My friend Andrew and I spent a recent afternoon reviewing the games he invented a decade ago. My favorite was Spectangle. You win by placing colored pieces on a geometrical board, and carving out piece of territory. I was drawn to the game’s heavy reliance on strategy, and its similarity to my favorite game, Go — a game that has both expanded and deepened my mind.

Most successful games rely on a combination of strategy, luck and secrecy. Children’s board games rely mostly on luck, with the role of dice or spin of a colorwheel determining moves. Think Candyland — no skill involved at all, and nothing hidden from any player. Simple card games (War, Go Fish, Uno) also involve luck, but add the dimension of secrecy — that is, players hold their cards so that they are secret from the other players. A few games (Stratego, Mastermind) rely on strategy and secrecy, but no luck — play revolves around trying to unveil the secret pattern or hidden pieces, but those hidden pieces are set by a player’s strategy, not by chance.

The most universally appealing games blend strategy, luck and secrecy in a fine balance. Think Settlers of Catan or Risk, which involve complex strategy and planning, but also feature hidden hands of cards and dice roles. I’m a huge fan of well balanced games like Settlers, which was the first of a series of “German style” games published largely by a company called Mayfair. Though I will admit, I was stymied by Mayfair’s Russian Rails, whose board full of similar-sounding cities ending in “-ostok” totally confused me.

At the far end of the strategy spectrum, there are the games with no luck at all, and nothing hidden from either player. These are pure strategy games, or in combinatorial game theory language, “zero sum, perfect-information, partisan, deterministic strategy games.” Checkers is a basic example of such a game. Play is entirely determined by strategy and choice; and the only thing hidden is the other player’s thoughts. If constructed elegantly, such games have simple rules and parameters. Certainly this is the case with checkers. However, checkers is considered a child’s game because it suffers from parameters that are too restrictive — the lines of play are quite limited, and only one of four or five moves are ever possible. (Think here also of Connect Four or Othello.)

In more “adult” games, elegant rules are combined with fewer parameters or more lines of play. This leads to complex scenarios with many possible choices. In the West, the king of elegant but extremely complex games is, of course, chess. After learning only nine possible kinds of moves (one each for six pieces, and the special moves of castling, en passant and pawn promotion), players can play out millions of possible games, all dependent entirely on their own choices. In such a scenario, players with better strategies will almost always win.

In the East, however, the champion of elegant strategy games is the ancient Chinese game of Go. If pitted against each other, I would argue that Go is the superior game. Developed more than 2,000 years before chess, it is both far simpler, and deeply more complex. It has four rules, total. There is only one possible kind of move — placing a colored stone on a 19×19 grid, one stone per grid intersection, once per turn. That’s it. Within these incredibly simple rules, Go allows for not millions, but billions of game permutations. Maybe even trillions, I don’t actually know that the number is calculable. The best chess computer programs can now consistently defeat the best human chess players; the best Go programs can only beat intermediate Go players, and human masters easily defeat the computers. Chess represents a medieval battle; Go represents the whole war.

I first started playing Go during the California Recall Circus of 2003. I was pulling 100 hour weeks campaigning for Arianna Huffington for Governor (quite a crazy game in itself). Between blasting out emails and launching viral videos, I learned Go alongside my co-workers in the San Francisco office, courtesy of smartMeme genius Patrick Reinsborough. In terms of pure fun, it was the best campaign I’ve ever been on (sidenote lesson: long-shot campaigns have a LOT more leeway to innovate with fun experiments). But largely because of Go, it was also the best learning experience I’ve ever had on a campaign.

Go’s lessons have helped define my strategic approach to politics, organizing, and in some ways, my whole life. After a week of mastering basic play, the lesson of Go suddenly popped out at me: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Or, more accurately, know when to dive into the small stuff and when to focus on the big picture.

In Go, it’s all too easy to get drawn into a small hand-to-hand combat battles. They happen constantly, and simultaneously, all over the board. But good players know when to abandon a close combat battle to take initiative on another part of the board. In Japanse terms, this concept is captured in the two opposing words “sente” (sen-tay) and “gote” (go-tay). Sente roughly translates to “initiative,” the ability to set the agenda and control the game flow. When you are playing sente, you force your opponent into gote, or defense. But when you are in a position of gote, you can often sacrifice a small battle to regain sente in another part of the board. And often, what seems like a sacrifice turns out to be a long term gain.

