Your Lordship,
Many are the vile texts which I and my knights have recovered, but this, by far, I find the most horrid. The words and images are horrific enough, but it appears to me that some evil magic must be bound up into the pages themselves, for of the brave warriors I sent to the dark temple, all those who read this fiendish work have perished, better than half by their own hand. I fear that I may succumb soon myself, as I read three full chapters before we began to realise that the book is cursed. Take this tome and lock it away, or better still, burn it, sprinkle it with holy water, and scatter the ashes. Under no circumstances should you read it yourself! Do you understand me? Destroy it unread!
Your servant,
Custham,
Abbott of the Sun's Searing Light
Gloria Oriens.

Remarkable, is the blood. Much is known of the blood by scholars. We know that it is the blood which carriers through the body the many important things we need, such as food and air and the humours which make up choleric or sanguine. We know not how the blood carriers such things, for a man may eat a grape and it shall not appear in his blood, nor can a fish breathe it nor a thirsty man live upon it. More than carrying life, the blood carries poetry itself. Do not all our bards speak of the blood running hot and the blood running cold? Do not our legends all speak of the life's blood, the heart's blood? Instinctively, we know that blood is the center of emotion, as we prove when we observe that a man drained slowly of blood becomes langrous and apathetic. The heart, which is filled always with blood, is where we feel our emotions centered in our body... what more proof do we need?

It is most curious to observe the many differences between the great species, when we consider blood. We have seen that the bones, the eyes, and hearts of the humanoids are not too different, but in the blood there are vast differences, some so complex we have difficulty accounting for them. It is human blood with which I presume most scholars are most familiar: a red viscous fluid of metalic and sweet taste. Elven blood is thinner and has less flavour to it; it is diluted by some curious fluid of cerebral origin, reminiscent of water with with a greater density. This fluid, when added to human tissue, slows necrosis and wasting, and is perhaps a preservative of some sort which might explain elven longevity. Dwarven blood, in contrast, is thicker and darker than human. It is most curious to note than dwarf blood reacts to magnets, and must thus contain significant quantities of iron. Where human blood is a basic fluid and turns acids to salt, dwarf blood is an acid rich and reeks faintly of some organic solvent, perhaps acetone. It resists potent serpent and bee venoms which in humans attack the blood preferentially. By some feature I have yet to deduce this blood rapidly denatures many poisons, including methanol and ethanol, turning them by some means to sugar. Attempts to put dwarf blood into humans and observe the effect resulted only in a cesseation of functioning of the humans, and so we conclude that dwarf blood is itself a poison which only dwarves are strong enough to survive. Orc blood defies my explanation and I shall not discuss it here, for it is disgusting, unpleasant, and wholly inexplicable.

How, then, to modify the blood of a man to make him better by it? Apricot. We consider the functions of blood and think on how we might make changes. We consider first that it is blood which carries our vital chemicals, be they air or food. We might consider diluting the blood, to make more room for dissolved foods, but diluted blood seems to by some means freeze the lungs or otherwise make the subject short of breath, and breathing, as we shall learn in a later chapter, is quite important. We might put carrying devices into the blood, but these are perforce large and it is difficult to make them flow smoothly through the organs where the veins get so small as to be invisible. We can put in extra blood, and this does seem to give greater endurance to the body, but the extra weight and volume is too much for the unmodified heart, which soon tires and stops to the accompaniement of much gasping and groaning. Perhaps with an enhanced heart a greater volume of blood could be accomodated, but as I have yet to perfect my augmented hearts this experiment must perforce wait until a later volume. Thus, for now, we abandon the question of capacity in favour of one much more interesting.

I observed that to learn the value of blood, ask a bleeding warrior. This is doubly true if the warrior's wounds have closed, for it is the blood, the very blood he was losing, which has sealed his wounds, and though he may miss what is not in his veins you may be assured he is grateful for what is on his skin holding back yet more blood. For blood is most special in that it clots! We may build golems with the strength of ten men but none of them shall heal their own wounds, for they lack blood, at least on their insides. We consider the clotting of blood. Blood cannot be made to clot too well, lest it solidify while still inside the body, and then the dissections take much longer for the extra tissue which must be cut through. The blood might be enhanced, however, if made to harden faster once extravasated. For this experiment, we take an ordinary human and add to the blood a polymeric chemical which hardens rapidly to stone when exposed to air. In the blood, the air is dissolved and so does not trigger the polymer. We take our blade and, slash, a small incision is made. we observe. In the normal human subject, some thirty second spass before a small and delicate red clot forms. In our experimental subject, the blood hits the air and in some ten seconds has become a thin stony plate on the skin. As an additional benefit, this stone scab is far harder than the normal, providing greater resistence and, to the truly severely wounded, perhaps even an armoured plating. Alas, our stone polymer is highly toxic and bleeding soon becomes a moot point for our subject, but progress has been made!

Similarly, the blood might be used to induce rapid healing, for it travels throughout the body and its natural flow accelerates to areas of wounds, infections and the like. This discussion, however, we will leave to a later chapter when we discuss the means by which healing might be sped, and shall content ourselves with the observation that if a healing agent is in the blood, it will go on its own wherever it is most needed.

End of chapter 6.

This past weekend, I had the priviledge of designing and wearing my favourite Halloween costume ever. I've had the priviledge of putting on some pretty good costumes over the years, including tattooed cultist complete with plush Chtulhu perched on my shoulder and High Programmer of Friend Computer complete with vial of happy pills and ultraviolet-coloured ID badge, but never before had I enjoyed wearing a costume as much as I enjoyed this one. Many of my readers are familiar with the Flag Bearers, one of my many Warhammer 40K squads painted up in Imperial colours. The costume I created, scratch-built entirely from materials already found in my closet, was a Flag Bearers squad captain. While I stopped short of painting my face yellow and black, the simple expedient of a white shirt and red sweatpants was supplemented by one of my 6'X3' Aerican Flags draped around my shoulders as a thrice-nifty cape and one of my iron escrima sticks with a large spherical happy-face superglued to one end as a cane (it's amazing how often my costumes involve canes, given that I walk just fine). The iron clasp off of my talis held the cape in place and, for purposes of photographs, I added two more round magnetic smiley to the front a-la Doctor Doom. I am reliably assured that I did, in fact, look absolutely damn nifty, using at least three definitions of the word. Sadly, the picture that was taken of the costume looked absolutely horrific and I've already deleted it from my computer, and will never been seen again by anyone if I have anything to do with it, but since all the individual elements of the costume still exist I might just rebuild it one day and have a proper picture taken. I did, after all, look great.

