Today’s Rant: Obama’s Agenda, Sore Points

I, like so many of you on the left, am somewhat disillusioned with our president. Ironically, though, it’s not due to his non-implementation of progressive policies. I knew he was a centrist, as most of us did, and when it comes right down to it, it was him or McCain. We liked to think that we were playing the old-fashioned right against the new-fangled left, but sadly, it was more on the order of old-fashioned right versus dead goddamn center. As many people have stated, we’ve not had a truly leftist president since Johnson, and of course as I was not even alive at the time, I have no basis for comparison. Obama does seem to understand the dire situation here, but he doesn’t want to smash his opponents to smithereens, because he somehow mistook the divisiveness of politics as the reason for current crises, rather than the stupidity of the elected politicians (and by proxy, their constituents). We need to shift the conversation so that facts are central to arguments, rather than the conversation consisting of people shouting down people armed with such meager weapons as the truth, or compassion, or what have you.

I will forgive Obama some of his what I would consider mistakes (based on my political views) and I’ve not given up hope, but I have given up on expecting any genuine surprises whatsoever from him. Additionally, there are three things that I find ridiculous, and will forever mar his presidency if he does not fix them somehow (I doubt that he will):

1) Inability to restore the Constitution and the rule of law. For Christ’s sake, Obama is a constitutional lawyer – there’s no way that he is ignorant of the last administration’s war crimes, disregard of the Constitution and international law, and plain old human decency. The fact that the President gets a free pass may just be the reality (meaning that the Constitution really is just a piece of paper) but frankly his insistence on turning the page and whitewashing over what is quite obviously the most blatantly criminal administration in our history is unconscionable. If we can’t string up any wrongdoer, even the head of the executive branch, then quite frankly that part of democracy is already dead. And maybe it was never alive – but we impeached Nixon for far less and NEARLY impeached Clinton for nothing whatsoever. So we know the tools are in place. I find it hard to believe that Obama believes in the imperial presidency if he is a constitutional scholar. So I have to imagine that he thinks that burying the past and moving ahead is the only way to get on with fixing the hundred and one things that are wrong. I ALMOST understand, but find it utterly misguided as protecting the Constitution is the President’s #1 concern, and that includes prosecuting lying, torturing cowards like Cheney and Co. This irks me more than everything else.

2) Handling of Wall Street bailouts. The top three companies just doled out $30 billion in bonuses to their filthy, greedy top executives – did they somehow forget that they reached into OUR pockets for help? Timothy Geitner, even if he means well (and he may, in some misguided fashion) is far too deep in the Wall Street system to create the changes and tools we need to prevent these thieves from returning to their pillaging. Obama was misguided in appointing anyone other than a hardcore populist – who in the name of God would fear “too much regulation” when these douchebags just destroyed our economy? Obama, apparently, since he’s bought into all the “free market” garbage that sounds great on paper, and in practice brings out the worst in human beings. Capitalism is an utterly amoral system, and when all that matters are profits, profits, profits, who cares how many insect-like people you crush to post that stock gain next Monday?

Of course, that last point is tied closely into the fact that these fuckers have too much money, and as such, can buy politicians left and right. We’re probably not seeing a philosophical divergence (that’s probably giving the lot of them too much credit) but rather the simple fact that Washington has fallen deeply into the pockets of these bastards and seems unable or unwilling to climb the hell out.

Damn it all to hell. I’m too mad to keep writing about this at the moment. But I got plenty more rage on this topic.

3) Anyway, the non-ending of the war in Afghanistan is another sore point with me, but practically all wars are because whatever it is we think we’re doing there does not justify the deaths of our own brave military or the Afghani populace. It never has, and everyone is too cowardly and afraid to stand up and say, “Yes, these selfless and courageous individuals have died not to protect this country, but rather to line the pocket of the military contractors and help secure oil for transnational corporations. But not one more. NOT ONE MORE. Bring them home NOW.”

Just that simple. And don’t tell me it’s not that simple. It is. 800 BILLION dollars, over 80% of our federal tax money, goes straight into military spending. We spend most of our money on murdering ourselves and others, death and destruction. And these corporate whores in the Republican party, these soulless ghouls with no compassion or common sense, have the nerve to say that universal health care is too expensive.

Well, sure it is! Why should we spend dime one of our own money on taking care of our citizenry when we could be bombing and maiming women and children in a country we have no legal right to invade? Arrrrgh! In summary, let me borrow a quote from Mike Malloy:

Have I told you lately how much I hate these people?

