The Luddite fallacy
2011 marks the 200th anniversary of the Luddite movement. 2011 is a fitting year to commemorate them as it has also been a year of popular protests with the “indignados” in Madrid, the recent attempts to occupy Wall Street and the St Paul’s protest camp in London Today’s protesters could learn a thing or two from the Luddites; . They certainly knew how to create a lasting brand. Will we be talking about the “Indignants” in 2211? Something about Luddites has captured the public imagination for the last two centuries.
Ned Ludd, the man who gave his name to the movement was a, a sort of Robin Hood-like figure among the protesters. There had been a young apprentice called Ludd or Ludham from Anstey near Leicester. Admonished by a superior for shoddy workmanship, he took his anger out on two frames for knitting hosiery, wrecking them completely. Word got around. After that whenever a machine was destroyed someone would say, “Ludd must have been here.” This is how a mythical leader was born and he became a source of inspiration for the protesters.
The Luddites emerged at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The industrial revolution was in full swing. It should be pointed out that they were not opposed to technology per se; many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. What they objected to was the automated looms that could be operated by cheap, unskilled labour, with the loss of jobs for many skilled textile workers. On March 11,1811, in Nottingham, a demonstration of textile workers demanding more work and better wages was broken up by the army. That night the disgruntled workers went to a nearby village and smashed up textile machinery. The movement spread rapidly throughout England in 1811 and 1812 with Yorkshire and Lancashire as two hotbeds of revolt. Mills and factory machinery were the typical targets of these handloom weavers. They publicised their actions in circulars mysteriously signed, “King Ludd.”
For a short time the Luddites created panic in the British establishment and they even clashed in battles with the British Army. The Luddites would meet at night on the moors surrounding the industrial towns, practising drills and manoeuvres. They were also into cross-dressing. However this seems to have been a way of disguising themselves. They often enjoyed local support, but once the government decided that they posed a serious risk and decided to repress them, their days were numbered. Machine breaking became a capital crime in 1812, legislation which was opposed by Lord Byron, one of the few prominent defenders of the Luddites. In order to suppress the movement mass trials were held resulting in many executions and penal transportations. By around 1816 the Luddites were a spent force.
The Luddites had clearly tapped into a common feeling. The nightmare vision of a world in which technology has eliminated human productive labour has been around since the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Automated production lines, computers and industrial robots have only reinforced this feeling. Each generation believes that the latest technology will be the one that eradicates employment. I tend to be very sceptical of economic populism and contrary to these populist beliefs, there is scant evidence to support the claim that technological development is responsible for rising levels of unemployment in the medium to long term. But these bad ideas keep coming back to haunt us. Whenever there is significant long-term unemployment, machines get the blame.
These fallacies are regularly trotted out in the media. Earlier this year Jesse Jackson Jr. lamented the dangers of the iPad, wondering what would happen to all the jobs associated with paper:
“A few short weeks ago I came to the House floor after having purchased an iPad and said that I happened to believe, Mr. Speaker, that at some point in time this new device, which is now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs. Now Borders is closing stores because, why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble? Buy an iPad and download your newspaper, download your book, download your magazine,”
And this summer President Obama was on NBC News trying to explain why companies weren’t hiring:
“There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate. So all these things have created changes. . . .”
George Bush was rightly criticised for many of the things he said, but I find it shocking that a President who is constantly praised for his stunning intellect could display such wilful economic illiteracy. Actually I’m not shocked at all by politicians spouting this kind of nonsense. Indeed, Obama may well be aware that it is bullshit, but is trying to make an appeal to populism. Either way it’s depressing that this is the man responsible for economic policy in the world’s most powerful economy.
A dynamic economy will see radical changes. This is what Joseph Schumpeter called this process creative destruction, the transformation that accompanies radical innovation. I did a piece about creative destruction in the financial sector in 2008. It has to be said that there has been precious little of this since the onset of the current economic crisis. Creative destruction has been around since we started inventing tools. The printing press was bad news for those who produced manuscripts. This process has been on steroids since the industrial revolution. Agriculture is a prime example. In 1900, nearly forty of every hundred Americans worked in farming to feed a country of ninety million people. A century later, it takes just two out of every hundred workers. There are many more examples:
Modern office technology has cut the number of secretaries.
Undergoing LASIK surgery allows consumers to throw their glasses away.
Digital cameras have forced photo labs to close.
There has been massive destruction of employment. There should be no more than five people working in the whole world! But as economist John Kay has pointed out, in the two hundred years since the Luddites first went around wrecking machinery productivity has increased more than fifty-fold. So we don’t have 98% unemployment; we produce fifty times as much.
We need to see the interconnectedness of all this; these ongoing processes cannot be understood in isolation. Resources no longer needed to feed the nation have been freed to meet new consumer demands. Over the decades, workers no longer required in agriculture moved to the cities, where they became available to produce other goods and services. Economist Walter Williams has a better grasp of economics than Obama and Jackson Jr.:
Certain jobs are destroyed by technology. You’re right, but many more are created. Think about it. If 90 percent of Americans still had been farmers in 1900, where in the world would we have gotten workers to produce all those goods that were not even heard of in 1790, such as telephones, steamships and oil wells? We need not go back that far. If there hadn’t been the kind of labour-saving technical innovation we’ve had since the 1950s – in the auto, construction, telephone industries and many others – where in the world would we have gotten workers to produce things that weren’t heard of in the ’50s, such as desktop computers, cell phones, HDTVs, digital cameras, MRI machines, pharmaceuticals and myriad other goods and services?