Some people go to Halloween parties dressed up as someone else. I've always said that Halloween is the one day I get to dress up as myself.

Clothes are a funny thing, after all. Psychologists have known for years that simply by changing how someone is dressed you can radically alter their behaviour. It is not a coincidence that the most vicious sports teams wear black uniforms; people will do far more horrible acts if they wear black, for some reason, and the instinctive understanding humans have of this is clear from the preponderance of black clothes and shadows in literature throughout the ages. federal agents wear sunglasses because this measurably reduces the empathy and kindness apparent in their actions, and drivers with tinted windows drive more dangerously to a statistically significant degree. Realistically, it's probably for our own protection that most people are discouraged from wearing costumes more than once or twice a year; stick someone in the right costume and you might be amazed at the things they'll do, whether they're LARP-addicted gamers or the mundanest of mundanes. Obsessively self-aware as I am, I could feel at least seven small ways in which my behaviour altered because of how I was dressed, starting from as simple a thing as unconciously exagerating my movements to play to the flow of the cape and moving right up to changes to my speech and levels of confidence. It felt perceptibly different to be in that costume. It felt good. It felt *right,* even... that costume was closer to my own internal self-image than the sane-&-sensible jeans and shirt I'm wearing as I write this.

In all likelihood, not everybody who dresses up changes their personality as I do. Above and beyond the fact that I'm a gamer who conciously subdivides his personality into characters I've played over the years, I had deliberately constructed a costume based on themes and affectations I find emotionally and thematically loaded. Most people would probably be rather more resistant to the effects of an analagous costume... but then again, I've watched more than one person become uncharacteristically conservative or lascivious when they change clothes, so I'm fairly certain it's not just me. If anything, given the fact that I've got a strongly stable personality, an unusually unshakable sense of self, and a general lack of inhibitions, I would tend to presume that other people would react more strongly than me to the costume they're wearing -- unless the deciding factors are my highly over-active imagination and my pre-formed expectations creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Note to self: must persuade more people to dress up in elaborate costumes and take careful notes of any changes observed; there may be a master's thesis hidden in here somewhere.

There is one other factor, of course, which might explain why I reacted strongly to wearing the costume. As I say, a Halloween party is often the one situation in which I feel able to dress as myself, in so far as that deep down I'm a melodramatic megalomaniacal jester with delusions of grandeur. When hockey or football players dress in black and take the field, it's not merely accurate for them to internalise the premise "I am going out there to hurt my opponent," it's actively encouraged. Drivers with tinted windows are merely exaggerating the same terrible driving habits which drivers all over the world demonstrate in abundance already. These are situations where people are not wearing costumes, but changing their normal "clothes" and going out in public in them. A normal person doesn't react too strongly to wearing a Halloween costume because they know that they are only putting on a costume and that they are not, deep down, "General Patton" or "The Third Extra From That Episode of Hercules." In contrast, when I put on a cape and take up my solid-iron-perfectly-capable-of-breaking-bones smiley-headed cane, I'm dressing not as a character but as I truly see myself to be. Deep down, in the depths of my soul where Nature sits snickering at Demeanor, I'm not a medical student or a gamer, a son or a brother, or even a writer, artist, or architect. I'm an Emperor. There are worse fates.

When the people came in anger for the prophet, they did break down his door and trample his flowerbeds, and the largest among them didst lift up the prophet by his shirt collar and dangle him in the air. Thus did the people demand of the prophet, "wherefore were your miracles when they were needed, and wherefore was thy magic when it was promised?" The prophet did sweat and sputter and gesticulate, and cried, "I was going to send the lightning to wipe out the invading army but the flux capacitor was overcharged and it inverted the polarity of the particle accelerator, which as everyone knows always upsets the atomic alignment of the magnetic linear coils so I couldn't possibly have generated any significant charge of electricity before Thursday." And the people were sufficiently confused that they put him down and left, though in frustration they didst uppend his water barrel on the way out.

From The Book of Contrivance, chapter 88, verses 24-27.

Last Entry's thesis was in part centered on one false premise: the idea that I speak only one language. This isn't false because when push comes to shove I am competent if not fluent in French and not because I've been refreshing my Yiddish this week as an after-effect of Frooshmas. Rather, it would be most fair to say that I'm multilingual on the grounds that I'm fluent in Technobabble.

The Gamers' Dictionary defines Technobabble as "The language of educated men and women designed to quickly and efficiently convey vast volumes of information to other similar educated individuals while utterly obfuscating what they are saying from anyone else." In simpler terms, Technobabble can be considered to be the complex language which devlops within any complex field, most commonly in the sciences. These languages grow over time as the field finds the need to create their own words to properly describe what they are doing. In engineering, for example, while "pounds" may be the best to describe a force to laymen, the most accurate way of describing the effect to another engineer would be in newtons or, if necessary, grams and kilograms. Using pounds instead is *basically* accurate but in addition to losing a lot of subtle nuance also doesn't work well when you try to plug the numbers into formulae. Similarly, psychology has grown its own language because of concepts like emotion. Emotion is a word which is so loaded and misused in popular culture that it has lost most of its scientific usefulness, and thus, within groups of psychologists, the topic of discussion will typically be positive and negaitve affect instead of such imprecise terms as emotions or feelings. These languages evolve out of pure functionalist thinking: they enable professionals to communicate for maximum efficiency, clarity, and consensus of meaning. The added benefit of confusing non-professionals and making the scientists sound smarter is merely a pleasant secondary bonus.