Today’s Rant: Death to Hiatus!

Well, well, well. Look who’s come crawling back. After a year plus of sitting around and wondering what the fuck I should be doing with my life, I took a few steps to correct this problem. It’s a long story, most likely to be parceled out piece by piece over time, though it’s no doubt a relatively typical story. To wit: I now own a whomp-ass electric guitar and am also a certified hemodialysis technician. More on that later.

What spurred my vainglorious return to blogging? A fair question. Considering that I get an average of perhaps 3 or 4 views a day, my best day being a whopping fifty views some two years ago, it is only sheer arrogance, or boredom, or anger, or most likely a combination of the three, that drives me back to the old b-sphere. Even if no one ever reads this goddamn thing, it is technically publically available so I can be sure that my self-indulgent ramblings are in theory readable by anyone, so they can learn more about me, what I like, what I hate, and what the hell is going on in my brain. I often wonder if blogging would take the mystery out of courtship. Want to know everything about me? I just direct my prospective date to my site and drive her away after just a few entries. But if they stick around – well, a woman who wants to listen to my rants and perhaps believes that I possess a modicum of wisdom, or god forbid is even entertained by them, is probably the most I could ask for. Of course, wisdom is relative. I think five years of cynicism is equal to about one year of genuine wisdom-accrual. But as I’m about 100 years old in cynicism, it’s no wonder people have trouble telling the difference.

One of the benefits of cynicism (and skepticism, my default position vis a vis everything) is that no one can fool you. The problem is that it causes you great irritation when you see other people being fooled, and fooled easily at that. My ire at the “health care debate” is so great it will have to be parcelled out over several articles here – suffice to say, when people are so manipulable that they compare the Daschau death camps to quote-unquote “socialist” healthcare (i.e.  the bare-minimum public option that they so manifestly desperately need), and are defacto crying out that they’d rather keel over dead from easily preventable conditions that negatively affect the profits of people whose sole business is to deny health care to policy holders and rake off the profits into the pockets of CEO, well, there is no other word for it than INSANITY.

These people are stupid, yes, but their level of intelligence is actually irrelevant because they have lost their minds. I’m not even exaggerating. The propaganda arm of the Republican Party (read: Fox News) has whipped these people into a frenzy, and the only reason I believe they can be so easily turned into tools of corporate fascism is because they lack education, a result of which is (in theory, I’m not sure about this) critical thinking. You know, collecting facts in order to make informed decisions, a process often referred to as using your brain. Sigh.

You may find that my rhetoric in regards to the right-wing has hardened somewhat, if you can believe it. This is partly due to the fact that rather than disappearing after we elected Obama, if anything they have gotten stupider, louder, and angrier, and have presented themselves unabashedly as an obstacle to human progress. The other reason is I have been listening like a madman to Mike Malloy, an obscure leftist talk show host who I feel an immediate kinship with – no one can fool this man. If he’s a little crazy, well, the world is a little crazy, and I’m a little crazy, and that all suits me just fine. Except the world. But I deal.

I’ll talk more about Mike Malloy’s show later on. You should check it out at www.mikemalloy.com. Be warned – your capacity to enjoy his show is proportionate to your ability to enjoy black humor – it simply depresses some people. But I believe that even if the truth is painful, and depressing, and irritating, well goddamnit, it’s the TRUTH, and at least when this country finally collapses inward on itself you can dust yourself off, stand up straight and say, well, it wasn’t me.

Well, I’m back. And aren’t you overjoyed?

Today’s Rave: Advanced Civilization

Everyone knows the ubiquitous Civilization games, up past their fourth incarnation and founded by the much-loved Sid Meier. What you may not know about this venerable series is that it drew as its inspiration a game by those old masters of the board, Avalon Hill. Besides being responsible for dozens of board games that put modern video games to shame in fun, replay value, and brilliant design, Avalon Hill also authorized a couple of adaptations of their board games to PC.

One such adaptation was Advanced Civiliation. But let me back up. The original Civilization was a board game by Avalon Hill. Sid Meier played and liked said game; in fact he liked it so much he stole/adapted/altered the design for his own game, also titled Civilization, albeit with his name plastered in front of it. It has a decidedly military focus compared to the original Civilization by AH. Perhaps in response to this release, and also partly because the original Civilization had some balance issues, Avalon Hill released an expansion of sorts called Advanced Civilization.