Creative destruction actually makes societies wealthier, by putting scarce resources to more productive uses. The savings from higher productivity don’t just go to the evil capitalist owners. They lower costs of doing business. In the short term this may mean higher profits. However, new competition tends to lead to lower prices as firms compete with each other to attract consumers. These consumers benefit from a higher standard of living as they have to work fewer and fewer hours to earn enough money to buy food, shoes or a car. It is technology that brings us a higher standard of living. It isn’t just the rich who get cheaper stuff. And I don’t know about Obama, but I love the convenience of using an ATM whenever I feel like it.
The problem is the time lag. While the disruption of the labour market and the destruction of businesses are immediate and very visible, the benefits from creative destruction are in the long term. As a result, societies there will always be a temptation to try and block the process of creative destruction, implementing policies to resist economic change. These attempts will almost always have a deleterious impact on the economy as inefficient producers, who should have gone out of business, hang around at a high cost to consumers or taxpayers. It prevents the shifting of resources to emerging sectors. The tragedy is that by trying to hold back the tide, you do not avoid pain. The ultimate cost of these misguided policies is stagnation, job losses, bankruptcies and a lower standard of living.
I don’t know what will happen in the future. The Luddites and their intellectual heirs may simply have been premature in their dire predictions. Will job creation match job destruction in perpetuity? With robotics and artificial intelligence set to advance rapidly this century, even many skilled jobs could come under threat. But I believe that jobs are created by what economist Julian Simon called the “ultimate resource” – our natural human resourcefulness and ingenuity. Human wants are insatiable -people always want more of something. This is what will create jobs in the future – jobs that we cannot even conceive of now.
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Progress and its discontents
To complement this week’s post about The Luddite fallacy I have a couple of extra bits:
The first is a letter from Don Boudreaux of Café Hayek to the U.S. Representative for California’s 9th congressional district, the Democrat, Barbara Lee:
Dear Ms. Lee:
Fred Barnes reports in the Weekly Standard that you refuse to use computerized checkout lanes at supermarkets (“Boneheaded Economics,” Oct. 24). As you – who are described on your website as “progressive” – explain, “I refuse to do that. I know that’s a job or two or three that’s gone.”
Overlooking the fact that you overlook the lower prices on groceries made possible by this labor-saving technology, I’ve some questions for you:
Do you also avoid using computerized (“automatic”) elevators, riding only in those few that still use manual elevator operators?
Do you steer clear of newer automobiles equipped with technologies that enable them to go for 100,000 miles before needing a tune-up? I’m sure I can find for you, say, a 1972 Chevy Vega that will oblige you to employ countless mechanics.
Do you shun tubeless steel-belted radial tires on your car – you know, the kind that go flat far less often than do old-fashioned tires? No telling how many tire-repairing jobs have been destroyed by modern technology-infused tires.
Do you and your family refuse flu shots in order to increase your chances of requiring the services of nurses and M.D.s – and, if the economy gets lucky and you and yours get seriously ill, also of hospital orderlies and administrators? Someone as aware as you are of the full ramifications of your consumption choices surely takes account of the ill effects that flu shots have on the jobs of health-care providers.
You must, indeed, be distressed as you observe the appalling amount of labor-saving technologies in use throughout our economy. It is, alas, a disturbing trend that has been around for quite some time – since, really, the invention of the spear which destroyed the jobs of some hunters.
The second is an anecdote from Russell Roberts in an article about technology and jobs:
The story goes that Milton Friedman was once taken to see a massive government project somewhere in Asia. Thousands of workers using shovels were building a canal. Friedman was puzzled. Why weren’t there any excavators or any mechanized earth-moving equipment? A government official explained that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman’s response: “Then why not use spoons instead of shovels?”
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Ice cream cones, frozen chickens and the meaning of disgust
Disgust, one of our most basic emotions, is fundamentally a biological adaptation which helps us to keep away from ingesting substances that could make us sick or even kill us – faeces, vomit, phlegm, blood, urine and rotten meat are universally seen as disgusting because they contain harmful toxins. One gram of human faeces can contain 100 million viruses and over a million bacteria. Steven Pinker has called this “intuitive microbiology“. Disgust is apparently unique to humans. I do perhaps have an unhealthy interest in this subject – this summer I took my family to an exhibition, Dirt: the filthy reality of everyday life, at the Wellcome Collection in London. If you feel so inclined, you can see the exhibition here.
Some of our disgust is hard-wired – when disgust first emerges in young children, at the age of around three, it is a consequence of brain maturation, not early experience or cultural teaching. Disgust can also be learned, because while some things are universally dangerous, others vary according to the environment. A fascinating area is that of food taboos; one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Indeed animal flesh is especially susceptible to environmental pressures. Pork is the classic example. In the climate of the Middle East eating it was dangerous. Thus a religious taboo prohibiting it emerged both among Jews and Arabs. At least they can agree on that! Of course this taboo then takes on a life of its own. With modern refrigeration it is perfectly okay to eat pork anywhere in the world. However the taboo remains.
If disgust were limited to gastronomy it would more of a curiosity and it would have less social relevance. But, there has been what is known as an exaption. This is when a trait that evolved because it served one particular function, comes to serve another. They occur in anatomy; Bird feathers are a classic example: initially these may have evolved for temperature regulation, but later were co-opted for flight. And exaptions occur in behaviour. In this case disgust has entered the realm of morality. MRI studies have shown that lying, cheating, and stealing, behaviours that may threaten group cohesion or co-operation, activate areas in the brain associated with disgust. And these days there seems to be a lot of indignation going around.
Whenever I read about moral disgust two scenarios, involving incest and frozen chickens, often seem to crop up. There is an online survey called Taboo, which asks you to judge a number of controversial moral scenarios including these two:
Sarah and Peter were brother and sister. They were on vacation together away from home. One night they were staying alone in a tent on a beach. They decided it would be fun to have sex. They were both over 21. They had sex and enjoyed it. They knew that for medical reasons Sarah could not get pregnant. They decided not to have sex with each other again, but they never regretted having had sex once. In fact, it remained a positive experience for them throughout their lives. It also remained entirely their secret (until now!).