The word "Technobabble" comes to us, as so many of life's great truths and joys do, from Star Trek. In any good science fiction series, implausible and incomprehensible technology is commonplace, and characters frequently find it necessary to talk about what has gone wrong with some esoteric device or another. Whereas a television program using modern technology must be accountable (relatively) to its viewers when they make claims about why a gun misfires or a computer fails to function, physicists in the twenty-fifth century have the benefit of an audience who will never have any clue whether an orthogonal alignment of the tertiary protoplasmic neural-network is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. The need for accuracy is not merely shoved aside; it is blindfolded, shaved, painted blue, kicked in the sternum, and defenestrated. This was reflected in the Star Trek series by early scripts. Before fans of the most rabid sort began to be commonplace, there was a brief period in history where the writers of Star Trek could put Klingon dialogue in their scripts without fear that fans sitting at home might notice a misconjugation. Similarly, for most of Star Trek's history, scripts written would sometimes have a large break in the text, wherein the author had simply written "tech." When an actor saw the word tech in the script, they were essentially being told to ad-lib anything they wanted, as long as it was long, complex, poly-syllabic, and above all, couldn't possibly be validated by anyone living in the twentieth or twenty-first century. The origin of many of the technologies which fans today can recite and sometimes even build can be traced back to James Doohan or LeVar Burton making up funny words on the spot. This all culminated in one of the many Star Trek roleplaying games, which actually had an official chart to allow players to randomly generate "technobabble" by combining pseudoscientific words together and thus ascribe names to whatever the the storyteller decided was wrong with a device or ship (or, most commonly, Holodec). The word "Technobabble" has since become, not only an eduring part of our language, but actually a proper noun.

They say that the best way to learn any language is to be forcibly immersed in it. When surrounded by a language and obligated to become proficient with it for functioning, people will generally pick the language up. By this mechanism, I've been forced to become proficient in more than just English. I've lost most of my Hebrew and Yiddish over the years because I've had no reason to practuce it and my French has atrophied to its current pathetic (though not as low) levels for the same reason, but by necessity I've become and remained fluent in the dialects of Psychology and Biology. Osteogenesis imperfecta, phosphofructokinase, and hyperglycemia are not absctract terms to me, but are rather nuanced and informative descriptors to be, even poetic in their own way. I'm fully capable of talking about people in terms of their internal of external loci of control. These are entire languages in which I'm arguably fluent. There are people around me who speak the analagous languages of engineers, physicists, computer scientists and historians who similarly speak their own esoteric tongues which are, understandably, totally incomprehensible to me. One might reasonably make the case that such modes of communication are dialects rather than pure languages, but as a Florentinian to speak Neopolitan and you'll see that two forms of the same language don't have to be very similar at all.

So, to be strictly accurate, I speak English, French, Hebrew, Yiddish, Psychologist, and Doctor, can furthermore read German, Dutch, Portugese, Italian, and Spanish, and can embarassingly muddle my way through simple Latin given some time to work on it. It's just that I'm only *good* at English. At least what I do well, I do really well.

It's dawned on me recently that I don't really speak English.

That's not to say that I speak another language entirely, of course. In theory I spoke four languages fluently and could read another five when I finished high school, but practically speaking I'm today a monolingual (no matter how beautifully I wield that one langiage). What I mean to say is that I don't speak *proper* English. I refer back to Webster fairly often in this Journal so proper I'm often reminded of what proper speech is. Proper, pure English isn't so much a question of verbal skills as it is a question of eununciation. As my writing style might suggest, my normal mode of speech is highly formal (relative to most young adults) and more than one allophone has commented that I have a trace of a Brittish accent which I can only assume has evolved due to years of quoting Monty Python. Still, I do not, strictly speaking, speak English. More than anything else, I blame this on the word "to."

I speak rapidly. It's actually rather an understatement to say that I speak quickly; in conversation with normal humans, I have to conciously slow down my speech just to be comprehensible. Most of the people I associate with are quick-speakers themselves, or at least fast processors, and so they're able to follow me pretty well no matter how fast I go, but the average person (even very intelligent average people) will often lose the thread of what i was saying around the time they fall five words behind. A natural side effect of speaking quickly is that I tend to gloss over certain letters in words when they aren't really necessary and would only slow things down. Looking back at that sentence, a number of letters aren't really "required" and it becomes more efficient to write (or pronounce) "A natrul side fect 'f speakn' quickly's that I tend t'gloss" et cetere, et cetera. It's embarassing to write and I'd never tolerate text like that coming out of my fingers as a normal mode of communication -- in fact, I'll usually refuse to correspond with people who *do* write like that, with only two or three exceptions -- but the fact is, that's what I probably sound like when I talk. If I'm sitting with an employer or someone with whom I see myself as having an official relationship, I speak slowly, clearly, and eununciate, and ironically actually stutter even more than normal. In normal conversation, on the other hand, I'm rarely such a purist, and to be totally honest, I can't remember the last time I pronounced both letters of the word "to."

On the one hand, a word as short as "to" might seem like the last one that would give any benefit to being shortened further. At best, you cut out only one letter, and not even an entire phoneme at that. On the other hand, "to" ends in what is often called a long "O" sound, and if you think about it, for a word that size, "to" actually takes a relatively long time to pronounce. In the time it takes to elucidate a single "to" one can easily fit an entire longer and more important word into a sentence, such as "thud" or "fnord." realistically speaking, that's a lot of time an energy being wasted on that "o" when it's the "t" which carries all of the meaning and emphasis. The "o" isn't merely unecessary, it's redundant and best and outright counterproductive at worst. All you really need to communicate clearly is "t" put into context by the word to which it's attached via the miracle of the apostrophe. Stop and consider for a second how many times in a day you use the word "to" and now think how much time each day -- how much of your precious life -- you could save by cutting the time that word takes you into less than half of its current wastefulness.

I don't use the word "to." It'd be inefficient if I did. I go t'school. I download files to give t'my brother. I invite friends over t'enjoy their company. I'm able to do all of those things more efficiently by cutting out "to."

When I type, of course, it's a different story. When you speak, every letter takes a subtly but perceptibly different time to say (and don't even get me started on it requiring different amounts of ATP and creatine to form different sounds using different numbers of muscles). When I'm typing on the other hand, every key is essentially equally accessible and takes a precisely equal amount of time to complete the keystroke. There wouldn't be any profit to removing the "o" from "to" when my finger's alreday brushing both letters at once. In text, the "o" is important because my text can be seen by others and thus has to be aesthetically pleasing; this is a limitation which speech does not have, and certainly spoken word, in general, doens't have the permanency of text to immortalize it if a lazy person takes shortcuts by removing the occasional letter. Thus, it is worthwhile to remove the "o" when speaking but not when typing, and to remove it when typing would be... well, bad writing, and there isn't much worse to my mind.

