That One Time I Created A Chemical Weapon

I've liked science since I was young. For example, I conducted an experiment when I was nine or ten years old: I wanted to see what would happen when I combined a cheap packet of hot sauce, Listerine mouthwash, and toothpaste (brand forgotten). I did not have any kind of hypothesis -- even to this day, I am unsure of what I was hoping to accomplish. Lacking the proper equipment, I emptied a nearby box of dominoes and mixed all the components together in the domino box. I also diluted the contents with some water, for whatever reason. Then I went to bed, excited for the results.

Later that night, a horrible smell woke me. Turns out the domino box was not at all watertight (I has stupidly assumed it was watertight because it was made of metal, although now I suspect it may have been made of faux metal) and the hot sauce mouthwash toothpaste concoction was leaking everywhere. Horrified, I tried to dump the evidence -- but the smell quickly permeated the house, waking my father. To my surprise, he helped me clean up the mess without saying a word of reproach. (Years later, during a visit to China, he would repay me in kind by snoring so loudly it registered on the Richter scale. Seriously, I could feel the floor rumbling.)

This early version of the hot sauce Listerine toothpaste experiment was imperfect, and so would undergo another iteration when I was in seventh grade. I'd learned from my previous mistakes. This time, I set a goal in mind: To create the most vile-smelling mixture of solutions I could find. I wanted to be able to market this thing as a chemical weapon of some sort, produce some odor so damaging the UN would ban its manufacture on a global scale. I don't know why I wanted to do this; something about watching the world burn, maybe.

The finished product was a mixture of hot sauce, Axe body spray, insect repellant, sunscreen, yeast, and some other mysterious item I've forgotten. My friend assisted me in its production. We mixed the ingredients with noses pinched, placed the finished product in a tiny, watertight container, covered it in cellophane, and let it sit for a month in my friend's desk drawer. During this month, we both forgot about it. Then I went over to his house one day, he happened to open his desk drawer, and we rediscovered our experiment. We reached for the cellophane cover, removed it --

Imagine that smelling a delightful flower is like your nose getting a massage. A rotten egg is like if someone gently tossed a pillow at your nose. The smell of our creation was like a nuclear apocalypse, except if fecal matter had the properties of Uranium-235. This analogy may have gotten away from me.

I'm not sure why it smelled so bad. Something about yeast fermenting? That mystery ingredient I failed to remember? Something ironic about Axe body spray? 

Anyway, my friend's dog went crazy and we almost spilled the stuff all over ourselves. The very fact that we didn't was an aversion of a national tragedy. We immediately rushed outside to bury the disgusting substance, which we barely accomplished without passing out. We have never spoken of it since, although the mention of chemical weapons has made us glance at each other uncomfortably. For all I know, the mixture is still buried in a park somewhere. I leave the exact location undisclosed to save the UN the trouble of banning it globally. Woe to the human race should some madman -- someone who actually wants to watch the world burn -- discover it.

Lesson learned: Science can be dangerous.

-Me

P&W Sickness, Chiccadilly

I apologize in advance for the rambly and somewhat incoherent nature of this blog.

Politics and War has become so popular at my school that I've made it a rule to never, ever talk about it during school hours. That's how sickening it's gotten. There's one person who vowed to never play it because it was so popular, but then all his friends only talked about it when they were around him, peer-pressuring him until he was forced to play it. He now plays it every day, constantly. I never see him offline. It makes me sad.

Here's what's so weird: P&W is pretty much exactly the same -- and as fun -- as manipulating a spreadsheet. Everything is numbers: Resources, dollars, military. There is no strategy, no mechanics, nothing but numbers. You just want the numbers on your spreadsheet to be higher than other people's numbers. That's it. I intended the game to be a tertiary, two minutes a day kind of thing. It now dominates a significant proportion of my class population.

In other news, I'm a fan of hidden identity games -- games where you try to figure out who other people are. I invented one today called "Chiccadilly" (because, and this has nothing to do with the game whatsoever, my favorite spoonerism is "Chiccadilly Pickadee". It rolls right off the tongue). Here's how it works:

There are three basic roles in the game: President, Diplomat, and Assassin. Each game, you receive one of the cards. No one but you knows what your card is. Two people trade cards. Only one trade can happen in a game -- once two people trade, the game ends. If the President trades with the Diplomat, they both win. If the Assassin trades with either President or Diplomat, the Assassin wins.

