Virtual board game week

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Andy

Last week I reached a small milestone in my math reading, so this week I’ve been taking a break to play some video games. Mostly I’m trying out video games that implement board and card games. I think hobbyists just call them all board games.

I played a few board games growing up, but most of the ones I’ve played have been in a lunchtime gaming group at my current job. We usually play on Fridays. Sometimes the group’s organizer (who writes for the excellent board game community site iSlayTheDragon) gives us a few options, and I typically vote for games I haven’t played before because I want to survey the field. In the past two-and-a-half years with this group, despite some long breaks I took from playing, I’ve still played almost four dozen games.

But while it’s fun to see what’s out there, it can be slightly tiresome to feel like a newbie even when we repeat games because I haven’t had any practice in the meantime. In fact, for most of my life I’ve largely avoided games because I find them taxing and I expect to play poorly. I don’t own any board games, and I need a way to play the same games often so I can improve. And that’s why I’m glad there are enterprising developers who have created software versions of a lot of these games and game creators who are nice enough to license their content for them.

Among its many, many features, BoardGameGeek offers some ways to find virtual board games. It has a wiki page with dozens of links to websites where you can play them, usually for free. Then some of its pages for specific games have links to places you can play online or download an iOS version of the game. See Carcassonne, for example. The iOS app link is under the game image in the upper left of the entry, and the online and other virtual play links are in the More Information section farther down the page and the Web Links towards the bottom.

You can also look up the games directly in whatever stores will work for your platform. Here’s a search of the iOS app store for games by designer Reiner Knizia. And here’s a search on Steam for PC games related to the publisher Games Workshop. Here’s another Steam search for their board game tag.

Then there are game engines that are designed for board games. These are single programs that let you play a lot of different games. A couple of examples are Tabletop Simulator, which is a 3D environment, and Vassal, which is open source. You install the engine and then the modules for the games you want to play. I’ll probably buy Tabletop Simulator once it has better support for touchscreens.

Virtual board games offer several modes of play, which you’ll need to be aware of when you’re deciding when to play what with whom. Some games will let you play by yourself against AI opponents. Some let you play online against other people. Some give you a hotseat mode (also called local multiplayer) where everyone plays at the same computer and the game cycles through the players as their turns come up. As I hinted at in my previous entry, I’m especially looking for touch-friendly games with a hotseat mode so I can pull out my Surface whenever I’m with people and we want something to do–Small World 2, for example. I played that with my coworker on his iPad during the train ride home from a workshop.

I’ve played a few virtual board games this week. My brother was visiting last weekend, and we played Hanabi (BGG entry). We had to play on separate computers, but it worked really well. Since then I’ve played a couple of games of Sentinels of the Multiverse (BGG), which I’m learning in order to play with some other friends (and now I have the theme song stuck in my head), and the iOS version of Ra (BGG), which will need a lot more study and practice. Yes, I treat games like school.

Looking into these virtual options has gotten me kind of excited about board games. They’re a good way to socialize, so after I’d resisted them for so long, this enthusiasm is a nice change.

Posted in Board games, Life updates | 2 Comments

Somerville

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Andy

Last week I acquired a new device, a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. And I do mean new. It was released that Monday, which is also when it arrived. I preordered it. I’m really not much of a gadget person, but they’ve been seeping into my life over the past few years–first an iPod touch, then an iPhone, various Kindles and other ebook readers at work, and now this Surface.

So why did I buy it? Well, my uses for one were mounting up.

