Goodbye To The Master Of Dungeons

When I was in fourth grade, my mother gave me a new game. I remember it well. I thought this was a strange game, since it had no board, no colorful pieces, or anything electronic. It was a game where you were supposed to play pretend, but you didn't dress up or run around. Instead you looked at maps and rolled dice, and you were supposed to talk all the way through it. And you couldn't play it alone.

The game was Dungeons & Dragons.

"How very odd," I thought. But the dice were all sorts of odd shapes, you played a character that interacted with and fought mythological beasts, and there were all sorts of complex rules and statistics to deal with. Even the cover of the box was fascinating, with a picture of a dragon on a pile of golden treasure, about to engage in battle with a wizard and an archer.

The budding geek in me was instantly hooked. I quickly found a neighbor kid to play with, then other friends, and by the time I was a teenager I was a pro, spending all-night D&D sessions with friends and pizza and laughter, populating our imaginations with elves and dragons, dwarves and warriors, wizards and kingdoms. The fantastic world I created for those games became the fantasy world I write fiction in today.

If you are an American under the age of 40 and work in some technical field, I'd say there is a higher-than-average chance that you enjoyed this game in your youth. And, if so, there are pretty decent odds you still play it when you get a chance, or some other role-playing game or video game spawned by the revolution that game created.

And it is all due to the vision and creativity of two men, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, in 1974.

Sadly, Gary Gygax died today.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/03/04/obit.gygax.ap/index.html

The article says that he died at home, in Lake Geneva, and had suffered a number of ailments. He was 69.

But I prefer to believe that his hit points ran out. He may have been at 100th-level, but you only have so much armor class to go around!

When Gygax and Arneson developed the game, they drew upon some previous wargaming experience and merged it with role-playing, a heretofore psychological technique of imagining yourself in someone else's shoes to better understand their way of thinking. Except instead of pretending you were your dysfunctional relative, you instead imagined yourself as a heroic medieval fighter or wizard. Cool!

Derided by evangelical fundamentalists as the spawn of Satan, or heralded as the King of Geeks by teenage boys with glasses, Gary Gygax was certainly the father of role-playing games, giving birth to an entire class of games and game systems.

More importantly, though, he has inspired several generations of children with the power of imagination, the effects of which have certainly gone beyond the realm of medieval role-playing and into the innovative spirit they carried into their careers, as I have.

He hosted role-playing games right up to January of this year. He is survived by his wife, six children, and seven grandchildren. Hopefully they are enjoying their patriarch's legacy as much as I did.

So, Gary, thank you for your inspiration. It's been fun.

In his own words, "Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game." (source)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to unsheathe my +8 Pen of Creativity, strap on my Armor of Imagination, and go do some fantasy writing. And, yes, there will be elves involved!


Addendum (3/7/08): On an almost-unrelated note, check out this webpage for the “Goblin Defense Fund”: http://www.goblindefensefund.org/main.html.

Addendum (3/9/08): Cartoon: Gygax versus Death: http://xkcd.com/393/.

Image taken from HERE, where you can also find a great interview.

Doohan & Cooper Are Now Star-Stuff

Yes, Saturday was the day when "Scotty" and "Gordo" became star-stuff.

If you remember my previous post on the subject, James Doohan (who played "Scotty" in Star Trek) and Gordon Cooper (astronaut for the Mercury and Gemini space programs) were to have their remains launched into space. Well, a little before 9AM, a small rocket carried a few grams of their ashes and the ashes of about 200 other space-lovers into low earth orbit:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070428/ap_on_re_us/rocket_launch

HERE is a video of the launch (followed by a little news article about Trekkies making their own films in Scotland – sorry, it was the best I could do, but if you geek out and enjoy the Trekkie part I'll have to make jokes about the age you lost your virginity at).

Here's another interesting and oh-so-juicy tidbit for you lovers of great sci-fi ideas come to life: The rocket that launched Scotty and Gordo's remains was the first rocket launched from Spaceport America, the location where Richard Branson will be locating his space tourist business (Virgin Galactic), in the New Mexico desert not far from Los Cruces. (Yes, the same one who will fly Stephen Hawking up there). Sure, the spaceport is just a concrete slab right now, but within a couple years it will be the start of a new industry, with rocket launching facilities comparable to Cape Canaveral.

