Link Roundup: December 2017

Unpacking Some of the Extreme Distress I Experienced Last Week – Some of you may have heard about the murder-suicide of Scott Smith, who was a podcaster for Recovering From Religion.  Well, here is an account from the cohost of the podcast.  I think this could be helpful if you knew Scott Smith, or if you just want to learn about trauma.

Cuphead: The Fake Outrage (video) – Anti-feminist gamergate-types have recently been outraged over people calling Cuphead (a video game) racist and ableist.  Except… nobody is saying that.  Amongst game critics, there has been discussion of the racist history behind the animation style used by Cuphead, and there has also been discussion about it’s high difficulty, and what that might mean for accessibility.  That really isn’t the same, and Shaun goes into depth about it.  I recommend Shaun’s YouTube channel if you need an antidote to anti-feminist and alt-right YouTubers.

Video game difficulty and accessibility is an interesting topic, maybe I will write about it in the future.

The Fine-Tuning Argument and Base Rate Fallacy – The author is not a physicist, but articulates very well some of the reasons why as a physicist I am very skeptical of fine-tuning arguments.  Predicting how the universe would look with different fundamental constants sounds like an incredibly difficult question!  And the more “fine-tuned” the universe is, the more difficult the question is.

BTW, the author mentions William Lane Craig’s claim that the gravitational constant is sensitive to a change of one part in 10^60.  I would not believe Craig’s claims without independent investigation.  I cannot stress this enough, William Lane Craig is an extremely unreliable source of information on math and physics, even on matters that are neutral with respect to his apologetic arguments.  Seriously, if you’re going to believe in God, you might be better off just believing in God rather than accepting Craig’s arguments, because then at least you will only be wrong about one thing.

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Republicans screwing over grad students

For those of you who are in grad school, you’ve likely already heard that the Republicans’ proposed tax plan hurts grad students. Specifically, grad students would be taxed on their tuition waivers. On top of being bad for grad students, it simply doesn’t make sense to me. As far as I’m concerned the tuition waiver is just an exchange of money between the grant providers and my university. I never see the money. So why should I be taxed on it?

I intend to graduate before any of this could possibly affect me personally. But I went ahead and estimated how much additional tax I would have to pay. In 2016 I earned about $33k, and paid $3k in federal taxes. I had a tuition waiver of $13k, so the proposed tax plan would treat my total income as $46k. My marginal tax rate was 15%, so if I paid taxes on the tuition waiver, my taxes would go up from $3k to $5k. Now, I’m omitting some details, as the tax proposal also shuffles around tax brackets and deductions. But some students at UC Berkeley made a calculator, and it comes out the same.

For some grad students it can be even worse. For example, the calculator estimates that for a typical MIT student, taxes would go up by 240%, amounting to more than a third of their true income. The reason is that MIT has a higher tuition than my own public university.

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Somebody else had it worse

[cn: Non-explicit discussion of sexual violence.]

Last month, I mentioned my past experience with sexual assault and rape. And I said I was fortunate to have never suffered from PTSD, unlike many other victims who have suffered from PTSD. This is my way of saying that other people had it worse than me.

If you’ve heard any number of accounts of victims of sexual harassment or sexual violence, you know that “somebody else had it worse” is a common trope. Saying, “I don’t want to take up space from other people with more extreme stories.” Or, “I don’t want anyone to think I’m making a huge deal over something so little.” Or, “I’m not sure this even belongs in the category of sexual assault.”

In the other extreme, some people argue that we shouldn’t ever compare different experiences of sexual violence at all. We’re told that there is only one kind of rape, all sexual violence is bad, end of story.

I have issues with both of these sides, and wish to find a happy medium.

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Origami: Compound of Five Octahedra

Compound of Five Octahedra, by Meenakshi Mukerji.  From the book Exquisite Modular Origami.

At first when you look at this it just looks like a many-pointed star.  But look carefully: each color forms an octahedron.  Yep, it’s five octahedra arranged symmetrically.  Classic.  I’ve already talked your ear off about symmetric colorings and polypolyhedra, so I’ll just leave it at that.

 

If you’re wondering, yes those are the aro flag colors (or at least the most common version).  Black, gray, white, light green, dark green.  It’s a good color scheme.

How to make symmetric colorings

This is the fourth part of a series about symmetry in origami.

Given an origami model, what are the possible symmetric colorings?

This is a question I posed in an earlier post, and I said I didn’t know the solution.  I thought about it a lot, and I found the solution. I will write up a mathematical proof in a later post.  Here I will just explain the result.

A brief review: Each origami model has an associated shape symmetry group, which is the set of all transformations (rotations and reflections) which leave the shape unchanged. There is also an associated color symmetry group, which leaves the shape and colors unchanged. Then there is the pattern symmetry group, which may swap the identities of some of the colors, but leaves the color patterns unchanged. In this post, C is the color symmetry group, and P is the pattern symmetry group.

I defined a “symmetric coloring” to be one where P is “large” and C is “small”. I didn’t say how large P needed to be, or how small C needed to be, but it doesn’t matter. I found a method that can construct any and all symmetric colorings.

Fundamental domains

Suppose we want to find a symmetrical coloring of a cube. First question: Are we assigning a color to each face, each vertex, or each edge? We want to find a general solution that will work in all three cases, as well as any more complicated case. So the first thing we need to do is divide the cube into fundamental domains.

A cube. Each face of the cube has been divided into eight triangles.

Each triangle on the cube’s surface represents a fundamental domain. In total, there are 48 fundamental domains.

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Cooperative board games

Cooperative board games are difficult to design. One major failure mode of a cooperative game is one player directing all the others what to do. At that point, it becomes a one-player game, only there are several additional people sitting around being bored.

One of the best-known cooperative games, Pandemic, has this problem really bad. Pandemic requires players to carefully coordinate in order to contain several diseases as they spread throughout the world. Unfortunately, the “careful coordination” often amounts to the most experienced player telling everybody else what to do. This is often a winning strategy, because the more experienced player can usually unambiguously identify the correct move. I refuse to play Pandemic for this reason.

But I do like other cooperative games. Here I’ll go through some examples and describe how I think they address the issues with Pandemic.

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The evil of theodicy

This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2012.  I don’t always agree with stuff I wrote so long ago, but I mostly still agree with this one.

Earlier a commenter told me I should stop bashing religion. This left me wondering, where did they see me bashing religion? I feel like I’ve mostly said neutral things about it lately. I should do more religion bashing!

The problem of evil asks: How can there be a all-powerful and all-good god if there is evil in the world? Obviously this only applies to religions with an all-powerful and all-good god, and I might as well say that I’m thinking of Christianity in particular.

I’m not sure I’ve ever talked about the problem of evil before. I don’t really like it, because there’s no math involved. And the argument is too sprawling, with a multitude of rebuttals. In fact, we even have the word “theodicy”, which means a defense against the problem of evil.

Most theodicies are not very compelling, but that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about how theodicies, above and beyond being bad arguments, are also evil arguments. That is, many theodicies involve defending evil, or denying the existence of certain kinds of evils.

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