  1. Traveling – I usually take my laptop with me when I travel so I can get things done and access my desktop at home remotely. I also like to access my desktop from across the apartment when I’m sending files to it from my scanner. But my laptop is old and slow now, and I’ve been wanting to replace it for ages.
  2. Reading – Reading ebooks on my phone was getting tiresome, especially when they were PDFs. I read a surprising number of those. And zooming and panning all over the page slows down my reading. The larger screen of the Surface already helping. And the stylus makes it easy to write annotations on PDFs, which is handy for doing math exercises.
  3. Writing – I actually had a pretty nice setup for writing using a wireless keyboard with my phone. But it only really worked well in my car, where I have a phone holder. A tablet would give me more options. The screen props itself up with its kickstand, and I can position it at odd angles without having it slide away. Plus it’s nice to have more screen space to work with.
  4. Drawing – I drew a bit earlier this year when I was rotating through all my project areas each week, but later I decided art was a low priority and dropped it. Since then I’ve been thinking a tablet would make it easier to practice at random times. Last week I tweeted my first Surface drawing.
  5. Recording – I have a digital piano with a USB port for exchanging MIDI data. For ages I’ve wanted to be able to record from it, but it’s not positioned very conveniently for recording to my desktop, and my apartment isn’t sized very conveniently for rearranging my furniture. I did record one MIDI sequence on my old laptop long ago, but like I said, it’s slow. A new laptop solves that.

So basically what I wanted was a tablet-laptop hybrid like the Surface or Chromebook. It would open up ways for me to do more with my projects, which is why I’m telling you about it. Hopefully you’ll me posting more on some of these projects in the near future. Why did I choose the Surface rather than a Chromebook? Honestly I didn’t think about it very much. But Windows was what I was used to, and I was more interested in using my device than in learning how to use it.

Since getting the Surface, I’ve been running across other uses for it.

  1. Hulu doesn’t seem to recognize it as a mobile device, so when I’m eating dinner, I can watch videos on Hulu’s free side while sitting in my usual spot rather than at my computer desk.
  2. The larger screen makes it easier to play in-person board game apps.
  3. The keyboard turns out to have n-key rollover, which means the computer will detect several keys pressed at once, which means I could learn and use stenography with an app like Plover.
  4. I can use my C-Pen with it to scan quotes from books when I’m working on projects away from home.

* * *

Computers have names to identify themselves on networks, and I usually like to name mine something meaningful. It took me some time to find a name for this one because I wasn’t feeling inspired by any of the fiction I had going. What’s been occupying me lately are themes, and the themes I’m into at the moment are math, steampunk, and cyberpunk. I thought about names of well-known mathematicians like Hilbert and Gauss, but those didn’t really grab me.

What kept floating through my mind was a woman I’d read about in one of my math books for teachers, Mary Fairfax Somerville. She was a mathematician and scientist in the 19th century and one of the first two women admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society. The textbook’s remarks were just a blurb, but I immediately felt she was some kind of kindred spirit. How could she not be, when she said things like, “I was sometimes annoyed when in the midst of a difficult [mathematical] problem someone would enter and say, ‘I have come to spend a few hours with you'”?

Her autobiography is available at Project Gutenberg, so I’ve started reading. From her daughter’s comments at the beginning, she sounds, well, too good to be true. Someone to learn from. And she nicely ties together some of my current themes. She was a mathematician and a woman in STEM, a topic I’ve been paying attention to lately. Better yet, as a woman in STEM she was something of a maverick in the Victorian era. She was basically a steampunk.

So I’ve named my Surface Somerville. But my friend Kenny and I have decided its real name is Mary Ada Somerville-Curie, because he wanted me to name it after those others.

Posted in Gadgets, Life updates | 5 Comments

Some math resources

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Andy

I’ve updated the math relearning introduction to reflect my Common Core emphasis, and I’ve added some resources to that page and the references. If you’re looking into relearning math or you need to understand your child’s homework, the resources will help you. Some of them include video, if you prefer watching over reading.

* Updated: Math Relearning/Introduction (changes)
* Updated: Math Relearning/References (changes)

Posted in Math relearning, Site updates | 2 Comments

A CCCCC for me

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Andy

Well, I’ve made another course correction. After posting the list of measurement topics, the next step in my math relearning project was to collect and post links to online sources that discussed them so my readers could refer to them as they read my notes and I’d have less to write. So I started collecting. As usual, it was taking a depressingly long time. There were a lot of topics, and I was collecting too many sources per topic. I only wanted to spend a couple of days on it, not the week or more it was clearly going to take at that rate.