Unlike Sid Meier’s games, Advanced Civilization is won mostly through clever trading and expansion. Military conquest is difficult and inherently balanced out by the games’ population system. No empire can expand indefinitely since the players use the same set of tokens for both population and treasury money. Expand too far and your cities will have tax revolts; but expand too little and you will not be able to operate at maximum efficiency.

The goods and trading system is at the heart of what makes AdCiv so special – each city generates one trade card per turn that represents a type of good. For example, if you have 1 city, you draw a card from the first of nine piles – so you’ll most likely receive an ochre or hide trade card, worth 1 point. If you have 2, you’ll draw one of two types of cards worth 2 points from the second of nine piles, and so on.

The brilliance of this system lies in the fact that cards are exponentially more valuable in sets than singly. What this means, for example is that a set of four hides, each worth one, is worth sixteen as a group (it’s the square of the number of cards times the value of the good). What this means, then, is that a fifth hide is actually worth 9 points to you (that raises the total to twenty-five), which means you would be willing to trade a good worth much more, say 7 or 8, just to get another value 1 good. Everybody benefits from this system, and no player is out of the game just because they can’t generate high-value goods – it’ll be worth something to somebody.

The other fact is that it’s not all goods in the trade decks – on occasion, you will draw a calamity card. Some of them you can’t do anything about, but others can be cleverly passed off to other players by bluffing during trading. You must trade at least three cards, and you must be truthful about two of them, but any other number of cards can be outright lies. This makes every trade exciting, because you never know if you’ll be screwed over; on the other hand, if you know that even if only two of the cards in the trade are very valuable to you, even if you get a slave revolt or treachery inflicted on you, it’ll be worth it.

Brilliance I tell you. You use these trade cards and some spare money from your treasury to purchase civilizational advances, some of which give you new game mechanics, such as winning conflicts more easily or allowing you to use money to help build cities, and some simply mitigate the effects of calamities so they don’t hurt you so much. Also, advances (called tools in the game) give you credit towards certain other advances, helping you afford the more expensive ones later on. The game ends when one player makes it to the end of the archaeological time table by fulfilling certain goals during play, though the player who ends the game may no necessarily win it, thanks to a balanced and complex scoring system.

The PC adaptation’s AI is brutal, even on its easiest setting. I have yet to end any higher than third place in a game, and I’ve played half a dozen of them by now. This game is abandonware, so it’s easy and free to get – but it’s old and you’ll need DosBox to run it (a free Dos emulator for Windows). For fans of the Civilization series, get ready for a crazy shock when you realize how a simpler and more elegant game can deliver all the addictiveness of the often overly complex Civilzation series.

Today’s Rave: Tyrian

I was around back when there were one speed CD roms. A 500 MB hard drive was considered plenty big – even huge. Windows 3.1 was all the rage. Yes indeed. Simpler times. And games from those times had much less to work with. Most serious games of that era still ran in DOS because Windows was unwieldy and Microsoft had yet to invent Direct X as a resource workaround.

Tyrian was a space shooter from that era. It was put together by the tiny software company Epic MegaGames, creator of such ancient and beloved franchises and Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall. It had good music and graphics for the time (it still looks colorful and runs smoothly) and was awesome because unlike other shooters, there was a great deal of customizability. But let me back up.

A game where you are a single pilot in a small plane or spaceship taking on fleets of enemies used to be simply called a shooter or shoot’em up. Generally speaking, you couldn’t get hit even once, or you died. Once you ran out of lives, it was game over. Tyrian broke with that rule because you had both shields (which recharged) and armor (which didn’t) which on the one hand was more forgiving, but on the other made the programmer able to create much harder situations because he knew a few mistakes wouldn’t kill you (that’s right, one programmer. Singular). Additionally, in arcade shooters (pretty much the only kind available at the time), you would collect weapon upgrades and bombs mid-level, and as long as you didn’t die you would keep all of your upgrades. Raiden, if you’ve ever seen that, is the classic example of this.

Tyrian also ruled because the weapons were hugely customizable. Your score was also your currency, which you would then use to buy different kinds of weapons or upgrade them. Besides your standard front weapon, there was also a rear/side weapon and two “sidekick” slots that you could customize with missile launchers, companion ships, bombs, flamethrowers, mines, and a dozen other useful weapons. You could also buy better ships (more armor), upgrade your shields, and upgrade your generator. See, what was particularly cool about the generators is that they power both your weapons and shields, so if your weapons consume too much power then your shields will recharge very slowly while firing. This relationship meant that hotshot pilots could buy really powerful weapons, secure in the knowledge that they could dodge well, whereas lazier people like me could scale back the weapon purchases but be assured of a somewhat more forgiving experience.