A man goes to his local grocery store once a week and buys a frozen chicken. But before cooking and eating the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. He never tells anyone about what he does, never regrets it and never shows any ill effects from behaving this way. He remains an upstanding member of his community.
Both scenarios involve no harm to its practitioners and third parties are not hurt. I won’t go into the chicken for now, but the first scenario is a particularly thorny question. The incest taboo is a human universal, which is so powerful it goes beyond blood relations. I am referring to the Westermarck effect, or reverse sexual imprinting. This kicks in when two people who live in close domestic proximity during the first few years in the lives of either of them become incapable of feeling sexual attraction. This phenomenon, first described by the Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck, has been observed in many places and cultures, such in the Israeli kibbutz system. In kibbutzim children are raised communally in peer groups, based on age, and not biological relation. One study showed that out of the nearly 3,000 marriages that occurred across the kibbutz system, only fourteen were between children from the same peer group. And of those fourteen, none had been reared together during the first six years of life.
How do we explain these taboos to ourselves? Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the Universityof Virginia, coined the term moral dumbfoundedness to describe our reactions. He found that when presented with these scenarios people give a reason. When that reason is stripped from them, they will find another one. When the new reason is stripped from them, they bring up another one. Only when they run out of reasons will they admit defeat – “I don’t know; I can’t explain it; it’s just wrong.” This is moral dumbfoundedness.
There is a school of thought that believes that deep-seated revulsion should be seen as a sign that an activity is intrinsically harmful or bad. One proponent of this view is Leon Kass, who was chairman of President George W. Bush’s commission on bioethics. He argues that while disgust is not an argument, “In some crucial cases, however, it is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond wisdom’s power completely to articulate it.” This is the wisdom of repugnance. This way of thinking has important practical implications: Kass argues that the idea of human cloning is disgusting, and therefore should be banned. Having said that, he also thinks that eating ice cream cones undermines our dignity:
“Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone… This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behaviour.” What Freud would have made of this quote, I shudder to think. I don’t like psychobabble but this man definitely has some “issues”
While I am in favour of spontaneous order and organic change, I find Kass’s arguments unconvincing. I am especially worried about the danger of false positives. History is littered with examples of groups and individuals being considered disgusting. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has critiqued disgust-based morality because it can become a justification for persecution of out-groups:
“Throughout history, certain disgust properties – sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness – have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with Jews, women, homosexuals, untouchables, lower-class people – all of those are imagined as tainted by the dirt of the body“.
Male homosexuals have been a traditional target and not just in the past. In From Disgust to Humanity, Nussbaum, a prominent professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, explains that much of the political rhetoric around gay rights is bound up in the language of disgust, with words like vile, revolting, contaminate and defile being the currency. In crude terms, much of the anti-gay argument is bound up in faeces and saliva, germs, contagion and blood. You may think that Nussbaum was exaggerating, but in the United States gay rights can inspire a very visceral response. At a recent state Judiciary Committee meeting the New Hampshire state Representative, the Republican, Nancy Elliott, decided to enlighten us with her views on homosexuality. During a debate on a proposal to repeal the state’s same-sex marriage bill, she described anal sex “taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement.” You can see the video here.
The bottom line is that it is impossible to find a correlation between what disgusts us and any moral norms. If only it were that simple! As we have seen reactions of disgust often have their origin in our most atavistic prejudices. The more I look into the origins of morality, the more confused I get. Well that’s enough pontificating for today. I fancy a bite to eat. Kentucky Fried Chicken followed by a Cornetto would seem to fit the bill.
By coincidence Jonathon Haidt has a piece about the Wall Street protests at reason.com: The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street.
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QI: A selection #9
Here is another selection of trivia that I have picked from the QI column in the Telegraph:
Anosmia (Greek for “no smell”) can be congenital, or can be caused by a severe blow to the head, a virus or vitamin A deficiency. Viral anosmia (such as that caused by a bad cold) is usually temporary. Smell and memory are intimately linked. Damage to the temporal cortical region of the brain – the site of memory – does not affect the ability to detect smell, but prevents the ability to identify it. Patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease often lose their sense of smell as well as their memory.
Brown sugar has fewer calories because it contains more water. Refiners of white sugar from the United States wrecked the success of brown sugar sales by creating a smear campaign against the stuff in the late 19th century. They produced photographs of horrible-looking microbes living in brown sugar to put people off. In 1900, a bestselling cookbook picked up on this and said that brown sugar was often infested with “a minute insect”.
No one knows why people stopped wearing hats after the Second World War. New hairstyles, the rise of the car, demobilisation – even the new fashion for sunglasses – all took the blame for the sudden abandonment of the hat. At first the hat industry thought hatlessness was a passing fad and newspaper reports of 1948 bemoaned the new “barehead” fashion. People who dared to walk hatless through the hat-making towns of Denton and Stockport risked being abused by local factory workers who saw their livelihoods disappearing.
If you or your children have just started a depressing summer job, fear not. Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett’s first job was at his grandfather’s grocery shop; Bill Murray sold chestnuts outside a grocer’s; Orlando Bloom worked at a clay-pigeon shooting range; Beyoncé Knowles swept up in her mother’s hairdressing salon and Mick Jagger sold ice cream. Brad Pitt dressed up as a giant chicken to promote a restaurant.
The Aztecs called gold “the excrement of the gods”. It was valued less than feathers, their most valuable currency. Decoratively they much preferred brass, introduced by the Spanish invaders.
The French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) liked to eat lunch in the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower because he hated the structure, and it was the only place he could not see it. He really hated it: “A high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney.”