Oh, Jesus, a shiver just went up my spine. Is it . . . yes! It is! A twinge of excitement! Suddenly, for that moment, I lost my jaded working-for-evil-biotech blues and actually felt the thrill of pursuing civilization-shaking science. Oh, to be a rocket scientist in the coming years!

Cooper, Doohan, wherever you fellas are at this moment (other than orbit), I hope you're tuning in to my digital bits right now and feeling my honest admiration for what you've done. I'm not talking about the actual advancement of technology. I'm talking about firing the imaginations of several generations of kids like me (okay, the kid I once was, and still am inside). And when your ashes fall back to earth and become cremated all over again, let me say it will be an honor to look upon you in that shining sunset and think about space tourists flying through you to the final frontier. Hell, I might just be one of them.

UPDATE (5/11/07): The rocket failed to reach orbit, and crashed in New Mexico! See this blog post: http://angrylabrat.blogspot.com/2007/05/scottys-ashes-are-lost-on-earth.html.

Guess Who's Going To Orbit Earth Forever

Yes, fellow space lovers, it is a grand time in the history of the world when our space heroes can be sent into orbit after death for us to forever gaze up at them, a star circling the world, a Space God to be worshipped from below.

Later this month, the ashes of astronaut Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, James Doohan (a.k.a. “Scotty” from Star Trek), and a couple hundred other space-lovers will be blasted into orbit to be enshrined in a little can in the radiation-baking void of space:

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/56658.html

Already in orbit are the remains of Doohan’s colleague, Gene Roddenberry.

Does this constitute a production? A great Star Trek epic in orbit?

I think of the late night re-runs of Star Trek that I would stay up for each night, marveling in the flashy, solid-colored, oh-so-campy sets and aliens, relishing every word of the ethics-saturated plots and forced accents. But I loved it. You gave ‘er all she’s got, James! And now, every time I watch Star Trek or one of the many, many, off-shoots it created, I can rest assured that the little silver canisters containing a few grams of Scotty and Roddenberry will be protecting me from a tiny percentage of micro-meteors. Thank you, fellas!

And as for Gordo, true space pioneer of Mercury and Gemini missions, believer in UFO cover-ups and later administrator for Disney and Epcot, I can only give a salute and a thumbs-up for a job well done. Now he will evermore rest where he entered the record books (for instance, he was the first astronaut to sleep in space – and on the launchpad during countdown!).

Yes, I’ll think of you guys with a little shrine of my own. Come 4th of July, I’ll shoot off a little bottle rocket to the Great Spacecraft in the Sky. Given it costs only about $500 (US$) to put a few grams of my ashes up there as well, I might very well join you one day, and thus have myself “beamed up”, Scotty.

See The World Through Rose-Tinted Lenses, Or Any Other Color You Wish!

The other day I was talking with a couple co-workers in the hall as they were preparing to leave work. They put on their Transitions sunglasses and complained about how they weren't changing back and forth very well anymore from clear to dark. "Yeah," said one, "when they get about a year old they slow down in their change rate and it takes too long. They slow down when it gets cold, too."

At this point I remembered watching a sci-fi movie called The Man Who Fell To Earth, staring David Bowie. I wouldn't call the movie excellent, but it has a cult following. It's from Bowie's glam days, after all, back in 1976. Bowie plays an alien (no stretch there!) who has come to Earth in an effort to save his dying family, who waits for rescue back on his home planet. He fits into human society using a facial mask (decades before the Mission Impossible movies) and cosmetic contact lenses, and quickly becomes a wealthy entrepreneur by patenting inventions based on the technology of his home world. There were some interesting inventions in the story which have since come true: self-developing film, cosmetic contact lenses, music spheres (which play like CDs), and UV light-sensitive ("photochromic") sunglasses, like Transitions lenses. Bowie's character possesses a pair of these sunglasses. They protect his alien eyes against the harsh Earthly light, they allow him to see in other wavelengths, and, in the presence of sunlight OR at the press of a button, they turn from clear to dark or back again. I remember thinking how cool it would be to change at the touch of a button, and that we couldn't be technologically far from making it.

Now, once again, science fiction has become reality. In fact, it's even cooler:

http://www.physorg.com/news94216721.html

A chemist named Chunye Xu and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle's Center for Intelligent Materials and Systems have invented photoelectric glass coatings that, at the touch of a button, can go from clear to any color you wish in just a second. Need your glasses to match your teal pumps? No problem. Just dial in the appropriate electrical signal to get the right color and darkness. The coatings are made of special polymers, and come in red, blue, and green. Combinations of these polymers can make just about any color. The color change happens with the application of a very small electrical charge from a small battery and a gold/silicone actuator, or can be stimulated by pH, temperature, or light changes depending on the formulation. They have a number of patents. Go HERE for a short PowerPoint presentation of the physical details. This technology will also be developed for goggle lenses, face shields, aircraft windshields, and office windows.