There are possibilities for a lot of other roles: Bodyguard (goal is to trade with Assassin), Trader (goal is to trade with anyone), Traitor, and others. I think this game has a lot of possibilities in terms of design space. It's also a lot of fun. Go play it.

-Me

On Numbers And Mysteriousness

I saw a cool proof that the sum of all the positive integers, 1+2+3+4+5+..., is equal to -1/12. Here it is.

This math proof is weird, and I'm not sure I buy it. (Wikipedia seems to agree with it.)
However, I seem more willing to accept it than other people. Why?

We typically conceive of numbers in terms of discrete objects. When I think of "1", I think of a single item. This helps me wrap my head around the concept, and generally it works very well. However, numbers are not discrete objects. They are conventions, constructions, things that do not exist anywhere but our minds and math publications. You're not going to go out and find 2 somewhere out in the universe, floating or otherwise. This can be more clearly seen when we look at complex numbers. The square root of negative 1, i, is unimaginable. i objects won't ever exist. Numbers are ideas.

Yet numbers' lack of objective, solid-state existence does not preclude them from forming the foundation of any technology we have. Numbers give us everything from the convenience of microwaves, to the exchange of goods for currency, to space travel. My point is simply this: Ideas are powerful, especially when you can transcribe them into solid-state existence. The most complicated, intricate achievements and innovations we have as a species come from the most seemingly basic idea of numbers. This basic idea, too, has grown into bizarre esotericisms, seemingly divorced from the objective realities we experience through our sensory perceptions.

This brings me back to the idea that the sum of all positive integers is equal to -1/12. Apparently, through mathematics I'm nowhere near smart enough to comprehend, this sum has actually proven useful in fields such as complex analysis and string theory. I'm not sure what "proven useful" even means; I'm just going with Wikipedia on this. Perhaps more astoundingly, the proof does not require anything other than the most rudimentary understanding of arithmetic and algebra. It's remarkably elegant and concise. It's also a little -- no, a lot -- mysterious, and I'm not sure if it ever won't be a lot mysterious -- to me, or to the most brilliant mathematician in existence.

I think there is some element of this world that will always remain a lot mysterious to us. I'm fine with that. In fact, I think I kind of like it.

-Me

Politics and War

So there's this game called Politics And War. It's a turn-based strategy game where you build up your nation by collecting resources, trading on the global market, and building a military force. Currently, around 715 active players exist.

Initially, I found it as a fun way to spend ~10 minutes a day; a "tertiary" game that doesn't demand a lot of attention. What I didn't expect was P&W to become extremely popular at our school -- so much so that someone paid $20 in real life to get money in the game. In fact, the Palmer alliance (The Corn Shuckers) is 18 nations strong and still climbing rapidly; we rank in the top 20th percentile for alliances and have no intention to stop growing. Then end goal is to become the absolute best alliance in P&W in the world. This goal is not too big of a stretch.*

One mechanic in P&W is the necessity of farms to feed your people. Farms, however, take up a lot of space and are a bit unwieldy in that respect -- you would much rather not have to build any farms and instead be able to focus on military, commerce, or resource production. I thought of a clever strategy to circumvent this limitation, however: I have built a total of 24 (read: a shit ton) farms and am putting up massive amounts of free food in the alliance trade system. As a result, no one else needs to get any farms for the rest of the game. I proudly dubbed this system TIFIS, or "The Instant Food Injection System".

Here's where things get really interesting: One scumbag took all of the food in Tifis today (this was over 900 food -- to put this in perspective, you only need about 20 food/day when you're starting out), left the alliance, and is planning on attacking people in the alliance.

The plan is to destroy this guy, absolutely and utterly. There will be no mercy.

-Me

*The best thing about P&W is how new it is. By joining at the ground floor, we all have an enormous advantage over people who join later.

On A Card Game

I like card games. In fact, I liked card games so much that my siblings and I made one. (Actually, I forced them to help me make it).