But what’s really great is that the source code was released to a group who have switched out the archaic DOS code for an up-to-date SDL executable, which means Tyrian can once again be run in all it’s speedy glory with full sound, instead of relying on DOSBox.

The music is really good too. Check it out, if you’re looking to kill some time with an old-school classic. Kudos to Epic MegaGames. Gone, but not forgotten.

http://code.google.com/p/opentyrian/

Today’s Rave: Diplomacy

As you know (I think), I love board games. And among board games, one is the undisputed king. The rules are simple, but the intrigues, subterfuge, treasonous maneuvering and back-stabbing is as complex and varied as real life. I refer to the Avalon Hill classic, Diplomacy.

The rules themselves are almost laughably simple. There are armies and fleets. They each can move, hold, or support another movement. Attackers must outnumber their opponents to dislodge them. That’s about it, other than rules for convoying. But all movement orders are processed simultaneously, so it’s up to you, the hapless leader of your nation, to wheel and deal with others in an attempt to grab as much land as possible while feinting with the olive branch whenever necessary. Certain areas on the board are supply centers, and for each additional one you capture you can build an additional fleet or army.

The ultimate aim of Diplomacy is to position yourself, after a couple of years, in a position where you will be able to perform a backstab of such breathtaking arrogance and scope that you will climb over the corpses of both your enemies and friends to victory. Because once you break your word, no other country will trust you again. So you have to wait for that right moment.

The hilarious thing about the game is despite the ridiculously simple rules, your interactions with other nations are hilariously complex. For example, you might meet with a stated ally to discuss plans, then meet with a secret ally who you will leak information to in exchange for information on their partner. Then it’s off to meet with a supposed enemy who in fact you are faking a war with to get another country off its guard. It’s as ridiculous as you make it.

Every country has its own challenges to face: England’s relative isolation and naval superiority make it easy to defend, but taking territory can be problematic. Russia starts with four military units but is beset on all sides by enemies. Italy has dominance of the Mediterranean but has two central European powers breathing down its neck.

In short, Diplomacy is a game that relies simply on human nature to provide its challenges and entertainment – a winning formula. Not to mention, Diplomacy is one of the few games that actually teaches you a skill: in this case, negotiation. Trying to delicately broker a peace agreement before the entire continent plunges into all-out war will make you think twice next time you read about the diplomatic problems some countries are facing.

Speed Screed: Metal Dad

I had the strangest vision of myself yesterday, as a forty-something father driving my kid or kids to school or something, blasting death metal from the late 90’s through the car’s stereo. There is something extremely odd about that idea. In terms of generation gaps, metal is not really the music of any particular generation – it’s a non-popular offshoot of rock and roll with a diverse number of influences including 20th century atonal music and folk music. So when my kids are rolling their eyes and asking of this is the music that my generation listened to, I would truthfully tell them “no.”

But of course this is true for many other genres besides metal. Jazz is very similar inasmuch as it went through its own set of revolutions and evolutions over time, but it was concurrent with popular music and not woven into it except in the most basic ways (blues’ influence on early rock, for example). But jazz is generally pretty unobjectionable; even if my kids didn’t like it, they probably wouldn’t be embarrassed by the fact that their dad listened to jazz.

On the other hand, there is a persistent weirdness about pulling into a school parking lot to drop off your children with “Smashing the Antiu” by Nile blasting out the speakers. Especially since, unless I miraculously end up being a metal musician, I sincerely doubt anything else about my attitude or personality would indicate any sort of stereotypical metal-like tendencies. I’d probably be driving some eco-friendly hybrid and waving goodbye while Karl Sanders is growling about disemboweling the enemies of the Pharaoh.

Now, obviously, I’d probably keep metal away from really young kids, although that they would almost certainly be completely unable to discern any of the lyrics. But the music my parents listened to influenced me a great deal, and I still ended up here with the strong opinion that metal stands head and shoulders in both quality and originality above all other genres of non-classical music. So maybe it hardly matters what they hear from me, they’ll probably end up just liking what they like and that will be that.

But the really funny thing to me is that there is essentially nothing “square” about death metal. It’s gritty, violent, intense, and for preference, fast. It’s just hard for me to picture my kids mocking the music I listen to for how “lame” or “old-fashioned” it is. There are plenty of other good reasons to mock it, but I can’t conceive of metal being associated with old timers.