Eyeglasses should be available within a couple years. I'll be waiting for my pair. Ooh, wouldn't it be wicked to have the color and darkness change rapidly, on purpose, shifting color every few seconds? Or have each lens a different color? I wonder if you could have the lenses vary in color and intensity across their face? Could you apply this technology to home windows, or church windows, or Christmas ornaments, or my friggin' aquarium? You could do all sorts of gimmicky things, I imagine.

Maybe I LIKE My "Faulty" DNA

Have you ever seen the sci-fi movie, "Gattaca"? It's one of my favorites (as it is for many scientists, according to one poll I read). If you haven't seen the movie, it's about a time in the not so distant future where every baby is genetically screened before birth to determine their genetic content. Sort of like "eugenics", the doctors of that fictional future select out the "bad" genes that can lead to diseases and replace them with "good" genes that insure a child that is healthy. Furthermore, they can tailor the child's talents based on his or her genetic profile. The interview process for certain jobs involves little more than a genetic screen, and criminals are expected to have certain genetic codes as well. The protagonist in the movie hides the fact that he was born without genetic manipulation and uses a "genetically superior" identity to get a job as an astronaut, all the time afraid he could be found out. I highly recommend the movie.

One of my favorite scenes in Gattaca is where the protagonist and his girlfriend go to a piano concert, and the pianist is able to play elaborate pieces because he has six fingers on each hand – an illustration of "designer babies" genetically manipulated (or deformed), in this case to excel at a certain talent.

Well, thanks in part to us lab rats, for better or worse, the world of Gattaca is quickly becoming a reality. For many years now fertility clinics have had the ability, for about $15,000, to screen embryos for defective genetic codes which could result in serious conditions that could result in failed implantation or lead to serious health problems for the baby, a process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. Understandable, I think. After spending your life savings to try for a baby using in vitro fertilization, you'd want to make sure the try was successful and that the resulting baby was healthy. But the ethical implications are obvious: it's a new form of eugenics. How far could it go? Right now we can detect genetic codes that predict high chances of heart disease, cancer, and a large number of physical and mental conditions. Are we to marginalize members of our society who have those conditions by saying they aren't valuable? For that matter, shall we just skip to the punch and create a "master race"? I'm short, fat, and have a heart condition. In the coming world of designer babies, would I still exist? Maybe. Maybe I would have looked like Brad Pitt and been able to run marathons. I'm pretty sure I could live with being a babe magnet, but would I really be "me"?

Now, in a serious test of science ethics, the opposite is happening. Instead of creating what many people would see as "the perfect child", some people WANT to select for physical deformities:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/parenting/01/18/designerd.disability.ap/index.html

Consider if you and your spouse had dwarfism, were blind, or were both deaf. Would you want your child to have the same condition? Would you want to INSURE that they had the condition? According to that article, a poll of fertility clinics suggested that as many as 3% of clinics were using PGD to select embryos with conditions for parents that others would have screened out, though they didn't say what those conditions were or if the embryos had even developed and been born. Some critics call this "deliberate crippling of children." Is it fair to the child to be "handicapped" like their parents? What if the parents don't see it as a handicap, or even see the condition as superior to average people?

Is genetic manipulation of an embryo any different than surgically altering the child after birth? Stunting her growth to make her a dwarf, removing her cochleae to make her deaf, or cutting her optic nerves to make her blind? I wouldn't think society would tolerate these things, but I've been proven wrong. Consider the case of Ashley.

I wonder what people would do if I had a designer baby tailor-made to be just like me? Designing-in a heart condition, high chance of obesity, short stature, a hairy back, and a predilection for liking pizza and cola for breakfast? Sure, he wouldn't be Brad Pitt, but maybe he would be a great lab rat like his dear old dad.

So, what is your feeling on this? Should children be born "as-is", with all the potential health risks and defects? Should those defects be genetically erased so they could live with fewer health issues and fit in with society? Should we be able to insure the child is "like their parents", whatever genetic conditions that may require? And where do we draw the line on these things?