Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

Do credit ratings agencies have too much power?

Recently, the credit ratings agency Moody’s reduced its outlook for Italy from “stable” to “negative”.  For those of you who don’t remember, ratings agencies were some of the key “villains” of the Eurozone crisis of the 2010s.  A ratings agency is simply a company who does research into the creditworthiness of people, organizations, or governments and then sells this information to lenders and investors.  Moody’s is one of the “Big 3” ratings agencies and so its ratings carry a lot of weight, whenever it cut its rating of Italy, Spain, or Greece, lenders would take notice and would consider those countries to be less creditworthy.  This in turn made it harder for those countries to borrow money to cover their expenses, just as an individual with a low credit rating has a harder time getting loans and has to pay higher interest on what loans they can get.  And for countries that were already saddled by high debt, this could be catastrophic.

Whenever Moody’s or another ratings agency cuts its ratings for European debt, the cries arise from various places that these ratings agencies are bad actors who must be reigned in.  People say that they are untrustworthy, they are profit-seeking, and worst of all they are American.  Because of all these things, they should not have this much power over the borrowing costs of European countries.  I think that while there are multiple criticisms to be made of ratings agencies (and I will try to address them later), at least some of this criticism comes from a place of ignorance and I’d like to address this.  

Let me first give a very brief explainer of how a ratings agency like Moody’s works in the context of government bonds.  A bond is basically a loan to a government, when you buy a bond you hand the government some money in exchange for their promise to pay you back over time.  So in a bond market you have the bond sellers such as Italy, and the bond buyers such as the banks and money funds.  Like any loan a bond has an inherent risk, a country that is more likely to not pay back its debts is seen as a riskier investment and must pay higher interest rates in order to sell its bonds on the market.  A government might confidently believe that there is zero risk in their bonds and thus they should only give the absolute minimum of interest rates, but if the market disagrees then no one will buy that government’s bonds and they won’t be able to raise money this way.  But how do the bond-buyers know which governments are less or more likely to pay back their debts?  Ratings agencies like Moody’s look at both the political and economic situations of the governments and come up with a rating, that rating says how risky the bond is and thus how likely it is to be paid back.  That in turn informs the market actors, who will demand higher interest rates for riskier bonds then for less risky bonds.

First of all, ratings agencies aren’t evil entities who make borrowing expensive for the lols, they are simply an element of the division of labor of modern finance.  Financial organizations, be they banks or pension funds or what have you, want to invest in stable, high quality bonds.  But if every bank and fund needed an entire team of analysts to assess exactly which bonds were high quality and which were not, there would be a lot of wasted labor as competing banks paid different people to find the same information.  Instead, banks outsource a lot of this investigation to the ratings agencies like Moody’s, then buy the information provided by Moody’s and use it to understand which bonds they want to invest in.  That in turn is a money saver and so the expenses of the bank or fund are a lot lower than they otherwise could be.  This division of labor is a godsend to modern finance, and to remove it for no reason would not be wise.  Moody’s provides a genuine service, it researches the economies and outlooks of almost every major government and investible corporation, and it has built a reputation of trustworthiness over its long history.

Second of all, ratings agencies have a lot of power in part because the market gives it to them.  Market actors such as banks and funds trust Moody’s and the rest of the Big 3 because of their long history of accurate ratings, or at least being more accurate than their competitors.  Those market actors use the information Moody’s provides to inform their investments, but Moody’s isn’t forcing anyone to raise the price of Italian borrowing, the market actors demand higher costs for Italian bonds in part because they trust Moody’s ratings and Moody’s says Italy’s outlook is not as good as it once was.  If you create a new organization, it wouldn’t necessarily change anything because a new, unproven organization would not be trusted.  The market would still trust Moody’s ratings more and thus Moody’s ratings would inform the price of bonds, this new organization wouldn’t.  You can’t really force every market actor to not use information from Moody’s.  I mean you can try, governments can always write laws, but enforcement of this kind of information ban would be a nightmare and would probably only cause bond-buying entities to flee from the EU bond market altogether because they wouldn’t want to fall afoul of new laws but also don’t want to buy a bond that they don’t know if it’s trustworthy or not.