An' if y'object, s'not my problem.

As a small number of people reading this will already know, this week has seen me spending a lot of time thinking about the impossible. I've led a charmed life thus far -- the gods watch out for fools or the devil takes care of his own, pick your cliche -- and one of the real joys of my life has been that I've had the opportunity to attempt a lot of impossible things. Possibly one of the main catchphrases people associate with me these days is "just because a thing is impossible is no reason not to try" and, indeed, I make an effort to live my life by that rule. A lot of things happen in my life which simply don't seem to happen to other people, which is both a blessing and a curse at different times. Just as most gamers I know will pick their dice based on how well the supposedly-random polyhedrons roll, so too, perhaps, are the probabilities of our lives dominated by the first "die-rolls" of our lives; I began my life by rolling a 1 out of 6,250,000 and maybe the long-odds have stuck with me ever since. Whatever the reason, this past week has had me thinking about two of the impossible things I've tried in my life. At one, I've proven to be a spectacular success, and I have reason to believe that within a week I'll have been paid an absurd amount of money for, of all things, modeling. Another, which doesn't need to be discussed here, proved to be a spectacular failure and has been sitting heavily in my mind for some time now. On the one hand, it's tough to learn to live with the spectacular failures hanging over you. On the other hand, looking just at these two situations, that's a 50 percent success rate at impossible tasks.

"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
The Queen of Hearts

Why would we choose to take on an impossible task? I can't speak for anybody else, but speaking for myself, I like to have a certain number of impossible goals at any time. An impossible goal means we're continually striving for something -- it's hard to be bored when there's always a new step you could be taking towards something impossible. It's also a source of inspiration to nkow that whatever you accomplish, whatever you do, and whatever you acheive, there's always one more desirable goal just outside your reach. The fact that the goal is probably out of your reach forever should merely be that much stronger a motivator; won't it feel that much more incredible to get it done, when it was impossible?

"Forget chasing rainbows; it doesn't work. If you want rainbows, chase storms."
David P. Burdette

It's hard work trying to acheive the impossible, of course. A lot of people haven't got the constitution for it, and understandably so. Who, after all, wants to take on a goal at which they know they're doomed to fail? I've always seen it from the other side. The joy of an impossible task is that, arguably, you can never really fail, because success was never a possibility. If you take on a task with the stated understanding "this is impossible" then any progress, no matter how small, is a sort of victory. No matter what, you're going to *fail*, but that doesn't mean you have to *lose.* Trying to accomplish the impossible is nothing more than being willing to say "yes I can" and stand up again every time you fall down. It can get a little repetitive, but it never gets dull.

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
Walt Disney

While it might be good for the soul to have an impossible goal, it can still be a bit rough on the self-image to fail, continually and unceasingly. Once in a while, everybody wants to win. There are few things in life that feel as good as the Moment of Dawning Recognition that comes from standing there, unsure at first if you've really just completed a lifetime goal, an epic quest. There's a few seconds of unreality, followed by a slow sense that something isn't right and that the other shoe will drop in a second. Then, everything just sort of clicks into place, and it's apparent that, against all logic, reason, and sanity, what you've just done is impossible. That, to say the least, is a pretty amazing feeling. This is why people train for the olympics or become researchers in improbable fields of science. People dream of pushing the boundaries of the possible because, when you get right down to it, doing the impossible is just that much more nifty.

"Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail."
Charles F. Kettering

Obviously, though, there's a fine line between "inspirational" impossible and "soul-crushing, despair-inducing" impossible. Keeping an eye open for that line is tricky. Back during my undergraduate, I had the priviledge of studying with one of the world's foremost researchers on the topic of disengagement, the phenomenon wherein people learn to identify goals which aren't healthy for them and let them go. His area of interest was the depressed elderly, and examining if maintaining unreasonable life goals predicted lower quality of life, which his data showed it did. Life is, as always, a balance. It's good to have one or two impossible goals at a time, but it's also good to be able to get rid of them if they become unhealthy. As we change with time, so too much our goals. Arguably, that's something I'm trying to do now: toss aside an old, painful impossible goal.

"No one ever gets far unless he accomplishes the impossible at least once a day."
Elbert Hubbard

It helps that at the same time, I get to revel in a few accomplished ones.

In general, I'm justifiably proud of The Stuff I Know. Information has always had a way of finding its way to me almost of its own accord -- I've got a knack for finding obscure facts both online and an paper, and people have the strangest tendency to begin talking to me about personal details of their lives when they barely know me. I rarely have to dig fo find out the sordid secrets of the people around me since the secrets tend to be shared with me sooner or later, by someone or other. On top of all that, I'm massively over-educated, and I carry with me a bolus of knowledge the likes of which most people have a hard time imagining. It is therefore with a most curious sense of pride that I admit that I only discovered that this past weekend was Superbowl Sunday around 10 p.m. EST, Sunday night.

To say that I don't follow sports would be an understatement. Not only do I have no interest in hearing sports news, I will actively take steps to avoid learning more than I absolutely have to about sporting events. Oh, to be sure, I can fake a conversation about most sporting events fairly well, mostly by reciting names I've seen in videogames alongside pseudorandomly selected adjectives and parotting back whatever facts the person talking to me has just said, in a different tone of voice, but I don't actually know anything about the topic. Pressed, I could not explain to someone what the basic rules of Football are; I have no idea what "downs" are or why there are four (or five?) of them. I love learning for the sake of learning and I consider the aquisition of facts to be a reward in and of itself, but somehow, there's a sense of satisfaction that comes from not knowing these things. Maybe it's the geek in me still instictively rejecting anything related to gym classes... or maybe it's just that football is really, really stupid.

Digression of the night: It is genuinely astounding how easy it can be to fake a conversation about hockey. I have actually had a ten-minute conversation on two different occasions where I managed to keep up my end of the dialogue merely by nodding frequently, opening my eyes wide, and occasionally commenting that "Sidney Crosby's pretty good so far, but remember he's only 19." Perhaps such things only work in Montreal, but I'm sure there must be an analagous player in most sports.

So anyway...