In 1991, to celebrate the bicentenary of Mozart’s death in 1791, Triumph International,Japan’s second-largest lingerie company, made a musical bra with blinking lights which played 20 seconds of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Although their intentions were commendable, the company had made a common error in attributing the piece to Mozart. Although he had composed variations on the tune, the lyrics were written by London-based sisters Jane and Ann Taylor and the melody was originally a French folk tune.
The word encyclopaedia literally means a “circle of learning” and was originally used to indicate a well-rounded education. It was not used as a title for books of general knowledge until the 17th century.
Wombats (Vombatus ursinus) have evolved with special anal sphincters that produce cubic faeces or scat. They use them to mark out their territory, leaving them perched on rocks, leaves and logs. Their shape helps stop them from rolling off.
The shortest nation in Europe is Malta. The Maltese have an average height of 5ft 4ins (164.9cm) compared with the EU average of 5ft 5½ins (169.6cm). Notable short people include Horace, Joan of Arc, Alexander Pope (4ft 6in), Goya, Lord Byron, Franz Schubert (5ft 1in), Leo Tolstoy, JM Barrie (4ft 11in), Judy Garland (4ft 11in) and Yuri Gagarin (5ft 1in). Someone who wasn’t short was Napoleon, who at 5ft 6½in was taller than the average Englishman at the time.
The shortest war in history was the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which took place on August 27 1897 and lasted 38 minutes. When the Sultan of British-administered Zanzibar died, his nephew, Khalid bin Barghash, succeeded him, in direct contravention of the wishes of the British consul, who had suggested another candidate. Undeterred, Khalid climbed into the royal palace through a broken window with 2,000 supporters in tow, raised the Zanzibar flag and proclaimed himself Sultan. The British then issued him with an ultimatum: abdicate or face war. When the deadline expired at 9am the next morning, the British gunships opened fire, bombarding the palace and setting it on fire. Khalid escaped toMombasa, leaving 500 casualties behind him. Only one British sailor was slightly injured.
The longest place name in Europe is on Anglesey: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll-gogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch. It was cooked up as a publicity stunt in 1860 when thevillageofLlanfair(which means St Mary’s church) opened the island’s first railway station. Local businessmen came up with the idea of creating the longest station sign in Britain, made up of the existing names of the village, a nearby hamlet and a local whirlpool. The world title, however, goes to Bangkok in Thailand, which in 1782 was given a ceremonial name: Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Yuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Phiman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit.
No one is sure where the name España comes from. It might be from the Greek Hesperia, meaning “western land” or the Phoenician, Hispnanihad meaning “land of rabbits”.Spainis certainly rich in rabbits: the first written reference to the art of ferreting rabbits occurs in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which tells of how, in 6BC, the Emperor Augustus sends ferrets to the Balearic Islands to control a plague of rabbits.
1 Comment	| Trivia	| Permalink
The future of the BBC
The BBC, the world’s first national broadcasting organisation, began life as a private company, the British Broadcasting Company on 18 October 1922. In those days it was a syndicate of six telecommunications companies, including Marconi and General Electric. Five years later the company was wound up and a royal charter created the British Broadcasting Corporation. Nation shall speak peace unto nation was the celebrated motto. The way radio initially developed was typically British. The fears of its negative impact on information and taste led to a paternalistic, top-down approach. There was no vulgar advertising. And because the press perceived the BBC as a threat, there were no news bulletins before seven in the evening. In 1932 using a system developed by John Logie Baird, the BBC began its television coverage with a limited television service. Since then the BBC has grown massively. By the start of this century it had become the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff.
The figure of the director-general has been fundamental in the corporation. There have been 14 of them in the 80 years of the BBC’s existence. The Corporation’s first director was a thirty-three-year-old Scottish Presbyterian, John Reith. A most high-minded man, he had no truck with the idea that the radio should be for mere entertainment. Educating and informing the masses should be its goal; give the public what they needed, not what they wanted. Another famous director general was Hugh Greene, brother of the writer, Graham. He was in charge of the BBC in the swinging sixties and was responsible for modernising an organisation that had fallen behind in the face of the challenge from the newly created commercial channel, ITV. He also had to defend the BBC from attacks by the ‘clean-up TV’ campaigner Mary Whitehouse, whose National Viewers and Listeners Association used to rail against the permissive society. The current DG, Mark Thompson, will be leading the BBC in a new cash-stripped era.
On 20 October 2010 Chancellor George Osborne announced that the television licence fee would be frozen at its current level – £145.50 per year per household – until the end of the current charter in 2016. The BBC will also have to take on the full cost of running the BBC World Service, which had been the responsibility of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. And just this month further cuts have been announced with the BBC expected to reduce its budget by up to 20% over the next few years. That will still leave it with 3.5 billion a year – hardly chicken. This leaves it second largest budget of any UK broadcaster, trailing British Sky Broadcasting’s £5.9 billion.
The BBC has since its creation been attacked and criticised. Their first test came with the general strike of 1926. And of course recently there was the bust-up between the BBC and Blair and Campbell over those dodgy dossiers about Iraq. The Beeb is often accused of political bias. Objectivity is impossible but I think the BBC compares very favourably with public broadcasters around the world.
Then there are those more light-hearted moments. One of my favourites has to be Guy Goma, a business studies graduate from Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo, who was the victim of mistaken identity. Goma, who was wrongly identified in the press as a taxi driver, was waiting for a job interview at television Centre. He was confused with an IT expert, who also happened to be called Guy; the producer had wanted Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, to be interviewed about the Apple vs. Apple court case. Instead it was Goma who went on air. He was interviewed for nearly two minutes. “I just thought keep going” said Goma after his ordeal was over. I thought he did rather well.