But while I was collecting links, I noticed something. Several of the resources I was finding were organized around the Common Core standards. I had read the math standards for grades K-8 a while back to get ideas for what my curriculum should cover and how I should order it, but after that I’d opted to try to streamline my studies. Common Core splits math into several domains, such as algebraic thinking, geometry, and measurement, and then covers most of them at every grade level. I wanted to try to clump the material together more to keep the presentation simpler. In the realm of pre-algebra I’d progress through number sense, measurement, geometry without calculations, the arithmetic operations, rational numbers, geometry that used arithmetic calculations, and basic statistics.

The trouble is that math is a complicated, interconnected subject, and while clumping is possible, it’s harder if you’re also trying to build math up gradually from its most basic concepts. And actually my plan was to cover the basics of each topic and then return to the topic in more depth periodically as I covered more advanced topics that related to it, so the clumping wasn’t going to be all that simple in the end. In any case, all of this takes a lot of thought and time, too much time for my purposes.

Well, the resources I was collecting brought my attention back to Common Core. Here was a program for math education that built up the concepts from the basics, and it was already being used to organize several sources’ teaching material. That’s a lot of thinking I wouldn’t have to do myself. After only a little wrestling with the question, I decided Common Core would be my new organizational scheme.

I wanted a single resource that would serve as my home base. I would read it to get the main ideas of each mathematical topic in a Common Core order, and I’d fill in the details with other research as needed. After some Amazon searching and a trip to the library, I settled on The Everything Parent’s Guide to Common Core Math Grades K-5 and the companion volume for grades 6-8. I ordered them. Then I, characteristically, did some more searching and, uncharacteristically, cancelled my order.

What did I find? It was this blog post by Crazy Crawfish, a parent who had tried to help his child with her math homework. In some ways it was a typical story of a confused parent complaining about the new way of teaching math. It was different in that it was more extensive, related the political background of the issue, and had a long comment section with some good discussion. It also had a lot of photos of the homework, which included the curriculum’s branding, a familiar name–EngageNY. EngageNY seemed to collect the new kinds of math instruction that perplexed parents. It was the kind of instruction I wanted to understand. It seemed like good place to start.

I’d run across EngageNY in my earlier searches and had noticed it included some downloadable lesson plans, but a second look revealed that it didn’t just have a few. It offered an entire P-12 Creative Commons Common Core curriculum! Thousands of pages of complete and well-organized course material available to download and use for free. I’d found my home base.

Common Core might have problems. It certainly has critics. I might examine the debate and write about it someday. But I don’t have kids with educations to worry about, and most of the criticisms don’t apply to my project, so it’ll be a while. As far as I can tell, Common Core is good enough for my needs.

I’m not sure what I’ll post for this reorganized project, maybe just my questions and random observations, but I’ll at least provide a list of the main sources I’ve found. That’ll be my next update. I’m especially looking for shorter treatments for people who don’t want to sift through a whole curriculum.

Before I get to the EngageNY curriculum, I’m reading the Common Core progression documents from Achieve the Core. They follow the development of each domain across the grades. These will give me an overview of the subject matter so I’ll know where I’m headed, and since they’re organized by domain, they’ll make it easier to see connections I might miss in the grade-oriented approach. The progressions are sort of what I was trying to accomplish in my clumping exercise. The progression documents are shorter than EngageNY, but it’s still a lot to read, around 280 pages. I’ll be on it for a few weeks. But at least it’s a few weeks on all of K-12 math and not only basic measurement. After that I might take a break from math to work on some of the projects I’ve been putting off.

Posted in Math relearning, Site updates | 4 Comments

Just a list of math words

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Andy

As recommended (by myself to myself), for the measurement chapter of my math relearning project I’ve posted a list of topics to cover (post-time version). It does have footnotes to help me find the topics in my main sources, but nothing more. It feels like enough for a post.

In addition to the reasons I mentioned last time, I’ve thought of another benefit to a breadth-first approach to projects like this one. I tend to lose perspective when I’m diving deeply into part of a topic. I get bogged down in the details and quickly feel like this is the most important topic in the world and I can take as much time as I need on it. Well it isn’t, and I can’t. Hopefully taking a broad view on a regular basis by treating the subject matter in layers will help me keep a sense of the relative importance of all the pieces.