Cleverly titled "A Card Game", the card game shamelessly stole ideas from every place imaginable. (Read: I stole ideas from every place imaginable). The very concept of the gameplay was lifted almost directly from an online game. What's more, the first cards off the press were based on the blandest, most mundane fantasy characters, with names such as "Regular Healer" and "Normal Knight". Those were their actual names.

Then, I gradually stole names from other genres, making "sets": There was a set based off of Winnie the Pooh characters (Piglet allowed you to take permanent control of the other player's cards and was way too strong), a set based off of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Vogon Poetry instantly killed anything), a set based off of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (they crawled out of Portable Toilets), and so on. The best set was the Harry-Potter-But-Also-Animal-Puns set, which started off either (a) when I accidentally drew Harry Potter looking too much like a cow, or (b) when I accidentally drew a cow with a lighting-bolt-shaped scar. I forget which. Regardless, the error inspired such brilliances as "Albus Dumbleboar", "Professor McDonaldgal" (as in Old McDonald), "Ginny Ferrety", and "Severus Snake".

I'm proud of A Card Game. Despite the fact that it suffers from crippling balance issues, insane deck sizes, and way too many awful cards, it was still a lot of fun. I don't really play it anymore, although I still possess almost every card I made. Every one of them has awful, hand-drawn pencil art that could be easily outdone by a third grader. It's hilarious.

-Me

P.S. I wish I could post pictures, but my current phone is bad at doing that.

Parallel Universes, An Infinity Machine, And Permanently Great Hair

There's a theory in quantum mechanics called the parallel universe theory. It basically says that for every possibility, there exists a universe for that possibility. What are the implications of such a theory?

Assume the theory is true. I flip a coin. The result could be either heads or tails, right? According to the parallel universe theory, at the very instant I flip the coin, the result is actually both heads and tails. This is a phenomenon called "superposition", which says that something exists in all possible states of its existence until it is observed. (Sidenote: Superposition is made awesome in the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, in which a cat is both dead and alive.) I'm not making this up -- it's weird, but so is all of quantum mechanics.

Now I take a look at the coin. The instant I look at the coin, the universe splits into two different universes: One where I got heads, and another where I got tails.

In fact, the universe splits like this every time something happens, constantly. Barack Obama wins the 2008 election: Universe splits (into a universe where Obama won, and a universe where McCain won). Sam Walton founds Walmart: Universe splits (into one where he does, one where he doesn't). I take a sip of water: Universe splits. Again, I'm not making this up.

Let's go back to the coin example. You may be asking yourself: So what? Even if this is true, the "me" that got tails can't see or interact with the "me" that got heads. We are in different universes, we have separate consciousnesses, and we can't influence each other in any way. For all intents and purposes, we are different people. Well, you're mostly right. But let's take this idea a little further.

Say you make a machine -- here dubbed the Infinity Machine, or iM* -- that can detect whether the coin is heads or tails. If the coin is heads, it does nothing; if the coin is tails, it sets off every nuclear bomb in the world simultaneously. (Stay with me, here.). In effect, what the iM does is destroy the world in every parallel universe in which the coin was tails. (I will address the moral quandary of this in a little bit; please continue staying with me.) Notice the power of such a machine. With the iM, you can control the outcome of any event.

For example, what if you reconfigure the iM so it goes off whenever you don't win the lottery? Then the world in every parallel universe in which you don't win the lottery is destroyed, and the only universes that matter are ones where you win the lottery. All consciousness will cease when you don't win the lottery; basically, you've guaranteed that you will always win the lottery.

If this constant lottery winning seems dubious to you, remember: The parallel universe theory says that for every possibility, there exists a universe. No matter how unlikely a thing is, there is a universe with that thing happening. There is a universe where I've won Sexist Man Alive twenty years in a row and am still going strong.** There is a universe where I am exactly the same, but can somehow breathe fire. There is a universe where the events of "A Bug's Life" happened exactly as they appeared onscreen, and then Flik the Inventor made the movie "Antz", except called "Personz" and with people. There is a universe where I made an actual, functioning Iron Man suit, but I only use it as a Halloween costume. I can't emphasize how not-making-this-up I am right now.