Thirdly, trying to replace Moody’s is not an easy task and I’m not sure most of the detractors are up to it.  As I said, they only have power because the market gives it to them, so let’s say you put together a “European Moody’s” let’s call it Euddie’s (pronounced YOO-dees), then what?  Euddies won’t have the long track record of Moody’s, it won’t have the trust of the market, and so no one will buy their ratings or use their ratings to inform decision makings.  Instead they’ll just keep using Moody’s ratings and there will be no change to the borrowing price for European countries.  Furthermore, who will run Euddies?  If it’s a private company like Moody’s then you run into the exact same criticisms that people have for Moody’s ie it’s profit focused and shouldn’t have this much power over governments.  The only difference would be the nationalist complaint that Moody’s is American and Euddies wouldn’t be.  On the other hand if Euddies is an EU-level government entity, then who outside the EU would trust them?  EVERY government in the world says it is perfectly creditworthy up until the moment it defaults, so why would investment organizations trust an entity that is controlled by the very governments it is supposed to be rating?  In all likelihood without stringent ring-fencing between Euddies and the governing bodies of the EU, it would be seen as just another government agency like the ECB, without the trust that Moody’s has.  Finally, I don’t think Euddies will solve the problems that Moody’s detractors think it would, nations like Italy are still heavily indebted with poor economic outlooks, any reasonable credit agency will not give them AAA credit rating no matter where the agency is based or who runs it.  There is every reason to believe for instance that Moody’s ratings are as much reactive as proactive, oftentimes borrowing for a country will get more expensive before Moody’s even cuts their outlook.  So I don’t think that a Euddie’s organization giving preferential treatment to European government bonds would really change their borrowing costs when Japanese, American, Chinese, and all non-EU investors will continue to believe that those governments are not as creditworthy as they claim to be.

In conclusion, Moody’s and other credit rating agencies are not bad actors in the market, they are performing a legitimate service for other financial institutions and cannot be simply removed or replaced without serious consequences.  Tomorrow I will try to touch on the differences in borrowing costs between Italy and Germany, and how Moody’s ratings have fit into that.

I want to learn to code, but it’s hard to learn on my own

I’ve described before how I want to make video games.  I’m a self taught coder in a few “academic” languages like R and Matlab and a little Java, but I’ve never worked on anything with graphics so I don’t even know how to start coding for video games.  Over the past year I’ve on-again-off-again tried to get into programming with Unity and I just can’t force myself to stick with it.  I’ll go in, make a block, make a room, and then tap out for weeks or months at a time, it’s just so hard to learn when I don’t have someone to learn from.  I don’t like video tutorials either, I work best with written tutorials, but those seem to be a dying art so I can’t find any.  I was wondering if anyone else had tried to self-teach themselves Unity and knew of any good tutorials for it?  Especially for something very simple and if at all possible turn based.  I don’t think I want to make the next Minecraft, but just having an outlet for my creativity would be nice.

Most of LinkedIn seems like a scam, how do others filter the wheat from the chaff?

As a white collar professional I am occasionally required to use LinkedIn either for job searching or networking, and during these occasions I am astounded by how scammy it feels.  When I attempt to apply for jobs, about half or more seem to be fake postings posted by someone who doesn’t actually represent the company, and is probably just resume trawling to get hired as a recruiter.  Many postings are clearly sourced from somewhere besides LinkedIn because although they may have a flashy “easy apply” button, the text indicates that applications should be sent to a specific email address, or indicates that the post comes from off-LinkedIn in some other way.  And finally my messaging inbox is inundated with all sorts of people desperately asking for a 5 minute call so they can demand I let them represent me as an applicant to some company I have no interest in, or in many cases they refuse to name the company and want to represent me anyway.

I’ve come to feel that a lot of LinkedIn is a scam.  It always sounds great to allow employers and employees to find each other organically from the comfort of a computer, but without strict moderation these types of things always fall into scam territory.  

If anyone is reading this: how do you find the non-scams on LinkedIn?

A Practical Guide for going to space.  Final thoughts.