One might ask, how did I manage to avoid hearing about the Superbowl, arguably the single biggest annual cultural event in the months of January and February in North America. A better question to ask, as I see it, is how did I screw up and discover the information. My typical goal each year is to make it until at least the Tuesday morning after the Superbowl before learning that the Superbowl took place. This is an extremely challenging goal if you think about it, because it's very difficult to keep from learning that something is upcoming without learning that it is upcoming. I obviously can't have a general idea of what weekend the Superbowl is, because then I'd be aware that it's coming. It's a case of the Pink Elephant Effect -- if someone tells you *not* to think of a pink elephant, even if it was the farthest thing from your mind just before, suddenly you will be able to think of nothing except for a pink elephant. It's true for countless similar circumstances (and while we're on the topic: you just lost The Game; You know who you are). How do you go about not discovering a fact, when you can't conciously avoid it without learning it?

The answer is, you don't. Most years, I get lucky and simply avoid sources which might ruin it for me by informing me that the Superbowl is coming up. My terrible memory helps immensely; I can usually stumble across the new three or four times in the week leading up the Superbowl and conveniently (and honestly) forget five minutes later, never to recall that I knew aside from a vague suspicion after the game itself that I already knew about it. As I said, my goal most years is to make it to Tuesday, two days after the game, before learning that it took place. I'm rarely able to make it that far, but about fifty percent of the time I make it to Monday morning. This year, I very nearly escaped Sunday without knowing about it, but my father unfortunately happened to ask me if I'd watched any of the Superbowl that night around 10 o'clock, and that was that. The important thing is that entire hours had passed since the game ended before I even learned it had taken place -- and now, a few days later, despite extensive media coverage and nationwide celebrations and protests, I still couldn't tell you who won (I think it was Indianapolis, but I don't know what their team is called) or who they were playing against. We take our victories where we can find them.

Some of the other philosophers -- lovers of wisdom -- reading this might take issue with the idea of me choosing to deliberately avoid learning something. To them I reply that as long as I understand the function, regulation, and enzymatic synthesis of thyroid hormone, I don't think my life is lessened by not knowing who won the 2007 Superbowl. My life is incomplete on a whole new level, wheee!

Now to go dig up some Vampire Counts. I've got the strangest urge to go play BloodBowl.

Webster defines "leader," after nine or ten more useless definitions, as "a person who has commanding authority or influence." The idea of "commanding authority" is one that captures the imagination -- it's rare that the dictionary breaks its objective standpoint to insert such a loaded phrase into a definition. One interesting thing about the definition is that is gives a very clear idea that a leader is the person whose voice carries the most weight in any situation, but it gives no idea whatsoever as to what makes a good or bad leader. This is probably sensible, from an academic point of view, given that the word leader has been applied both to history's wisest and most foolish with equal enthusiasm, so obvious the definition of the word can't imply on its own that, for example, the leader has read his Machiavelli or has ever bested a walrus in mortal combat. In a highly unusual turn of events, the Gamers' Dictionary actually provides what is perhaps an even better definition than Webster, defining "leadership" as the quality of being able to get people to do Stuff just because you're the one who told them. This definition captures a bit more of the idea of the personal charisma with which we associate leadership; as often as not, people will obey a great leader not because the orders are correct, but because they come from the great leader. The Gamers' Dictionary, though, is just as big a failure as Webster in terms of suggesting to us what makes a good or a poor leader.

What makes a good leader? At the most basic level, a leader has to be moderately persuasive and charismatic, or else no one is likely to follow. The world is doubtlessly full of people who would set excellent policies and judgements, but who could never persuade anyone to follow them. Shallow as it may seem, the first and foremost criteria for any leader is probably people skills and an ability to communicate effectively in the medium of their choice, not because this is a sign of intelligence but simply because it is necessary to somehow persuade people to listen before you persuade them to do what you say. Indeed, most of history's great leaders have been recognized for their incredible charisma. For better or worse, a significant number of the notable figures of history have been described as being the sort of people of whom everyone just seems to take notice and listen to. In part, this is probably just retrospective reconstruction -- naturally, after you've worshipped someone for twenty years, when you look back you'll think that they were captivating right from the first ever moment, because saying that you recognized their greatness is kind of like inserting yourself into their legend. Probably, though, there really is some truth to it, whether it's because they're tall, they have blazing eyes, or they're waving the still-bleeding severed heads of their foes and shouting in tongues, leaders tend to be people who make an indelible (as opposed to inedible) impression quickly.

So now the leader has captured attention... depending on who you ask, either the easiest part or the hardest part has just been accomplished. An audience, however, does not alone make a leader, or else we would have more comedians elected to political office. The businesses of building, ruling, or convinving is tricky, and it's difficult to pin down what traits contribute to a "good" leader. Lets assume, for the sake of argument, that when we speak of leaders, we mean it in the sense of people who literally lead others in the political or social sense. There are several dimensions which might be relevant to leadership: sense of ethics, sense of justice, sense of one's own infallibility, balance of empathy and emotion versus logic, and so forth. As with anything else, an ideal leader has to strike balanced positions in all of these areas, though the balance in one situation may be much farther to one end of a spectrum (or, god help us, multidimensional coordinate system) than another, and obviously a kindergarten teachers needs different levels of empathy and emotion than a drill sergeant.

Should a leader be ethical? A position of leadership sometimes requires that people do unethical things, not merely to get and keep it but also to do what's best for everyone in some cases. Ends rarely justify means on their own and an unethical action rarely becomes ethical simply because it's the best option, but none-the-less, what's best for an individual or a world is the not-so-nice option. This does not excuse a leader without any ethics; sacrifices for the greater good are understandable once in a while but embezzlement is hard to justify. An ideal leader is probably someone of strong ethics, and perhaps even morals, who has the conviction to stand by those ethics in trying circumstances, but also the flexibility to abandon those ethics if they truly have to and if all other reasonable options have been exhausted. If they feel very very guilty about those moments before, after, and during, then they may be a good leader. Most leaders, historically, do not show that kind of guilt, or even hesitation.