In my political organizing work, I always try to keep the sente / gote concept in mind. When hundreds of moves are possible but only one or two will produce the right outcome, the “players” with the best strategies will “win.” To be clear, I actually don’t subscribe to the popular metaphor of politics as a game. Campaigns have winners and losers, yes, but government isn’t sport. However, metaphors from games are often quite useful in navigating the irreducible complexity of real democracy, where real decisions affect real people. And Go’s metaphors are the best.

Which is why I’m excited about Andrew’s Spectangle. Like Go, the rules are fairly simple, but there’s no luck involved, nor hidden cards. The game play allows for millions of possible moves, in a way that would necessitate thoughtful strategies. Was it as fun as Go? Or as useful a metaphor? Unfortunately, I didn’t find out, because Andrew and I didn’t have time to play. We chose instead to have our scheduled discussion about political organizing and 4G technology. That seemed more “big picture” and “important” than playing a board game.

But was it? Given how much I’ve learned from Go, perhaps a game of Spectangle would have been the sente choice!

To be exact, she was picked up by the website Drinking In America. They featured her infamous Agent Orange as their official New Year’s Eve Punch of Choice.

As far as I know, this is the first time that her alter ego, the Punch Vixen, has been featured anywhere other than on her own blog (Punchvixen.com). What a fun, celebratory way to usher in a Happy New Year!

She was 120 pounds, organically raised, with a sweet disposition. I shot her in the head.

My new friend Peter Barrett, a photojournalist and surprisingly good butcher, documented the whole event on his blog, quisimangiabene.blogspot.com, in a post called “The Pig Dies at Noon.” From his eloquent writing:

Meat is food that comes at a particular cost, and though is is extremely good to eat, people should be fully cognizant of the cost/benefit ratio when they eat it. Those who really can’t deal with watching the death and dismemberment of an animal should reconsider their carnivorous status.

Moving the life and death of most food animals far out of sight of most peoples’ lives has robbed us of this much-needed perspective, and also removed certain rituals from our meals. Being mindful of the beings that we eat when we eat them has been one such casualty. This event [at Tate's house] was a welcome attempt to redefine nose-to-tail eating upward, towards owning the whole animal and its dispatch and consumption. This kind of meal should be more common, since it’s the way humans have eaten from since we became human until very recently.”

Exactly.

Thanks to Peter for his excellent narrative and photos; and also to Eli Smith, who provided a second camera. If you eat pork, I highly suggest reading this fascinating account.

The state’s largest newspaper, the Burlington Free Press, covered the project with a full page spread. Naturally, the focus was on Marie, our 96-year-old matriarch, who took active part in the construction of benches and gardens. From the Free Press:

Marie Hausman, 96, of Bradenton, Fla., found herself Tuesday wearing a face mask in the humid air in front of the O’Brien Community Center, sanding a board as part of her contribution toward a new bench for the Malletts Bay Avenue complex. She said she couldn’t imagine a better thing to do.

Enjoy the rest of the story at the Free Press website.

Unsurprisingly, the weekend was a trip down memory lane. We sifted through boxes of files and crates of knick-knacks. We perused old photographs, flyers, newspaper clippings and notebooks. We flipped through late 60s yearbooks, marveling at the afros and beehives, and debated throwing out Consumer Reports magazines from 1982. Most of the momentos were from or about my parents. But some stretched back another generation, even two.

The oldest artifact survived from 1905 — a small, yellowing notebook bearing a cover price of 5¢ and the name “Hattie Nelson” — my maternal, maternal great-grandmother’s maiden name. Inside, repetitive lines of her tight, measured handwriting filled the fragile pages. The content revealed nothing — just grammar exercises, not at all personal or creative — but the style evoked a fading, past America that my generation can only know through legend.