Writing this series has been, for me, very therapeutic.  I’ve always been interested in space and space travel.  There’s still a lot more to talk about, for instance SSTOs (single stage to orbit) and why many think they’re the future of space travel.  Or the particular difficulties of landing on any planet with an atmosphere.  But overall I wanted this to be a fun little introduction to how space travel works and how it was done in the Apollo program.  Once I learned how it worked I started noticing how basically no movies or games (besides Kerbal Space Program do it justice.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve noticed that most spaceships in movies or games don’t actually orbit anything, they just float around relatively motionless compared to whatever body they are near.  The International Space Station for its part is moving incredibly fast, with an orbital rate of about once every two hours.

Still it was fun to get this all out there and in one coherent place.  Thank you for taking the time to read and learn with me.

A Practical Guide for going to space. Part 4: fuel-saving designs for an easier round trip

In the last three days I’ve made a series of posts detailing in a general sense how a space mission can go from the Earth to the Moon and back.  On Monday I discussed how to get into orbit and how orbits work generally.  On Tuesday I discussed how to go from an Earth orbit to a Moon orbit, and how to go from orbit to landing on the surface.  And on Wednesday I discussed the return journey from the Moon to Earth and how atmospheric drag can be used to help land on Earth.

Today I’d like to touch on the things I didn’t mention, the things NASA spent a lot of time and money to achieve because they were crucial to mission success.  In particular, NASA spent a lot of time and money figuring out how they could get the greatest amount of mass to the moon using the least fuel and the smallest rockets they could.  Rockets and fuel are big, expensive, and difficult to handle so the less of them you have to use the better.

This weight-saving starts in the first ascent when the spaceship is getting into orbit.  The rocket that launched from Kennedy space center was 363 feet tall and looked like THIS while the orbiting modules that went to the moon was about 37 feet tall and looked like THIS.  Where did all the rockets go?  Well the Saturn V rocket itself was big and heavy, and once all its fuel was expended it was detached from the orbiting modules and fell back to earth, allowing the modules to get into orbit on their own.  This in turn made getting to the moon cheaper and more fuel efficient because getting those little modules to the moon costs way less fuel than getting a giant Saturn V PLUS those modules to the moon.  This idea of saving weight by detaching from expended rockets was used all over the Apollo and Soviet programs, and will be discussed again shortly.

Next, once the modules got into orbit around the moon, we can save weight again by having only 1 module descend to the lunar surface while the other remains in orbit.  This significantly reduces the amount of weight we need to get on and off the Moon, and that in turn reduces the fuel usage.  Finally, once on the Moon the Apollo module would detach from some of its rockets yet again, leaving them on the Moon and sending only a small part of the lunar lander back to orbit, similar to how booster rockets were jettisoned during Earth ascent.

In all these above cases, fuel can be saved by simply taking less mass from one place to the other. Detaching from the rockets to take less mass from Earth orbit to Moon orbit, detaching the lunar module to take less mass from Moon orbit to Moon Landing, and then detaching from some lunar module rockets to take less mass from Moon Landing back to Moon orbit. All of these save the weight you have to move and thus save fuel, and one of the biggest difficulties in going into space is you fuel usage so this is a big help. Originally NASA didn’t want to detach a lunar module to detach from the command module for lunar landing, they wanted to land the entire module on the moon. This was because detachment and landing would have to be followed by an in-orbit rendezvous to get the astronauts back together for the return-to-earth part of the mission, and they didn’t know if in-space rendezvous were feasible. But the fuel-savings from this method were obvious so several missions were launched to test our ability to perform rendezvous, and once successful the lunar-module version of the mission was given the go-ahead.

The last trick is something I’d like to make clear about the physics of getting into and out of an orbit.  When I watched the Giant-Bomb let’s play of Kerbal Space Program, one of the commenters posed the question: “It’s easier to get down from orbit than back into orbit, it must be easier because you have gravity helping you, right?”. This is in fact a misunderstanding, to get from in orbit around the body to being stationary on a body requires the same amount of force as to do the opposite. You can get down from orbit more cheaply if all you want to do is crash, in that case you can simply shrink your orbit and crash into the body at a few hundred meters per second, saving you a lot on fuel (this is called lithobraking and was used to land the NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity, although to protect the robots their fall was cushioned by inflatable airbags). So it will always take the same amount of energy to get from the ground into orbit as it takes to get from orbit to the ground, however importantly this does not take into account the atmosphere of a planet. The atmosphere of a planet creates drag which will slow down down any craft moving through it, and we can use that to our advantage when we try to land on Earth by letting the atmosphere slow our descent instead of needing to use rockets to slow ourselves like we did on the Moon. This is the final big fuel-saving for our trip and is why the Apollo capsules landed without their rockets, because they didn’t need those rockets to slow themselves and it would only make descent harder as they’d need a bigger parachute to slow themselves upon final descent to the ground.