Having grown up with it, I have a soft spot for the Beeb. I Claudius, Yes Minister and Life on Earth were all surely examples of public broadcasting at its very best. Of course they also produce dross. But as they say, 90% of everything is probably crap. However, we can’t go back to the past. The organisation has become rather bloated. Does it really need to do everything that it currently does? The problem is how to focus. I’m not arguing for something on the limited scale of PBS in the United States, but £3.5 billion should be sufficient. The problem is that everyone will have their own idea of what is essential. When the BBC tried to close Radio 6 last year there were howls of protest and the station was reprieved. My criteria would be that the BBC should provide what the market won’t. Maybe the cash constraints will force a bit more creativity. I don’t really see the point of the BBC doing Strictly Come Dancing. I don’t think that anyone could argue that this couldn’t be done by the private sector. Of course the most difficult area in the future will be sports. The problem here is not one of market failure. Murdoch’s Sky would love a crack at the BBC’s sporting jewels. The problem is that access will only be available to paid subscribers. In America a market solution has emerged – the big four sports appear on free-to-air television. If you want to see every match of your team, then you have to pay. This seems to me like an intelligent solution. You get the national exposure and the corresponding advertising revenues that a sport requires and you can also charge those who are willing to pay for a premium service.
The BBC faces some challenging decisions over the next few years. It will have to downsize. I wouldn’t want to go back to the old days when there were just two or three channels. I love the variety we can enjoy now. American television is really so much better than it used to be. With satellite, cable and YouTube we are spoilt for choice. We can be our own director-generals. But I am sure that the BBC has enough talent to remain relevant for another eighty years.
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Twimmolation and other new words
Here is another selection of new words I found on the Wordspy website:
butler lie
A lie used to politely avoid or end an email, instant messaging, or telephone conversation. We use the term “butler lies” to allude to the social buffering function that butlers provided for their employers.
Search results, recommendations, and other online data that have been filtered to match your interests, thus preventing you from seeing data outside of those interests.
intactivist
An activist who supports or lobbies for laws that ban infant circumcisions.
IKEA effect
Increased feelings of pride and appreciation for an object because it has been self-made or self-assembled.
juvenoia
n. The baseless and exaggerated fear that the Internet and current social trends are having negative effects on children. [Juvenile + paranoia.]
last name effect
The closer a person’s childhood surname is to the end of the alphabet, the faster that person tends to make purchase decisions.
The man who is least likely to take on a dominant role in a social or professional situation.
paperphilia
A deep appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of paper; a preference for reading items printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen.
pity friend
On a social networking site, a person whose friend request you accept out of pity.
twimmolation
The destruction of a person’s career or reputation caused by lewd or insensitive Twitter posts. [twitter + immolation.]
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Five famous psychological experiments #2
Last year I did a post about five famous psychology experiments. Here is another selection:
Blind to the unexpected
In 1999 cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris came up with the so-called “invisible gorilla” test. Their volunteers had to watch a one-minute video where two groups of people — half dressed in white, the other half in black — are passing basketballs around. The volunteers were told to count the passes among players dressed in white shirts while ignoring the passes of those in black. During the video, a woman in a gorilla suit walked into the centre of the frame, pounded her chest and then walked off. It would seem to be the most obvious thing in the world. However, about half the people missed it. This effect is known as inattentional blindness. When you are focussing on one activity you can become blind to the unexpected. Last year they repeated the study; they wanted to see if the people who had heard about experiment would notice other unexpected events in a new video. Like the first time those who hadn’t seen it had a 50% success rate. As you would expect, all 23 of the experimentees who knew about the original experiment saw the gorilla but only 17% saw one or both of the new unexpected events – the curtain changing colour and one player on the black team leaving the game. You may find this experiment trivial, but one done by NASA using commercial pilots with thousands of hours of flying experience in a state-of-the art flight simulator is more worrying. During a simulated landing in foggy conditions some of the pilots failed to notice a jet parked on the runway!
Clairvoyant rats and pigeons
Last week I wrote about the unreliability of expert predictions. There are experiments that show that animals can do better than humans some times. I’m not referring to Paul the Octopus, who was able to correctly predict the winner of each ofGermany’s seven matches in the 2010 World Cup, as well as the result of the final. In this case it was rats and pigeons. The experiment involved researchers flashing two lights, one green and one red, onto a screen. However, the exact sequence was kept random. The rats and pigeons were quick to discover that the optimum strategy was to always go for green, guaranteeing an 80 percent hit rate. Humans, on the other hand, tried to see a pattern where there was none and only achieved 68% success. What’s more they would persist in the erroneous strategy even after they had been told that the flashing lights were random. Another study with Yale students produced similar results; they couldn’t accept 40% error, so they ended up with almost 50%.
Frightening Little Albert
Behaviourist John Watson believed, following the principles of classical conditioning, that he could condition a child to fear a stimulus which normally would not be frightening. The subject of the study was a nine–month old baby called Albert. At the beginning of the experiment Little Albert was exposed, to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair and burning newspapers among other things. During this phase Little Albert showed no fear toward any of these items. In later trials, Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner made loud sounds behind Albert’s back by striking a long steel pipe with a hammer when the baby touched one of the chosen items. Not surprisingly on these occasions, Little Albert cried and showed fear when he heard the noise. The final stage of the experiment was to present Albert with only the stimuli. He became very upset as the rat appeared in the room. He cried, turned away from the rodent, and tried to move away. Watson had show that emotional responses could be conditioned, or learned. Indeed, Little Albert seemed to generalize his fear to other furry objects so that when Watson sent a non-white rabbit into the room seventeen days after the original experiment, Albert also became distressed. He showed similar reactions when presented with a furry dog, a seal-skin coat, and even when Watson appeared in front of him wearing a Santa Claus mask with a white cotton beard. The story has a sad ending. Albert, whose real name appears to have been Douglas Merritte, was the son of one Arvilla Merritte, then an unmarried woman who was a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home. Nothing is known about the long-term effects of Watson’s experiment on the child. Tragically he died at the age of six on May 10, 1925 and is buried in a cemetery in Maryland.