Looking at the notebook, I wondered what Great Grandma Hattie looked like. And what her mother had looked like, and her mother before. Chances are, somewhere in some family vault lie photographs of at least five generations of my ancestors. Maybe six. Before that, photography was inaccessible to the masses, and I doubt any of my forefathers were rich enough to commission painted portraits. If I’m lucky to find that vault, I might be able to show my kids images of their great, great, great grandparents. Like Wolf Hausman, Lincoln’s middle-namesake, or William Flood, Evelyn’s middle-namesake. What a treat!

But what will happen if that vault goes undiscovered? Or its contents are lost, destroyed, thrown out? As my weekend of purging Dad’s house proved, material possessions can’t last forever. Eventually, all the physical photographs will disappear. All photos from my grandparents generation, my parents’ generation, even the photos of me as a kid — lost to an unrecorded past.

Not so, for Lincoln and Evelyn. They’ve been born in the age of digital — digital photography, digital video, digital mail, digital telephones, digital everything. Freed from the constraints of physical film and paper and ink, their photographs (and video, etc) exist only as data. And that data is indestructible, because it is nowhere and everywhere. It lives in the cloud of the Internet, stored on distributed and duplicated servers, unthreatened by physical realities. Its colors never fade.

In fact, Linc and Evie may be the first generation whose entire lives, from their moments of birth, will be documented and preserved for eternity. As in, forever. Or at least until the end of society as we know it. The cost of storing digital data is so low, why would any future generation throw out Lincoln’s “007 lbs” video? The task of finding digital data is so easy, how could any future generation lose Evelyn’s “Coming Home” movie? Though our digital storage technologies may (will) change, it seems unlikely that they’ll change enough to obviate early digital data. A thousand generations from now, Linc and Evie’s descendants will be able to know exactly what their great-to-the-thousandth-power-grandparents looked like — and whether they liked sweet potatoes, survived Hollywood fame, or tortured their adorable pets.

This seems like a profound historical shift. From my kids’ generation on, ancestors will never be lost. They will be searchable. And, quite likely, they will be overwhelmingly documented. Every photograph, video, email, text, IM, tweet, blog post and a zillion other digital data points will paint a robust picture of who they were. Their stories will live for a digital eternity.

How bizarre!

To be clear, Evelyn actually came home on Friday, May 14. But I didn’t get this video together and post it until today because, well, I’ve been a little busy. Her health is excellent, and she’s packing on the ounces. On Monday, she was 4 lbs 9 oz, up from 4 lbs 1 oz on Friday. That’s 2 ounces a day of growth. Woo hoo!

Let’s hope that Lincoln can survive the competition from another super-cutie.

Check out the segment on YouTube:

For months, I’ve been struggling with TateHausman.com. Someone (or more likely, some bot) hacked into my code and planted something ugly there. I couldn’t find it. And it started spewing out all sorts of nonsense — I think it was trying to sell Viagra to eastern Europeans. Or maybe Turks. I don’t know. As a result, Google dropped TateHausman.com from its rankings.

This was all pretty annoying, but not annoying enough that I did anything about it. Until my friend Roy came over. Roy is a computer systems professional. Unlike yours truly, he actually knows his way around code, instead of just pretend- pseudo- kinda-hacking like me.

Within 20 minutes, Roy had found the problem, (in the htaccess file, btw), isolated it, and fixed it. Within 2 days, Google had re-indexed the site. And now, finally, TateHausman.com is once again the top hit when you search for my name.

Thanks, Roy! For your genius detective work, I hereby reward you with a link to your clever but incomprehensible blog, forexroy.blogspot.com, about the ups and downs of foreign exchange currency trading. You helped me with the Google; here’s backatcha!

LIVING AND DYING WITH GRACE
Joy Hopkins-Hausman passes on
by Andrea Barrist Stern, Woodstock Times

Joy Hopkins-Hausman, 61, of Woodstock, whose name has been synonymous nationally with breast cancer support advocacy for more than two decades, died on Friday morning, August 21 at Benedictine Hospital.

After developing breast cancer in the mid-1980s, Hopkins-Hausman brought new dimension to survivorship, combining conventional treatments including a mastectomy, breast reconstruction and chemotherapy with complimentary approaches like support group therapy, acupuncture, yoga, nutritional counseling, vitamin therapy, meditation, and basic laughter at a time when such regimens were still far outside the mainstream.

Read more ….