All in all, saving fuel and weight is of primary importance to any space mission, and many of the techniques we take for granted had to be calculated and figured out by NASA before they became standard. Everything the Apollo rockets did had hundreds of pages on data and savings behind them, even if they aren’t immediately obvious to us, but they were all necessary to get to the moon.

A Practical Guide for going to space. Part 3: from the Moon back to Earth

This is the third post in my weeklong series about space travel.  Yesterday’s post can be found here and in it I explained the basics of getting a spaceship from low Earth orbit to the surface of the moon using the simple concepts of a prograde and retrograde burns.  Remember that burning prograde means firing your rockets in such a way that you increase your velocity in the direction of your motion, relative to the body you are orbiting.  Burning retrograde decreases your velocity in that direction.  If you are orbiting around the Earth’s equation, burning prograde means pointing your rocket in the direction or your current motion and executing a burn to gain more velocity in that direction.  

Now that we’ve been to the surface of the moon we can play a few holes of moon golf, and then once finished we can leave the surface of the moon and return to Earth.

The trip from the moon’s surface to low lunar orbit is much like the trip we took in Part 1 from the surface of the Earth to low Earth orbit, only this time there’s no atmosphere to drag us down.  So we only need to gain enough altitude to clear any lunar mountains, then burn horizontally from the lunar surface until we have enough horizontal velocity that gravity bends our trajectory around the planet and into an orbit.  If we have too little horizontal velocity, our trajectory will be bent back down to the planet’s surface, and if we have too much horizontal velocity we will escape the moon’s orbit.  Escaping the moon’s orbit is actually our next step though, so once in orbit we can burn prograde to gain velocity relative to the moon and escape its orbit.  

Once we escape the moon’s orbit, where will we be?  Back in orbit around the earth.  Remember that the moon itself orbits the Earth, and so anything orbiting the moon is also itself orbiting the Earth.  Escaping the moon’s orbit will likely bring us to an elliptical orbit with Earth as its focus.  We gained a lot of velocity relative to both the moon and the earth in order to escape the moon, but we still haven’t escaped the Earth’s orbit.  That’s actually good, we don’t want to escape the Earth (yet), personally I need to get back home.  So now that we’re out of the moon’s orbit and back into an Earth orbit, how do we get back to Earth?  Simply burn retrograde to reduce our velocity relative to Earth.  Doing this will shrink our orbit, just as burning prograde expanded our orbit in part 2.  And once we’ve shrunk our orbit to the point that our orbital trajectory crosses into Earth’s atmosphere, we’re basically guaranteed to get home.  The Earth’s atmospheric drag will slow our craft down, sapping it of horizontal momentum, until our trajectory no longer maintains an orbit but instead is bent towards the planet’s surface by gravity.  

This was something we couldn’t do on the moon because the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere, but it does bring back the Apollo 13 dilemma that I discussed all the way back in Post 2.  To recap: the Apollo 13 dilemma was about how Apollo 13 would navigate the Earth’s atmosphere to ensure it got home safely.  The astronauts needed to burn retrograde to lose enough velocity such that Earth’s atmosphere would slow them down and they would land on Earth with their parachutes, but how much should they slow down?  If they slowed down too much, they would take a steep plunge through the atmosphere, the intense heat from re-entry might destroy their capsule, and even if it didn’t the steep trajectory might not give their craft enough time to slow down enough for a safe landing.  However if they slowed down too little, then they would take a very shallow trajectory.  This shallow trajectory would mean they would not pass through enough of earth’s dense atmosphere, meaning they would not be slowed down significantly by the atmosphere, meaning their trajectory would not be bent into a surface-crossing one.  As they passed through the atmosphere, they would be slowed down, but it would not be enough and they would continue on their elliptical earth orbit.  Their orbit would still cross Earth’s atmosphere, and so each time their obit passed through the atmosphere the craft would be slowed more and more until their trajectory was bent into a surface-crossing one and it hit the ground.  The problem for the Apollo 13 astronauts was by then it would be too late.  Their elliptical orbit took days to complete and they didn’t have enough food, water or oxygen to survive for that long.  They needed to come down to earth in a single pass.