Posted in Math relearning, Projects, Site updates, Writing | 1 Comment

Experimenting with iterative writing

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Andy

Okay, two problems. I’ve gotten bogged down in my math relearning project, and I haven’t been posting once a week like I’d hoped. I think I can make progress on both problems if I change the way I’m doing the project. The problem with it is that I’m trying for both breadth and depth, and I tend to take a depth-first approach to life. That means I try to cover everything I can about one topic before I move on to the next. It takes forever. I was hoping I could do one chapter every week or two, but for measurement it’s been over a month already.

When I’m honest with myself, breadth is more important to this project than depth, because I need to learn a bunch of math to accomplish my goals. I’ve been aiming for depth because understanding helps with memory and problem solving and because understanding the more basic concepts helps you understand the more advanced ones that are based on them. But beyond a certain point understanding math at a deep conceptual level is more of a bonus than a requirement.

So I want to try covering each section shallowly at first and then adding layers of depth in later iterations. That’ll let me cover more ground faster and let me post more often. Surveying what people have already written is quicker than figuring out what things mean and how they all fit together on my own. With the depth-first approach I have trouble knowing when I’ll feel done enough to post. For example, you’d think measurement would be a straightforward topic, but no, at this point I’m sure it would still be weeks before I thought my writing was in a postable state. One reason it takes all this time is that math is somewhat unfamiliar territory to me, so I have a lot of concepts to think through, and it’s tiring. Imagine excavating this large ant colony without the benefit of cement. The way I’m thinking through this project feels like that–delicate and time consuming. If I can break up that work over a longer time and make a lot of it optional, the project will feel more possible. Since I’d be moving faster through the material, I’d also feel freer to take breaks to address other projects. I’ve used a similar iterative approach before, but with math relearning it feels like a different level of challenge.

Another benefit of taking an iterating, breadth-first approach is that it’ll be more practice with the idea of sharing imperfect, incomplete work. That’s a trend these days, if you hadn’t noticed. I picked it up from agile software development a few years ago. Release early, release often. That means the software (or whatever) won’t have every feature you want right away, and it’ll have bugs. It’s not that completeness and perfection are bad. It’s that they can get in the way of accomplishing things when less is really good enough for the purposes of the work. It’s an interesting philosophy-of-life conflict though: Which is better, quality work or getting things done? Similarly I ask myself if I want my online work to represent final products and reflect professionalism or to represent processes and reflect personalism (or do I want professional processes or personal products?). Clearly I’m picking the personal process quadrant, for various reasons. But I’ll explore all that another time.

I’m thinking the iterations will look something like this, probably with some of these clumped together:

  1. A list of topics to cover
  2. A list of references for further reading (sources for the list and results of searching with the list’s terms)
  3. A list of objectives for skills and maybe knowledge
  4. Headings from the topic list in somewhat random order with a sentence or two to summarize or introduce each section
  5. A list of open questions
  6. A full discussion for each section with footnotes (can be posted one at a time)
  7. The sections reordered more logically
  8. Revised section texts to reflect the new order (and whatever other changes I think of)
Posted in Math relearning, Productivity, Projects, Site updates, Writing | 2 Comments

Back to math

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Andy

After a long detour, I have finally returned to what I consider my main project these days, relearning math. The latest phase still dealt with meta-issues, some fundamental features of math that will probably come up repeatedly through the rest of the project. Hopefully once I get into actual mathematical operations, I can move more quickly. Here are the updates:

Next I’ll finish the section on numeration systems in Number Sense and then move on to Measurement.

Posted in Math relearning, Site updates | 2 Comments

Words are magic

Posted on July 11, 2015 by Andy

Here’s something I just wrote in my journal, lightly edited for blog purposes. I’m posting it because I thought it was an interesting idea that I could share easily (not too complicated or personal), and sometimes I like to see how people work, so I thought I would do a bit to return the favor. Also it would raise my post count for this week. 🙂

Working on an ebook about parenting yesterday got me thinking again about ways to respond to people, in this case sanctimonious people like potentially the hypothetical parent in the book. Later I was thinking about group discussions, especially among people who strongly disagree. I started thinking of them as a puzzle, possibly some kind of graph problem. I was possibly thinking of them along the lines of Tall’s knowledge structures, since I’ve been trying to wrap my head around his theory of math thinking.