The other thing is that death and black metal might be considered extreme (and actually good) offshoots of the angsty popular bands of recent years, so in that sense they are associated with the energy and conflicts of youth. On the other hand, what angsty teens listen to transliterated texts from Ancient Egypt being growled out over the most crunchy, dark riffs every to issue forth from a drop-A-tuned electric guitar?

Not many.

Nile rules.

Today’s Rant: The Happening…?

Look, I know with a movie entitled “The Happening” there’s only so much you can expect. It’s like trying to take what will clearly be a disastrous event and try to make it sound less like a disaster movie by adding  hint of esoterica to it. Something happened…but what?

Feh.

Anyway, I avoided this movie since I haven’t really liked anything of Mr. Shyamalan’s since Unbreakable, but as I was somewhat bored last night, I watched it through, thinking that at least there would be some weirdness if nothing else, and weird is good.

And as far as that went, it delivered. But the massively implausible premise actually interfered with my enjoyment of the movie. This rarely happens to me. When other people tell me they have trouble suspending disbelief in a movie, I just shrug and say “It’s a movie. You’re always suspending disbelief because it isn’t real.” But in this rare case, it was immediate obvious to me what the problem was.

I hardly think I’ll ruin anything whatsoever to tell you that the main idea is that the plants on Earth are collectively and spontaneously producing a laughably complex neurotoxin to punish humans for…uh…something. Amazing that it took four hundred thousand years. Our fault for cutting down the trees right? Er…anyway. This neurotoxin apparently makes you kill yourself in the most convenient and brutal manner to hand. While it shuts off rational faculties for things like self-preservation and speech and memory centers, you still apparently can operate motor vehicles or climb up a ladder, tie a noose knot, and hang yourself.

I will say that the images of such emotionally blank and creepy mass suicides are definitely disturbing. That aspect of the movie is done well, and I was still thinking about some of the more well-shot scenes later the next morning.

But a disaster/horror movie tries to bring you in by letting you feel danger vicariously through the characters. But the unbelievably unlikely scenario of all types of plants producing an impossibly complex neurotoxin that just happens to turn humans into creepy suicidal drones instead of even simply making them drop dead on the spot is so utterly ridiculous I simply cannot be scared by it. Obviously M. Night Shyamalan dreamed up these odd scenarios of mass suicide and had to come up with some sort of malevolent force to justify their happening. So plants have it in for humans. If only we’d been nicer to them. After all, plants react to human stimulus – so surely they could all gang up on us by, despite vastly different chemistry and genetics by all creating the appropriate apparatus to produce naturally which the most fervent mad scientist could only dream of.

And considering how fast people drop dead in the movie, about twenty minutes in everyone seems completely screwed. And point of fact, they were, since apparently the entire Northeast was wiped out except for the three main characters. Then it’s like, three months later, and everything is back to normal, some expert on TV warns us that the first one was the sign of a bigger attack to come, and then another “Happening” happens in Paris or something, and then you realize that we’re doomed, thanks to these needlessly malevolent shrubs. It’s also to hard to be scared when you know no one is going to make it out alive.

I sure learned a lesson from that movie. I’ll never be mean to a ficus again.

Feh.

Today’s Rave: Fives

You may think that Dominoes is a childish game that is a waste of time for any seasoned game player. And you’d be right. Ahem. Actually, there is one game played with dominoes that’s pretty cool: Fives. Also known as All-Fives or Muggins, the game is simple yet there is quite a few different tactics to be employed.

Generally played with two though it can be played with up to four, the player with the highest double (i.e. a domino with the same number on both sides) puts it down. This is the spinner and it can be added to on four sides. Players then take turns adding on dominoes in the usual fashion, by connecting a matching number on one side of one of their dominoes to a domino already on the board.

The trick with Fives, and what makes it interesting, is that every time the outer dominoes on the board add up to a multiple of five, you score that many points. Also, if you manage to use up all of your dominoes, you score as many points as pips remaining in your opponent’s hand. This means that you can play defensively, and try to keep your opponent from scoring, or try to make him draw a lot of dominoes and then go out quickly (you have to keep drawing until you draw a domino you can play), trying to capitalize on his large hand. You can also try to set up traps where you invite him to score a low multiple and then you add a new domino, cranking up the score by five or even 10 for yourself.

Generally the game is played to about 200 points, and it combines speed of play with variety – a single round only takes a couple of minutes at most, and even players that are lagging pretty far behind can come back with a little luck and a few good moves. It’s just about the only good game with dominoes that I’ve played, and it stands up to virtually any classic board game in its appeal.