Make me straight
Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath, founder and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, did research, partially financed by the CIA and the US military, which involved stimulation of the brains using surgically implanted electrodes. His subjects were institutionalized psychiatric patients, often African Americans. He wanted to use this brain stimulation relieve the symptoms of major psychiatric disorders such as severe depression and schizophrenia. However despite this laudable desire, his methods left a lot to be desired. One of his collaborators was the Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey, who later recalled that they had used African Americans as subjects because “they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals” His most infamous experiment was on Patient B-19, a 24-year-old gay man who wanted Heath to make him straight. Heath implanted electrodes in his head, showed him straight porn movies, and then activated the pleasure centres of the brain via the electrodes. A prostitute was hired to see if his treatment had worked. Did patient B-19 actually become heterosexual? Following discharge from the hospital, he had a sexual relationship with a married woman for almost 10 months. His homosexual activity was reduced during this period, but did not stop completely. I couldn’t find any long-term follow-up information. Heath seemed excited about the prospects for this therapy, but fortunately homosexual conversion therapy with brain surgery and pleasure centre stimulation did not catch on.
The monster study
Most of us are familiar with the film The King’s Speech. At the beginning of the film a therapist has the future king put seven pebbles in his mouth to get him to take his mind off stuttering. This goes back to ancient Greece where the famous orator Demosthenes is said to have used the same treatment. Anyway it didn’t work out; George spat them out and the hapless therapist was promptly sent packing. On the other side of the Atlantic, at more or less the same time, an infamous experiment was taking place. The year was 1939 and the place, Davenport,Iowa. The aim of the experiment was to make kids stutter. The intentions were noble; Dr. Wendell Johnson, a speech pathologist believed that stutterers were not born and the stigma of being labelled a stutterer d actually make them worse, and in some cases caused ‘normal’ children to start stuttering. To prove his point, he ran an experiment which has since become known as the ‘Monster Study’. The 22 youngsters from a veterans’ orphanage who were recruited to participate in the experiment were divided into two groups. The first were labelled ‘normal speakers’ and the second ‘stutterers’. In reality only half of the group labelled stutterers had actually shown signs of stuttering. During the course of the experiment, the normal speakers were given positive encouragement. But what made the study so notorious was what happened to the stutterers’ group. They received negative reinforcement – they were lectured about stuttering and constantly reminded not to repeat words. And the rest of the teachers and staff at the orphanage were told them the whole group were stutterers. Although none of the test subjects actually became stutterers they became very embittered when they discovered in 2001 what had been done to them. The quality of their schoolwork fell off and they would suffer a number of psychological and emotional scars later in their lives. The university issued an apology after the study was made public in news reports. On 17 August 2007, six of the orphan children were awarded $925,000 by the State of Iowa.
So there you are. These are some of the things psychologists got up to. One would assume that they don’t do some of the more ethically questionable things that I have described above. They were different times. I could have mentioned Pavlov, who experimented on humans as well as dogs. Watching the videos can be quite painful. The uncomfortable fact is that we did learn a lot from these experiments and others carried out in those years. There were some pretty terrible experiments going on in other fields. One of the most shocking must surely be Tuskegee syphilis study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama by the U.S. Public Health Service on poor, rural black men. They received free health care, but they were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. The aim was to see what would happen if the disease went untreated. I hope in 2050 a future blogger will not have to write about what we were doing in the 21st century.
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Home Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection Santa Anita Park, Arcadia, looking west
Santa Anita Park, Arcadia, looking west
Title Santa Anita Park, Arcadia, looking west
Location/Accession KHAF 462-3; GPC_b25_f2_i17 (Photographic print)
Historical Data The 'first' Santa Anita Race Track was built on Elias Jackson ("Lucky") Baldwin's immense estate of "Rancho Santa Anita" and opened on December 7, 1907, but closed just two years later after horse racing was banned in California due to an anti-gambling bill that became law. In 1933, Hollywood director Hal Roach and San Francisco dentist Dr. Charles Strub formed the Los Angeles Turf Club and raised funds to build a new track. Designed in an Art Deco style by Gordon B. Kaufman, the "new" Santa Anita Park was opened on Tuesday, December 25, 1934 with an attendance of 30,077 visitors paying an admission price of.15 cents. This famous racetrack has seen some important events since its grand re-opening: In February 1935, the first Santa Anita Handicap was run; famous racehorse, Seabiscuit won the Santa Anita handicap in 1940; in 1942, racing at Santa Anita was suspended due to the Second World War and from 1942 to 1944, Santa Anita was used as a Japanese American internment center; the racetrack reopened in 1945; a downhill turf course was added in 1953, which added a distinctly European flair; during the 1960s, major renovations included a much-expanded grandstand as well as major seating additions; in 1974, the Westfield Santa Anita Mall was built on the site of the old barns and training track; was host to the 1984 Olympic equestrian events; and in 1997, Santa Anita Park was acquired by Meditrust Corp.; Meditrust then sold the track to Magna Entertainment Corp., which they still own to date. Santa Anita, which has a turf course measuring 9/10 of a mile, also has a one-mile synthetic "cushion" main track. The new Cushion Track opened for training on September 4, 2007 and hosted its first live race on September 26, 2007. The 1,100-foot-long grandstand, which is a historic landmark, can accommodate 26,000 guests and is the original facade from the 1930s. The track infield area can accommodate another 50,000 or more guests. The Park also contains 61 barns, which house more than 2,000 horses, and an equine hospital. Santa Anita Race Track is the oldest racetrack in Southern California, and is located at 285 W. Huntington Drive.