The common thread between these two trains of thought was that I was looking for the right words and attitudes to convey to the other people that would make the situation work, bring it to the goal I wanted. It brought up a thought that’s crossed my mind before, that words are magic. This time I’m expanding it to all communication, since I’m seeing the relevance of nonverbal messages. But for brevity I’ll let words stand for all of it, or I’ll use the word messages.

Words affect other people. They can even affect the speaker. If I’m unclear on something or unsure of it, articulating it can make me clearer or more sure. Or it makes it clearer to me how plausible I find the ideas I’m articulating. Maybe I feel conflicted about saying the words, and so I find I don’t believe them at all. Words can also lead me into the emotional state surrounding the words I’m saying, like when you tell a story and you get wrapped up in it.

So whenever you speak, or even whenever you’re visible to someone else, you can think of all your verbal and nonverbal messages as magic spells you’re casting on the other people. They may be strong or weak, but they’re all having some effect.

Now, these message spells can be counteracted by messages from other people. You can have message battles and picture them like wizard battles in Harry Potter. Maybe someone tries to control you with their imperiousness and you counteract it with your own imperiousness. Now that would be fun to watch. 😉

It occurs to me that the idea of message spells and battles would be a good way to design scenes in a story. Who’s trying to influence who how, and how is that influence working or being fought against?

Posted in Communication, Journal entry, Writing | 2 Comments

Hypnosis and Immanuel prayer

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Andy

For several years I listened to a lot of recordings of hypnosis inductions. I wasn’t trying to be hypnotized, and I rarely followed the instructions–I just found them relaxing. But as I listened, I learned a bit about what hypnosis was for and how it worked.

A few years after I started listening to those, I got involved in learning and practicing a couple of prayer ministries: Theophostic first and then Immanuel. These were facilitated conversational prayer methods that helped people find emotional healing.

At some point I noticed that these prayer ministries looked a lot like the hypnosis sessions I was listening to. They seemed to overlap on some central features, such as a state of deep concentration. I felt vindicated in this observation when after one Immanuel session she facilitated, our trainer noted that the recipient’s dazed demeanor was because Immanuel prayer is an altered state of consciousness.

So I decided to read a hypnosis textbook based on academic research and find out the real scoop on what hypnosis is, what it does, and how it’s done. I had two purposes. One was to examine the overlap between hypnosis and mindfulness meditation so I could learn how to concentrate better. And the other was to compare hypnosis to Immanuel prayer to see what Immanuel practitioners might learn from it. Immanuel prayer is a work in progress, and if it shares important features with a field as extensively researched as hypnosis, that sounds to me like an opportunity to develop the ministry further.

I’ve posted the results of my analysis on the wiki here: Hypnosis and Immanuel Prayer. It’s sort of a rough draft. I skipped over some issues that deserve attention, I hardly cite any Immanuel references, and it could use some editing. But other projects are calling for me, and hopefully the article will be enough to get someone in the Immanuel world interested in looking into the issue.

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Weird things are fun

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Andy

While I’m finishing up my current main project, I thought I’d post something about a side interest. Every once in a while I go through a phase where I learn about a bunch of weird things. It’s usually the paranormal, but I also include more normal categories that I just find strange, such as undeciphered codes. It had been a long time since one of these phases had come around, but I’ve had a couple in the last month or two.

So on the wiki I’ve started a list of some of my favorite weird things. It’ll grow over time. This list is specifically for historical or pseudoscientific weird things that people claim to be true. It’s not for religious or philosophical weirdness or for speculative fiction. I’ll make other lists for those sometime later. Even if you’re not into the paranormal or conspiracy theories, there are plenty of regular mysteries on the list that might interest you. I even put them first. So take a look. I promise your sanity won’t dissolve … right away.

Posted in Site updates, Weird stuff | 5 Comments