You may not be the kind of person that plays many board games, but if you have an old, unused set of dominoes lying around the house, you should bust them out and give the game a try with a friend. You won’t be disappointed.

Speed Screed: Exploiting Kids

You know, few things irritate me more than the use of children in commercials, particularly babies. This is the sort of genius advertising that comes from people following a line of thought like this:

“Everyone likes babies, since they’re cute. So how can I use this? Hmmm….I know! I’ll make this little baby explain to the watchers that this online investment company is the best in a completely mismatched voice, and then I’ll make him throw up on the keyboard, and everyone will go, ‘Awwwww!’ Brilliant!”

It might work on a few dopes whose brains shut down when they see a moderately cute baby, but for practically everyone else, they’ll just be annoyed that this poor kid is being forced to hock some shoddy product and he’s not even aware of it. To me its simply shameless exploitation of little kids.

You may also have seen that Target commercial where some kids are putting on a Christmas play and it ends with a stupid rhyme saying that Target is the best place to save for the holidays. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. First of all, I know that Christmas is pretty much about commercialism, but cheesy holiday plays put on by second-graders are not. No genuine play is going to include an overt advertisement for Target unless they sponsored the entire thing, and even if they did, it would cause spontaneous revulsion in the audience when they realized that Target’s only goal was to capitalize on the adorableness of the players to hock its wares.

I know I’m cynical, but this is not merely needless cynicism. This is simple logic. These sorts of ad campaigns rely on their audiences being more dimwitted than even I’m willing to believe. I can understand that certain people might enjoy the “cuteness” of the commercial, but at the same time I doubt that they would therefore make any sort of leap to purchase the thing advertised.

The “dancing baby” commercials that I think Blockbuster did maybe a decade ago were the worst. Another grievous miscalculation of what people would find entertaining and cute, whereas the end result was simply something creepy and pointless. Ultimately, unless you have kids genuinely acting like kids, the commercial is going to seem contrived and fall flat.

But that doesn’t seem to stop them from trying. Advertisements suck these days.

Speed Screed: Imagining the Tenth Dimension

One problem with dividing everything into “rants” and “raves” is that I don’t really have a neutral category. Obviously lumping things into “love” or “hate” is gross oversimplification that I use as a cheap draw. I may have to invent a new category for stuff that is simply interesting or informative, but that I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about. If I don’t have a strong opinion, you may find it boring, but at least I don’t have to pretend something is either wonderful or abhorrent. Not that I have yet. That’s called integrity. Ahem.

Anyway, I recently checked out this interesting video called “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” which was posted by the writer of a book of the same name, Rob Bryanton. It’s basically a technique that helps you wrap your head around some of the possibilities of the dimensions beyond the three (or four) that we experience, by using lower-dimensional analogies.

For example, if you collapse all of space into a point (i.e. three dimensions) then a line segment moving from that point to another is movement in the fourth dimension, which is roughly described as time (in truth I think it’s more complicated than the way it’s presented; the way the exercises handle time is a little too flippant) It’s an interesting exercise and I highly recommend it.

As a cautionary note though, this whole experience is really an exercise in philosophy and imagination than any sort of scientific model. I somehow doubt that a string theorist who works on Calabi-Yau spaces really considers the sixth dimension as movement between logically inconsistent realities. String theorists have more or less no physical evidence for their claims (though I still think the theory is a good one) so they use higher dimensions as a way to get the equations to balance out; in other words, string theory becomes a usable model when there is an assumption of ten (or eleven) dimensions, but I think they are viewed mathematically and not as “lines of travel” which is what this mental exercise basically assumes.

The author more or less admits that he is trying to reconcile philosophy and science in a certain fashion, but his spiritual and aesthetic side somewhat damages his scientific credibility. He also produced a series of songs that supposedly outline the key concepts of his book – but the man is not a professional songwriter so I felt mostly confusion at his attempts to use music. I felt that he was once again trying to blur the lines between rational discourse and intuitive spiritual belief. I personally believe that there is no such thing as an informative song – songs are not about transmitting information, at least, not in a form where it has any real-world use.

In short, I believe this is a good thing to watch in order to understand how lower-dimensional analogies can be useful in wrapping your head around things that seem impossible, but to take the entire thing with a grain of salt. Particularly telling was the way that he shaped the 10-dimension symbol like the Sefirot, the Tree of Life from the Jewish mystical tradition of Qabalah. Jumping to premature conclusions much?