As you can see, the possibilities with the iM are endless (infinite, even). Set it to go off when you don't win the lottery, but don't let your imagination stop you there. Set it to go off whenever you don't have great hair. Set it to go off whenever a kind, trustworthy man doesn't give you free ice cream every day. Set it to go off whenever any of these things don't happen -- then you would always win the lottery, always have great hair, and always get free ice cream. You control the outcome of any event, always.

Okay, let's talk about morality. You have a machine that can do anything; the only problem is that it ends countless lives by destroying entire worlds. My question is: If everyone's consciousness ends at the same time, is that such a tragedy? There will be no more human emotion in the worlds you've destroyed, no one to feel sad about their destruction. Moreover, countless worlds will live on. If you make an iM that gives you great hair, only universes where you have great hair will matter.

Perhaps it seems arrogant to say that the quality of your hair dictates whether human consciousness will cease or persist. But again, consciousness will only cease for those universes you have bad hair in; all others will continue to blossom and spiral out into their endless possibilities. The infinite bad hair universes you've destroyed will become inconsequential compared to the infinite good hair universes that would have existed anyway. They'll be a drop in an ocean of possibilities.

What about all the animals, environments, and natural beauty you've obliterated? Well, remember: Every fish, tree, and rock will continue to exist in the worlds the iM hasn't destroyed; the only difference is, in the worlds where they do exist, you will have great hair. Again, consciousness ends when you get bad hair. You don't get to see those bad hair universes getting destroyed. You don't feel the emotional impact of their loss, you can't contact them in any way whatsoever. You just get to know that you will always have good hair, no matter what. You will only know about universes where you have good hair, and never have to worry about it.

-Me

*Because lowercase "i"s seem to be in style these days.
**That's this universe.

TEWWG, Framing Devices, And Storytelling

We've started reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book by Zora Neale Hurston, in English class. It's really good, but I'll get to that in a minute.

I like to think about the ways we tell stories, both to ourselves and other people. Oftentimes, the craft (or the method by which we tell a story) is just as important as the content -- if not moreso. Our gestures, our tone of voice, our excitement, and our expression are all of significance in the storytelling experience. That's why I so enjoy the literary trope of the framing device.

A framing device is a technique in which a secondary story "frames" a primary story, or a sort of justification for a story's existence. For example, in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, the episodic events (the "primary story") are all framed within the context of Ted telling an absurdly long and increasingly unbelievable story to his kids (the "secondary story"). Within the primary story, other people tell shorter, tertiary stories. The show leverages its framing device in clever ways, allowing for unexpected plot twists and clever revelations.

Another example which I like is the tale of One Thousand And One Nights. There existed a cruel Arabian king who would marry a woman each day, spend the night with her, and have her executed in the morning. Lather, rinse, repeat. Seeing people slaughtered around her each day, a woman named Scheherazade came up with a plan to stop the insane ruler. She married the king and, on their wedding night, began to tell him an intriguing story, which she ended on a cliffhanger. Come next morning, the king decided to spare her for an additional night so he could hear the end of the story. The next night, Scheherazade concluded the story in the middle of the night, then immediately began to tell a different story, which she again ended on a cliffhanger. Lather, rinse, repeat, and before you know it Scheherazade had survived 1001 nights. At the end of it all, she told the king that she had no stories left and was ready to die -- but the king had fallen in love with her and kept her as his wife. Mission accomplished.

The stories told over the thousand and one nights include adventures like The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The story of the story of these stories is inspiring and exciting. In addition, there are other narratives characters in Scheherazade's stories tell (these would be "tertiary"). A story within a story within a story, and I love each level of it. (If you go down another story level, though, that's Limbo, which isn't a good place to be. Especially with your ex-wife.)

Similarly, the plot of Their Eyes Were Watching God is framed as a woman, Janie, telling a story to her friend Phoeby. The story weaves from first person to third person seamlessly; the former allows immersion in the 1900s America setting of the novel, while the latter delivers beautiful, poignant prose. (The question "Did marriage compel love like the sun the day?" resides in a top spot in my personal Best Sentences Ever hall of fame.)

TEWWG is a powerful look into race identity, black American culture, and the coming of age of a young woman. I recommend reading it.

-Me