Burrowowl

Just a couple of things that have come to mind repeatedly while reading the news:

• Instant run-off voting doesn’t make sense to the entrenched parties. Why give the fringe parties a seat at the table? Possible solution: introduce instant run-off in non-party contests like county seat, city council, school board, etc. Over the course of a few elections, people may get used to the idea of not having to settle.
• Nuclear power is safe, and secondary and tertiary-fuel reactors are possible and feasible. Fire a couple up where the fault-lines aren’t.
• Transmission over long distances is inefficient, and centralized production is subject to market manipulation a la Enron or physical disruption. Put some solar-panel factories near the reactors.
• Recently-viable third party forms in-state to reform state constitution and ensure that California taxpayers are getting their fair share back from the feds.
• Take a queue from Germany and give some incentives for private citizens to buy into decentralizing the power grid a bit. More resistant to interruptions in transmission lines (earthquake, fire, etc.), increases in residential population helps offset increase in consumption.
• Continue building nuclear reactors to run desalination projects for Imperial Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other inherently-thirsty areas.

Not a plan, just thinking about some ways to address California’s reliance on its neighbors.

No, really. It’s got water in it, and it’s navigable. By kayak, sure, but navigable nonetheless. I joke with my wife sometimes about them needing a TMDL for shopping carts, and about the absurdity of having one of our nation’s biggest population centers in a desert, but I just don’t like it when a government entity like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers messes something like this up. It may not be common knowledge that there’s something in the L.A. River other than the bitter tears of crushed dreams and leaked motor oil, but facts are facts.

Big hat-tip to LAist.com (also source of photo, obviously).

Austin Modine wrote today, over at The Register, about the selling of a new moon mission. Particularly a mission to establish what amounts to a colony on the moon, a permanent settlement. The underlying question is, simply put: why the Moon?

• It’s there. No, really. I flatly reject the notion that we have better things to spend our time and money on than space exploration; we waste tons of money on utter crap.
• It’s close. This is rather important, as we’re talking about long-term manned habitation of a hostile environment. If something goes wrong, we can get there a lot faster than if we skip ahead to Mars or one of the gas giants’ moons.
• It’s visible. Everybody can look up and see it, as opposed to the occasionally-visible Mars or the effectively invisible moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the other potential settlement targets. Once established, every man woman and child on Earth can look up and point to our new achievement: a permanent off-world settlement. Extra points if its lights are visible during the new moon.

There’s some boldly-going to do, folks. Hop to it.

House Bill 1089 passed in Oklahoma yesterday. For those of you who, like me, were only vaguely aware that Oklahoma existed as anything other than a Christian terrorist militia target and monument to our nation’s mistreatment of our aboriginal population, this was an effort to assert their rights as a state as originally established in the 10th amendment to the United States constitution. This was largely prompted by a backlash to Oklahoma’s recent legislation that would deny taxpayer-funded services to illegal immigrants, which is ironic, as the federal government explicitly has domain over immigration policy per Article 1, section 8, which enumerates the federal legislature’s power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.”

Well good for you guys, Oklahoma. I’ve been thinking about having my state renegotiate the terms of our entry into the union, but you seem to have found an interesting baby-step towards a modicum of independence.

After waxing mathematic on my wariness of the 4th Edition D&D skill challenge system, I ran across the DMG Errata. Oh look, they totally retooled the target numbers, number of failures, etc. Because there are so many changes, I’ll just put the relevant, updated text below:

What level is the challenge? What is the challenge’s complexity?

Choose a grade of complexity, from 1 to 5 (1 being simple, 5 being complex).

SKILLCHALLENGE COMPLEXITY

Complexity	Successes	Failures
1	4	3
2	6	3
3	8	3
4	10	3
5	12	3

Level and complexity determine how hard the challenge is for your characters to overcome. The skill challenge’s level determines the DC of the skill checks involved, while the grade of complexity determines how many successes the characters need to overcome the challenge, and how many failures end the challenge. The more complex a challenge, the more skill checks are required.

For an easier or a harder challenge, use DCs from the row that corresponds to a lower or a higher level, and assign the challenge’s level as the midpoint of that level range. For example, if designing an easier challenge for an 8th-level party, you could use the DCs from the “Level 4–6″ row. That would adjust the challenge’s level to 5th.

Set a level for the challenge and DCs for the checks involved. As a starting point, set the level of the challenge to the level of the party, and use moderate DCs for the skill checks (see the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table on page 42).

Example: A complexity 3 challenge using hard DCs and cutting the number of failures needed in half increases this skill challenge’s level by four.

This modification, along with a revised pg42 Difficulty Class table (effectively reducing the difficulty of skill checks by 10), means that the death spiral of skill challenge futility now points in the opposite direction: characters that excel at a set of skills related to a challenge now stand an excellent chance of succeeding. The math now looks an awful lot more like “roll some dice, feel good about training a couple of skills, win” instead of “roll some dice, curse your dice, throw your dice at the DM, curse a lot, fail.” Probably a good thing, though they may have swung things a bit too far over.