How about justice? Justice is tricky because it's highly subjective. Rather than worry about what actual justice is, most leaders instead opt to make laws -- which are like justice, minus adaptability. Law is relatively easy. To create a system all laws, all you need is a legal system which is around for enough years to develop a series of precedents based on some initial starting principles, such as "if you kill someone, we give you punishment A." Justice is a more complex idea because it's entirely dependent on context. Individual circumstances change the justness of any action or inaction. Worse, justice is contentious because few people can agree on what sorts of punishments are just... do you imprison the rapist for a few years, or torture him to death and give the profits from popcorn sales to the victim? Justice has been defined as the intersection point between vengeance and mercy, but of course, two lines can intersect at any point along their length, or never intersect at all, and gods help you if you plan to persuade any large group of people that you can deal out ideal justice consistently. If the ideal leader is someone who has their own sense of ethics, then similarly, the leader is someone who has a strong sense of what justice is and what justice is not. The leader can apply jutice fairly, equally, and to each situation based on the individual circumstances of that single situation. In theory, this is the job we have judges for, and indeed, a wise judge will apply harsher or lighter sentences to an offender based on mitigating or incriminating circumstances. A good leader doesn't merely have to be able to do this job, but has to be able to do it all of the time, and worse, convince other people to apply the same thought processes. My personal bias is towards a leader who applies light penalties for initial offenses and severe (read: downright draconic) punishments to repeat offenders or cases of incontrovertible eivdence (if such a thing exists). I like to think that I'm generally a merciful and forgiving person, but in every society there's the occasional fellow who really deserves to be flayed alive.

Also similarly, a leader has to act with a proper balance of logic and emotion. I may be hypoaffective but I recognise the value of emotions and the wisdom they can bring to any decision-making process. If a knee-jerk emotional response leads to illogically housing the poor and providing free education and medical care to the people, then it might not be a bad reaction to have, knee-jerk and illogical or not. On the other hand, if doing so means there's no money left to keep electricity flowing to homes and hospitals, logic has to prevail over empathy. I'm a socialist in most respects and I think the government -- and thus, the good leaders -- have a responsibility to provide a lot of services to the people, and I have never been able to justify this stance logically. Excessive emotion obviously isn't helpful to a leader because people admire cool-heads and problem-solving skills, and for all the fun emotions can be, they're relatively rarely the best tool for effective problem solving. Logic does have its place as a regulator and moderator of emotional responses. The good leader, I feel, is actually probably closer to the "logic" end of the spectrum than the "emotion" end, since leadership more commonly benefits from clear thinking and rational, measured response than from agression or unbridled empathy. The logical leader should not be ruled by emotion, but should by no means be allowed to forget that it's there. A rule of thumb might be a two-step system, wherein first a solution to a problem is arrived at via logic and reason and then the solution is evaluated emotionally to make sure it's not something horrific. I suppose a leader could work the other way around, but given that emotion tends to be flighty and indecisive, it strikes me as being far less efficient.

Lastly, I honestly think that a leader has to have a certain degree of arrogance. To lead -- to rule -- an individual has to have a certain belief that they're right. Ethical and empathic people often have the problem where they know what to do but are caught agonizing over whether they're doing the right thing. A great leader has to have enough self-confidence -- and, yes, arrogance and even megalomania -- to know that when they have picked the best option, they have to go ahead and do it, and not worry about whether it really is the best option. A great leader can't be so arrogant as to get stuck on a bad option merely because they refuse to change their mind, but a leader has to have a certain belief in his or her own infalibility (assuming new empirical evidence doesn't appear showing sudden and extensive fallibility).

What makes a good leader? A great leader is someone who does the right thing, for the right reason, the majority of the time, and can persuade others to mimic them. Now if only more of the world's problems had right solutions, we'd be set.

I don't like talking to me. Well, strictly speaking, that's not true; I enjoy talking to people more often then not, but I dislike initiating conversations with people. Until I know someone extremely well, I'll only very rarely stick my head out and be the one to say hello first. I spend a lot of time talking to people in my class, for example, but they learn quickly that to get me talking, they have to come to me, because it's never going to occur to me to go to them. In part, I hate the idea that I might miss an obvious social cue and go harass someone who doesn't want to deal with me -- an incredibly unreasonable fear, given how wonderful and fascinating I am -- and in part it genuinely never occurs to me to go over to someone and say hello unless I have something specific to say to them. This is true even online; as a general rule, I will never, say, add someone to my MSN unless they add me first, or they specifically ask me to add them, and this rule is general enough that it's proven untrue only twice in the last two or three years. This naturally makes it difficult to find people to socialize and to make new friendships, which is a terribly bad habit of mine but one which I have the most dreadful time trying to break.

Behaviour patterns such as these might be called shy by some people. Curiously, while I've always been quite happy (and sometimes enthusiastic) to take on various perjorative labels, "shy" is a word which I've always denied can be applied to me. It's an embarassing word, after all, which doesn't carry along with it the more fun implications of such insults as liar or bastard. Objectively, though, one has to wonder if such words fit. To answer this question, we once more turn to Mr. Webster, who defines shy as: 1: easily frightened; 2: disposed to avoid a person or thing; 3: hesitant in committing oneself; 4: sensitively diffident or reserved; 5: secluded, hidden; 6: having less than the full or specified amount, short; 7: disreputable. The answer is that yes, I apparently *am* shy... in the sense that I'm short and occasionally disreputable. I am easily frightened, but not by social situations. I'm rarely, if ever, hesitant to commit myself to something, and I give the illusion of being reserved only because I rarely see a need to show off. I do have a tendency to be hidden from things, but that's because I like my privacy and not out of anxiety. The one meaning which might fit is disposed to avoid a person or thing -- this being crowds, as opposed to people.

I don't like crowds. Medicine sees this as a severe enough problem that there are a good five or six "ophobia" words which mean this, each with subtle distinctions. Agoraphobia, for example, means a fear of crowds and open spaces, but diagnostically indicates someone who experiences a paralyzing fear of being out of their home or in unfamiliar situations. This doesn't describe me, in so far as my dislike of crowds isn't paralyzing, on top of which open spaces always make me feel better, not worse. It might be more accurate to describe me as claustrophobic; I despise being closed in by crowds, particularly in a situation where I can't accelerate to at least five kilometers per hour. Busy streets rarely bother me, but hallways have been known to. None of this really fits the definition of shyness, though; I dislike crowded small areas but that doesn't keep me from socializing. The single area where my social activities are slightly curtailed by this is that I hate, truly hate, cafeterias (though only when they're full and crowded, of course). If I didn't spend my lunch breaks sitting off on my own and reading or checking my e-mail anyway, this might conceivably prevent me from chatting with friends during this time.