Description Aerial view of Santa Anita Park and Racetrack, located at 285 W. Huntington Drive in the city of Arcadia; view is looking west. Tree-lined street along the left is Huntington Drive; tree-lined street along the right is Colorado Place; Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford Drives are at middle right; Colorado Blvd. is middle right to upper middle; Baldwin Ave. is horizontally at middle, just past the race track and stables (middle left). Photograph dated January 14, 1958.
Subject Santa Anita Park (Arcadia, Calif.).
Racetracks (Horse racing)--California--Arcadia.
Grandstands--California--Arcadia.
Horse racing--California--Arcadia.
Dwellings--California--Arcadia.
Stables--California--Arcadia.
Streets--California--Arcadia.
Arcadia (Calif.)--Aerial views.
Arcadia (Calif.).
Baldwin, Elias Jackson,1828-1909.
Roach, Hal,1892-1992.
Kaufmann, Gordon B.
Strub, Charles.


KBR rides ups and downs of market
Focus shifts to meet customer needs
By Stephanie Kanowitz
The past year was a mix of highs and lows for KBR. As one major contract wound down, the company won others. And as its best customer — the U.S. government, especially the military — shifted its focus, KBR also made adjustments, such as reorganizing its government business unit.
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Since 2001, KBR’s Government and Infrastructure (G&I) unit has supported troops in combat zones under the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (Logcap) III contract, funded at $35 billion. But Logcap IV, awarded in 2007, is a multiple-award contract that opens KBR’s monopoly to competition at the same time that the Obama administration plans to reduce contractor spending and shift military focus from Iraq to Afghanistan.
“Under the Logcap III contract, KBR employees have served more than 1 billion meals, delivered approximately 440 million pounds of mail, produced nearly 23 billion gallons of water, issued more than 8 billion gallons of fuel, hosted more than 170 million patrons at MWR [Morale, Welfare and Recreation] facilities, logged more than 701 million miles transporting supplies and equipment for the military, and laundered 78 million bundles of laundry, all in an effort to support U.S. troops as they carry out important and dangerous missions,” said Linda McKnight, KBR’s senior vice president of sales and marketing.
Meanwhile, Logcap IV’s multiple-award effect is already being felt. Revenues under Logcap were $4.8 billion in 2009, compared to $5.5 billion in 2008.
But the company still saw overall revenues grow from $11.6 billion in 2008 to $12.1 billion in 2009. That success is attributed to continued performance on current contracts; new wins, including a task order to provide logistics support services, transportation assistance and postal services in Iraq under Logcap IV; and internal changes to meet the external demands. In sum, KBR landed at the No. 7 spot on the Top 100 list with $4.5 billion in prime contract revenue.
“The composition of our contract base will shift to meet the needs of military sustainment activities, which are different from those of major combat operations, and work will be performed under longer-term contracts that are more predictable than typical contingency support efforts,” McKnight said. “We are prepared to be a tough, agile competitor in the new environment, and we are pursuing other adjacent business opportunities with the potential to offset the income effects of the inevitable reduction in Logcap activity.”
The contract base is not the only thing that has changed to meet new customer needs. In August 2009, KBR sliced G&I into four distinct segments and 10 market-facing business units. “We are now NAG&D — North American Government and Defense — and part of the Infrastructure, Government and Power business group,” McKnight said. “Our focus is now only on the U.S. federal government, whereas previously it included defense and infrastructure clients in the U.S., [the United Kingdom], Australia and the Middle East.”
Will Gabrielski, vice president and senior analyst at Broadpoint Gleacher, said KBR is well positioned for future endeavors.
“With the two Iraq Logcap solicitations now over and KBR’s position within Iraq solidified as the U.S. winds down and demobilizes, the debate about what impact Logcap work will have going forward is mostly complete,” he said. “This provides stability and visibility on the federal side while the company deploys its capital to grow its nonfederal segments and support increasing activity in energy markets with the global recovery under way.”
Stephanie Kanowitz is a freelance writer based in northern Virginia.


Arilou's Mad Ramblings
Arilou Turns Ten
It's hard believe, but it was ten years ago on this day that I was promoted to the rank of junior wizard in a little known game called Wyvern. Although the game has twice gone down for long periods of time since that day and I have since retired from it, I have consistently been affiliated with the game, in some capacity or another, for that entire time. I've done and seen a lot along the way, but as I did in my five year anniversary blog, I'd like to use this space to just reflect on my early days with the game.
If you go back to the last anniversary blog of mine, you'll see me discuss the development of my first area, Forgotten Oak. I had actually been planning to mark this date by releasing at least the redone village maps for that island of lost souls (fyi - in my plans for the area, the island map would be done away with and also replaced with dozens of individual maps that you would have to traverse much like Amita, only on a larger scale). However, since that's not possible with the game being down and all, let's talk a bit about my second completed area; Amita.
You may not know this, but although Amita is the second area I released, it's actually the third that I worked on. My second attempt at an area was a quest for the golem temple that's to the east of the Forgotten Oak village. I spent about two months working on it and got to almost 200 maps before realizing it was absolute garbage and decided to trash the whole thing. Ultimately, it was an important learning experience and while I still had a ways to go at that point, it helped me when it came to future projects like Amita.