This dilemma is similar to the one we would face coming back from the moon, we need to burn retrograde such that we will pass through the earth’s atmosphere and let it take enough of our momentum so we can safely land with our parachutes.  Again the calculus for figuring this out is diabolical, and it’s the reason NASA employed so many people just to do calculations during the Apollo program.  But once we are slowed down enough by the atmosphere, our trajectory will be bent into one which crosses the surface of the earth, and from there it’s simply a matter of deploying a parachute at the right time and our craft can gently float down to land on the surface.  Mission accomplished.

A Practical Guide for going to space Part 2: from orbit to the Moon

This is the second post in my weeklong series about space travel.  Yesterday’s post can be found here and in it I explained the basic mechanics of getting from the ground into orbit.  To summarize, getting into orbit is all about getting enough horizontal velocity (relative to the ground) such that gravity pulls your journey around the body you’re orbiting and not back into the body’s surface.  To do so you need to get above Earth’s atmosphere (where atmospheric drag would sap you of velocity and allow gravity to pull you back in) which is why spaceships start their journey by going up, but most of the energy will be expended gaining the horizontal velocity.  Secondly I discussed changing an orbit, in particular how firing your rockets (“burning” for short) in the prograde direction expands your orbit, while firing them in the retrograde direction contracts your orbit.  These will be important concepts for getting to the moon.

So if we’re in a spaceship in orbit around the earth, how do we get to the moon?  Well the moon is just a body that orbits the earth at a very long distance, so in principle there’s not much difference between going to the moon and when we visited our friend’s spaceship in Part 1.  Let’s assume that like last time, our orbital plane is the same as the moon’s orbital plane, so again all we have to do is burn prograde to expand our orbit to a point where it comes close to the moon.  In reality the calculations for this are diabolical, especially with the hand-calculation used by NASA in the 60s.  The prograde burn turns a circular orbit into an elliptical one with its periapsis (the point of the orbit which is furthest from the earth) hopefully intersecting the moon’s orbit at a point when the moon will be close to it.  But if done correctly, then at the furthest point of our spaceship’s orbit we will come close to the moon, having crossed over into its gravitational hill sphere several hours beforehand.

But we’re not done yet.  Just getting our ship close to the moon isn’t enough, we’ll likely just pass right by it and continue on our orbit around the earth.  We need to get into orbit around the moon.  Again from Part 1: an orbit is just when you’re moving fast enough relative to a body that gravity can’t pull your trajectory back down to the surface, but not so fast that you fly off into space.  If we got to the moon by burning from the earth, then we’ll have so much velocity relative to the moon that we can’t just get into orbit, we need to slow down relative to the moon so that its gravity can bend our trajectory back into an orbit.  And if burning prograde speeds you up, then burning retrograde slows you down.  In this case retrograde will be in relation to our speed relative to the moon, rather than relative to earth, but retrograde we must burn if we are to create an orbit.

So finally we are in orbit around the moon.  We burned prograde from our earth orbit to extend it outwards towards the moon, then once close to the moon we burned retrograde relative to the moon in order to slow down and get into a moon orbit.  Now orbiting the moon we would be able to look down at the lunar surface and pick out a landing site.  Getting down onto the moon is now just the opposite of getting up off of the earth.  For earth we burned vertically at first to gain height and then horizontally to gain horizontal momentum and create an orbit.  For the moon, we first burn retrograde to lose horizontal momentum in order to decay our orbit to the point where it intersects the ground, then as we fall towards the moon we will gain vertical momentum from gravity pulling us down.  As we approach the lunar surface we can perform a final burn to slow both our horizontal and vertical moment to zero, or as close to it as possible before final touchdown.  Congratulations, we have landed on the moon.  

You’ll notice this explanation has so far been missing a few pieces that you might remember from the Apollo program: there’s no discussion of a separate lunar module and leaving a crewmember behind in space, for instance.  Those will all be discussed in a later post where I talk about weight and fuel requirements.  For now, I’d like to enjoy a game of lunar golf, and tomorrow we can discuss getting back to earth.