So if I'm not shy, what precisely am I? It's possible that no real label exists, of course, but given the current state of human civilization and the English language, that doesn't seem likely. One word which gets tossed around these days almost as much as "shy" is "antisocial," a word I enjoy hearing get used because people use it wrong. Contrary to popular belief, antisocial doesn't really mean that one doesn't like society. It's sometimes considered to be a synonym of unsociable, which would indicate that it means that one has a specific dislike or aversion to social contact. More properly, particularly in academic circles, antisocial is the currently accepted word to replace what people used to call sociopathic -- one who is pathologically incapable of experiencing guilt, who derives pleasure from hurting others, and who generally causes a lot more harm than someone who merely displays reduced interest in socializing. A slightly more proper word for someone disinterested in rather than aversive of society is asocial, although this word, too, has meanings which run the gamut from "not social" to "lacking the capacity for social interaction." I don't lack the capacity by any means, as I've proven time and again.

So, it's not fear. It's not anger. It's not rebelion. There is one word which accurately describes why I don't socialize more, and it means "the state of being weary through lack of interest." Right: bored. That's largely my own fault, of course, since clearly if I bothered to find out more about the people around me I'd no doubt find them -- well, some of them -- to be deeply fascinating people, but really, it's that first step that so rarely seems worth the trouble.

Fortunately, there will always been a few people who save me the trouble and walk over themselves. They tend to end up being nicer and more interesting people to get to know anyway.

A few months back, national geographic reported that anthropologists had uncovered what appeared to be the oldest human center of worship ever discovered. The area in question has been traced back early enough that it probably wasn't used by Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and it may in fact predate the whole Sapiens lineage. Calling the area a church would be a gross exageration -- it's a cave, and even by mythological caveman standards, it's not a very well appointed ones. Crude but sophisticated drawings cover the walls, depicting images believed to form a sort of paleolithic holy book which the faithful probably venerated. The cave itself is dominated by an immense stone slab -- an altar, of sorts -- on which rests a vast stone which, due to its shape and sheer size, is believed to have been the primitive humans' focus of worship. The large rock doesn't appear to have been carved, although signs of carving may simply have weathered away in the thousands of years the cave lay relatively undisturbed. The rock bears a remarkable resemblance to the figure which our ancestors probably worshiped: a bloody great python.

The earliest known human religion was giant-predatory-snake worship. Actually, this doesn't seem like that huge a shock.

Humans have always had a fascination with giant reptiles, of course. Nearly ever human culture has developed some variant of the dragon myth, often with tremendous similarities between them, even in areas between which stories probably didn't get shared. There are three more-or-less logical explanations for this sort of thematic convergent evolution: the giant killer reptile bears a particularly large presence in the human collective unconcious, the giant killer reptile stories were somehow passed between cultures that had no known means of contact, or going back far enough there really were dragons in the same ecosystems as humans. Two and a half of these options are more or less rejected by modern science, although if we assume that "collective unconcious" is analagous to the concept known in evolutionary biology as genetic predisposition to fear, then there's some possible basis to it. Given that giant killer reptiles probably did co-exist with humans to some small degree, given the wide range and deadliness of the crocodiles which live where humans first sprang up in Africa, there probably was an evolutionary advantage to being the monkey which fled instinctively at the first sign of "big scaly thing." Given enough generations, and a strong enough evolutionary pressure, this fear eventually becomes pretty widespread as humans branch out and move into the world. There wouldn't have to be any dragons in I'm-Going-To-Be-England for the humans living there to grow up fearing dragons; it was deep in their genetic code and there wasn't any pressure to lose the gene because we never tried to domesticate the crocodile for anything other than moat duty.

Why did they worship the python? It's not that hard to imagine.

Larry: Hey, some animal's got ahold of Joe.
Darryl: Wow, it's big. Do you think it's a god?
Larry: It's godlike enough that it's eating Joe. Let's worship it and maybe it'll go away.

At least, we hope that we've conditioned religion. The alternative is that the religion sprang up for reasons other than coicidence, i.e. because the python was in a position to appreciate and reward worship. Bucky Fuller, if you only knew.

The question I find kind of compelling isn't "why did they worship the deadly scary predator" since doing so makes perfect sense to me, but rather, how did they finally transition to worshipping the nice, non-brain-eating gods we know today? I'm personally not 100% sure we ever did. The kind, caring god is really an invention of the last three thousand years at best, given that the "big Y" god of the old testament had his own predatory moments. There are some genuine parallels that could be drawn between the god of the early Jews and our hypothetical snake god. The python "demanded" regular sacrifices, and bad things would certainly befall the faithful whenever they forgot their place. Any number of practices would get adopted by the faithful, because somebody might be doing something weird at any given moment which they might intuitively come to think is responsible for why the god ate somebody else and then wasn't seen again for a full month. Conquer the next land over and sure enough, the depredations against your people stop -- at least until you find the dominant predator in the new land. Men worshiped the sea and the thunder because they wanted to protect themselves from wrath as much or more than because they wanted a nice spot in the afterlife. Nothing says "angry, insufficiently placated god" like one of nature's most perfect killing machines coming at you, after all, and if you're on the menu, then the fine distinction between "superior predator" and god is subtle, contentious, and very much irrelevant.

The transition to non-predatory god only occurs given a long period of time, according to this theory. If religion gets conditioned generation by generation, then every generation has the slow, painstaking process of waiting for small, subtle aspects of the faith to change due to pure stochastic probability. "Angry god" to "loving god" isn't one mall change; it's the culmination of countless small changes over thousands of years, barring the occasional lucky fellow who stumbles across the idea. Humans have been around for about thirty thousand years in pretty close to their current form, and religion in one form or another seems to go back about as far, so it says something that the warm and fuzzy god didn't catch on until pretty recently, and even then, the worshippers of that god have the same nasty tendency to be hungry and scaly on the inside.

On the plus side, this does go a long to way helping explain why the whole "penguin" this hasn't caught on...

Lacking any particularly compelling ideas to cover right now and not having the energy to try some of the ideas which I have got rattling around (for a spoiler, go read Webster's definition of the word "shy"), here's volume 2 of the D-Curriculum. As some of you may recall from a good 20 or 30 Entries back, the D-Curriculum was an attempt to write a short humour column for a class newsletter, most of the columns therefore being themed to whatever we were learning that week. As my classmates moved on to second year, the editors of the newsletter kept it going, and for the joy of writing if nothing else, I kept submitting. I wasn't really in a position to know (or care) what the second-year students were now covering, so I just wrote about whatever came to mind, and Montreal locals may recognise references to some stuff based on what was local news at the time. Because the second-year students have a busy schedule, that newsletter only ended up getting printed a handful of times, and in fact at least two of these columns have never before seen print anywhere (although the gag in number 5 was previously used in an Entry in this Journal, so it may seem repetive to readers with good memories). In any case, I've been printing them in groups of 3 so far but there are five columns left, so here's all five. Fair warning, this means that the next time I need filler, I'll probably reprint some of the uncut interviews I've given to newspapers over the last two years. Be afwaid.

Volume 2, Issue 1:
     New frontiers of sonic medicine have opened in light of a report in the Lancet which suggests that certain frequencies of sound may be effective at destroying MRSA bacteria. MRSA, or Methicillin-Resistant fnord Staphylococcus Aureus, is a form of bacteria which is nearly impossible to kill with standard antibiotics.
     "Science has long known about fundamental frequencies and how objects will fall apart if they vibrate certain ways," explains Dr. T. Narrows, leader of the project. "We found an old report from early 2000 where Backstreet Boys music was used to maim protestors and extrapolated from there."
     The new technique is requires nothing more than a CD-player, an amplifier, a bed with restraints, and a Shakira album. It has so far met with mixed results.
     "We’re seeing better than eighty-percent mortality in the bacteria," Narrows told reporters. "Also, in patients. And technicians. But we’re sure we’re on to something and we’re going to keep at it.
     "And best of all," Dr. Narrows went on, "we don’t have to worry about resistance developing. By the time the Staph becomes immune to this music, someone else will have released their new single. The future looks bright."

Volume 2, Issue 2:
     A new multi-million dollar purchase will soon set McGill at the forefront of medicine in yet another field, a spokesperson for the MUHC announced recently. The hospitals of the city of Montreal are world-renowed for their work in every field from pediatric collagen study to plant psychoanalysis, and McGill’s administrators are constantly on the lookout for new fields in which to improve.
     "Society faces an epidemic," announced Dr. Pemberton of the newly inaugurated Carbon Dioxide Reactivation Clinic. "Every year, countless individuals suffer from disorders related to loss of valuable gases, and this is both preventable and treatable. We can do little at this time to help people prevent carbon dioxide loss, but we can now treat it and restore joy to the lives of sufferers."
     Dr. Pemberton’s speech was made as he cut the ribbon of McGill’s new Accelerating Compound Oscillator Unit, fnord which, once it is up and running at capacity, will be able to restore carbonation to more than seven hundred cans of flat soda each day.
     "This is a tremendous success for us," Pemberton continued. "Curing cancer is all well and good, but with our new clinic, we’ll be able to make a real and measurable improvement in the lives of people, while at the same time improving business for our dentists and gastroenterologists. Everyone wins!"

Volume 2, Issue 3:
     Falling blocks of concrete appear to be unhealthy, a new study in the Journal of Unsurprising Medicine reported yesterday. The new research, conducted in Montreal, has examined the long-held belief that large, fast-moving rocks can harm an individual.
     "It was a bugger to get ethical approval, I'll tell you that," lead researcher Iggy Neous told reporters. "We had to use very precise language. You can't say to an ethics committee, 'we're going to drop rocks on people.' You have to say it academically, like 'the present study will expose participants to kinetically-rich exogenous carbon/silicate units.' Don't even get me started on how we had to phrase our consent forms fnord."
     Data collected by the new study suggests that large blocks of concrete traveling at high velocities are, in fact, poisonous, and so harmful.
     "Our initial hypothesis was that they were just, y'know, heavy," Dr. Neous explains. "But that wasn't very exciting. So instead, we showed that they're toxic. This suggests all sorts of treatment options to preventatively make people immune to falling rocks. Next week we begin our tachyphylaxis program, wherein we'll drop progressively larger rocks on people and try to show that getting hit by small ones makes you immune to larger ones. We have good, strong, solid hopes."

Volume 2, Issue 4:
     The leading health risk to physicians is sudden anaphylactic to allergens, a new study reported this week. Dr. Simon Crates and Dr. Clea Petra of the Montreal General conducted a meta-analysis of reports of physician illness and found that allergic reaction is the primary cause of physician injury.
     "We examined fnord the cases and found numerous reports of physicians reporting difficulties breathing, inability to function, and severe confusion," explains Dr. Crates. "All of these symptoms seem to occur only in the presence of particular triggers, which tells us we're dealing with an allergy of some kind."
     "Specifically," suggests Dr. Petra, "more and more young doctors appear to be allergic to patients. This is tricky because, of course, the more times one is exposed to an allergen, the more severe the reaction gets. It's just a shame that patients aren't simply poisonous... we could cure that more easily."
     Precise implications of the new finding have not yet been suggested, but sources within the MUHC report that three-inch thick plexi-glass shields are being considered as mandatory hospital safety equipment.

Volume 2, Issue 5:
     New advances in the field of organ transplantation may mean renewed hopes for thousands of Canadians awaiting heart transplant, a new McGill study shows. The major block to saving the lives of patients awaiting transplant is a shortage of organs, and attempts to solve this problem have led to the use of pig and ape hearts in human patients in the past.
     "The big stumbling block to the old surgeries was finding suitable animals," explains Dr. Lothar, pioneer of the new technique. We needed to find an organ source which was similar to humans, posed minimum rejection risk, was plentifully available, and no social interest groups would get upset with the sacrifice and harvesting. So we looked at orcs.
     "Orcs are plentiful, of course," continues Dr. Lothar. "They're basically human sized and if anything, their hearts are tougher and more durable than ours. There's no shortage of them, and there's always people lining up to kill orcs, so supplying fresh hearts should be easy. Best of all, the orc hearts we've tried transplanting so far seem to be hypoallergenic, so to speak -- we've seen no rejection at all no matter what we hook them up to."
     Currently, four heart-failure patients at the Montreal General have received orc hearts and Lothar and his team will spend the next several months observing them for any signs of complications. Within two years, Lothar hopes, a significant portion of the patients currently on cardiac-transplant waiting lists will be well on their way to recovery.