A Practical Guide for going to space. Part 1: from Earth to orbit

Over the next week I’d like to set down my understanding of how going to space works.  Most of this has been gleamed from my academic career as well as having fun in Kerbal Space Program, but I’ve noticed that despite the half century of progress since America first went to the moon, most people I’ve met don’t know how space travel works or why spaceships work the way they do.  So I just wanted to set down my understanding in hopes of helping someone else who might be reading.

Step one of most any space travel is getting into orbit, everything else comes from there.  As XKCD taught us (https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/) getting into space is about speed more than height.  Being in orbit is about moving around the earth fast enough that gravity can’t bend your trajectory back to the earth’s surface, it can only bend your trajectory around the earth.  Don’t go too fast or gravity won’t even be able to keep your trajectory around the earth, instead you’ll fly off into the solar system.

So with that said, the primary necessity of a spaceship is to gain horizontal velocity (relative to the surface) so that gravity will keep them in orbit and not pull them back to the ground.  Spaceships only go up so that they can escape the atmosphere and not have it sap them of all their precious horizontal velocity, so while a spaceship starts its journey thrusting vertically to get off the ground, it quickly adjusts to a more horizontal position in flight such that it continues to gain vertical speed but gains horizontal speed at a much much greater rate.  From there, the key is to just keep gaining horizontal speed until you reach the point where gravity can’t bend your trajectory back towards the ground anymore, and as long as you’re above the atmosphere so it can’t sap you of horizontal velocity then voila you’re in orbit.

From Orbital rendezvous and changing obits

So once you’re in orbit, what do you do up there?  Have a party in your spaceship maybe.  Call your friends to go visit them in their spaceships.  But this gets to the tricky question of how you’d get to their spaceship.  Keep in mind that when you’re in orbit, you’re not stationary.  You’re hurtling around the earth at about thousands of miles per hour.  Let’s say you’re in an orbit that is just 250 miles above the surface, about the height of the ISS.  Your friend is 1000 miles above the surface and you want to visit them.  How would you go about doing that?

First one needs to understand how to change an orbit to begin with.  I’ll start with the most basic of the basic: prograde and retrograde.  When you’re in an orbit, prograde refers to the direction you are moving in at any particular time, and retrograde refers to the opposite direction from prograde.  So if you’re in a spaceship whizzing around the earth, look straight ahead in your direction of travel and you’re looking prograde.  Look behind you and you’re looking retrograde.  These are important because these directions are how we can change an orbit and visit our friend.

Point your ship so it’s front is pointing prograde and its thruster is pointing retrograde, fire the engines and you will give yourself more velocity in the prograde direction.  Doing this will expand your orbit, making you orbit be further away from the body you are orbiting (although it will mostly expand the part of your orbit on the other side of the planet from you).  Fire your engines in the retrograde direction and you will contract your orbit.  This is how you can visit your friend.  If you’re in a circular orbit at 250 miles above the equator, and they are in a circular orbit 1000 miles above the equator, you need to expand your orbit such that at least part of it crosses that 1000 mile mark.  Expanding and contracting your orbit is how you’re going to have to go anywhere in space, it doesn’t really work to aim your rocket *at* a thing and fire the engine, that’s now how space works.

So you finally have an orbit that crosses your friend’s orbit and at the point of crossing you and your friend will be only a few hundred meters from each other, so you can finally visit him in his capsule, right?  Not entirely, there’s one final thing.  At the point of crossing your relative velocities (how fast your moving relative to *each other*) will probably not be zero, and this can cause you to blow past each other at the moment of closest approach (https://youtu.be/CnxpsV_FMsI?t=3181).  If you actually want to get in your friend’s capsure and have a party, you need to fix that.  To do so, during closest approach you need to fire your rockets in a direction that reduces your speed relative to your friend’s spaceship.  This part requires a little math and is hard to explain without visuals, but trust me when I say it’s a necessary part of the procedure.  Reducing your speed relative to your friend’s spaceship will cause the two of you to match speeds, and your orbits will begin to potentially look almost identical to each other (since you’re going the same speed at the same point in space).  Once you have perfectly matched speeds with your friend, you can *now* point your rocket in their direction and fire the engine, because since you aren’t moving relative to each other things finally work intuitively like they do on earth.  You can then use this to dock with their craft, get in, and have your party.

So this has been a fun little trip, we talked about how to get into orbit and how to change an orbit.  This all would be easier to explain with visual aids and in my mind this would work better as a YouTube video, maybe some day I’ll make it one.  For now though this is only part 1 of space travel.  Next up, actually getting from orbit to the moon.

How much are people on the street worried about Monkeypox?  An informal survey.

Over the past weekend I went out on the street to do an informal survey of everyone I could find to ask them two questions: had they heard of Monkeypox?  And were they doing anything to protect themselves from Monkeypox?  The answers somewhat surprised me.

Every single person I spoke to had heard of Monkeypox.  I was expecting at least one or two to have not heard of it but literally everyone had.  So at least that’s good that some public health information had filtered through.

As for if they were doing anything to protect themselves, the overwhelming majority said no.  A few said they were using “masks and social distancing” which means either they were treating Monkeypox like COVID or they just gave a COVID-like answer to my question.  A few told me they weren’t doing anything to protect themselves because the disease is only circulating among men who have sex with men.  And a few said that they didn’t know what they should do to protect themselves or didn’t have time to learn what to do.  But again, the overwhelming majority of people said they weren’t doing *anything*.

It seems to me like Monkeypox just isn’t conjuring the same fear among the folks on the street that it is online.  It especially isn’t conjuring the COVID fear, I remember people almost running away from each other if they got too close in April 2020.  I’d like to hear from other people, if anyone else can share what if anything they are doing to protect themselves from Monkeypox.

Full Disclosure: this was my script for the survey.  Question 1: “Have you heard of Monkeypox?” Question 2: “Are you changing your behavior or doing anything differently to protect yourself from Monkeypox?”

Random thought: I prefer real-time-with-paused to turn-based in my party RPGs

It feels like the world has passed me by on this one.  I have always held Baldur’s Gate up as being basically exactly what I want in the feel of a party-based RPG, and yet every discussion online I’ve seen has been the opposite.  When Pillars of Eternity 2 came out, it sold terribly.  I have my own opinions on that but one explanation that was making the rounds was “turn based is a far more tactical feel for an RPG, real time with pause is outdated, that’s why Divinity 2 sold so well and Pillars 2 sold so poorly.”  The devs even seemed to believe this, as after I left Pillars 2, they patched in a turn-based mode for the game.  Well I played some of Divinity 2 and I have to say I truly truly wish this were real-time with pause.

Divinity’s system relies a lot on the minute positioning of spells.  One pixel off can mean the difference between incinerating your enemies vs your allies.  The maps contain plenty of pillars and Line-of-sight blockers to force you to consider positioning, and yet I feel like the positioning is just not fun to engage with.  There are two archers and a warrior at the end of the hall,I want to hide my mage so they can hit the warrior but not get hit by the archers.  How far behind the pillar do I need to be?  I sit in a spot that looks good and… nope.  A little off, I cannot hit the warrior.  Well now I have to spend more AP in order to finagle my positioning just right.  In Real time (Pillars), this would take about a second, which is nothing in the timescale of the battle.  I unpause, move a bit, check, and yep it’s fine.  But here that 1 AP is 25% or 20% of my total for this turn, which can easily mean the difference between getting the spell off or not.  The worst is how intuitive it can sometimes be, a lot of iron stuff lying around has big gaping holes in it (think like the iron bars of a cell).  Can I fire stuff through or does this count as solid so I should instead hide behind it?  Infuriatingly it depends.

So while position matters a whole lot, I generally ignore it because it’s not fun to engage with.  When you’re trying to get something just right, the difference between success and failure is very minuscule, and the AP system means those minute adjustments cost action points, so while a mistake in positioning in Pillars costs me a couple of seconds to fix, a mistake in positioning in Divinity can cost me my entire turn.  And because the mistakes are so punishing, the system is opaque, and I’m not yet feeling any situations where a perfectly executed fireball won the battle, I feel no compulsion to “get good” at this system, and I don’t have much fun trying.