Ironically, though, Amita is something I put together in about 26 hours in response to a discussion on the wizard forum about how we needed more low level content. The end result was 37 maps (it has since ballooned to over 250 maps - I kid you not) including six Orc Tower maps that I had previously worked on with the intention of putting directly on the world map (it was to appear on the land mass that later housed Terrim, but I re-purposed it while working on Amita as I realized how well it fit). Believe it or not but that simple tower was actually ahead of its time. I had been noticing how common it was for people to get trapped in multi-map monster areas, as anyone who has played for any amount of time has, and so I decided to create this tower that starts with a non-claimable map and then diverges into five monster maps (east, west, north, up, and down). To illustrate this I combined the maps together in one image:
It may not seem like much, but it was something different and I was able to build on it to make it a lot more interesting at a later date. If you go there when the game is up, you will see that each of those side maps now has multiple maps and there are paths leading from one to the other so a player can find their way out by progressing forward if their path backwards is blocked. I never did get a chance to release a redone version of the top or bottom floors, but the kobold basement has become kobold tunnels with lots of little paths in the general shape of a spiderweb. So that same multi-path motif continues into the rest of the tower's maps. It looks a lot better now, (see the below image of the entrance for comparison) but I'm disappointed that I didn't originally take the time to properly measure all the maps so that these side rooms and hallways all fit together like puzzle pieces. This especially became an issue for me after I finally fixed Amita's main maps so that they could come together properly when I made those sign maps for it (it had bothered me for awhile, but working on that map gave me the push I needed to make it happen).
Speaking of Amita's central area, obviously it didn't always look as it did now with forest paths and districts having their own maps. Originally it was this big 40x43 map that you can see below (note: not all graphics are the same as the ones players saw when Amita went live and, yes, I know you can see what's behind the hedges, but it's not a trade secret so don't worry about it). I don't know why, but when designing it I felt compelled to start drawing a wall in the upper portion of the map and I suddenly asked myself why there would be a city wall in only one portion of this forested village's map. I had just previously read a book about a city with inner walls that was meant to separate the wealthy from the near rebellious rift-raft and that's when it hit me that this would make a good basis for my own story and Amita's plot took off from there.
Next thing I knew, I had the gatehouse and the secret tunnel in place. Then I started dropping plot points about how the villagers hate the merchants, how there's hostility between the peasants and the guards, (hence the two taverns) and how people have been using the tunnel to escape the harsh rule of their tyrannical "king." It's interesting because I was trying to get away from Forgotten Oak's dark design with both the area that I scrapped and Amita. Instead, I ended up with was something that appears light and happy on the surface, but is dark and oppressive if you look deeper. I have found that this is a common motif in my work as a paradise itself is just not interesting. There needs be some intertwined madness on, or bubbling just below, the surface. Otherwise, what's the draw for people to want to learn more about the area they're in?
Getting back to map design, I think we can all agree that Amita has come a long way since it's early days. Although, I actually started seriously updating it toward the end of 2003 as I made an account to further test the area to see if there was anything I could tweak. I was hoping just to get a feel for anything that might be annoying for new players so I noticed, for example, how irritating it was to die in the merchant houses and then have to go all the way down to the hospital to heal and then go all the way back up to continue fighting. So I added fountains to the church. I also noticed how annoying it was to have to go through patches of tree terrain, especially that patch just southeast of the church. So I began to wonder how I could maintain this forest look and, at the same time, make it easier for people to get around the village as it's a low level area and they don't really have to deal with that in Davos or New Verden. Then it hit me, like a ton of brick,s that I should split that one map into a whole bunch of maps, which I very quickly did and then put online without any fanfare. Ironically, it's not easier to get around as there's now a lot more space to traverse and new players often get lost (causing me to eventually put mall style maps of the village all over the place). But, it looks awesome and it's a whole lot more realistic.
I don't know why wizards had never done this before. Instead, wizards would generally make really big town maps and since large maps were a problem, Legolas would sometimes suggest that people make them smaller by splitting them in two. That's what ended up happening Coran - It was one big map and so Zifa took the top half, copied it into a blank map, deleted the bottom half in the original, and added teleporters between them. Zifa put a lot of detail in that city and so it doesn't look like a big box, but most towns did because that's what they were. The first thing everyone would do when making a town was create a big blank square or rectangle and start filling it in with wild abandon. Part of it may be laziness as it's easier to keep track of, but multiple maps just "feel" great in-game. There's such a scope to them that it that makes you feel like you're really exploring a majestic fantasy city or a wooded fantasy village when done properly. And it looks really great when you take all those maps and put them together in one big image. You've probably seen the small version of that for those direction signs in Amita, but one day I'll probably put a larger version up on my website. In the meantime, here's a look at just the slums so that you can compare it with the original version of Amita's main map.
All in all, Amita is my favorite area [of the areas that I have created] and my closest to being completed. Not that you can ever really declare an area completed in this type of game as there's always the possibility that new ideas will cause you to add on to existing content. But, it's not too far off from my current vision. I had planned to release some redone maps along with completed guard housing maps, maps for the logging operation that is the reason behind a select few's wealth, a small quest series, some additions to the PK Forest, and I wanted to filter some more mini-quests into existing and planned maps. It may sound like a lot, but I had been expecting that I could get it all done by March 16th, 2013 (ten years to the day that Amita was made public) and jokingly announce that I finally completed an area. Alas, the second great downtime put "a bit" of a kink in that. Although, even though I'm now retired, there exists a certain amount of completed unreleased content that I can throw up on the server when the game comes back (assuming, it doesn't go open source or anything). So if you're fan on Amita, you have that to look forward to.
-That rocky path was actually inspired by my grandparent's property. There was originally a house there that had a stone pathway leading up to it, but it burned down and they rebuilt it further back. However, since they no longer had enough matching stones to reach the front of the house, they moved a few right below the front porch and let the rest of stones be taken over by grass. Anyway, one day I was there playing cards with my siblings and father while my mother was working outside when suddenly, my mother came in to declare that she had uncovered one of these rocks. Having grown up with a love for the idea of digging up the unknown (and thus wanting to be either an archaeologist or paleontologist) I was legitimately excited and went right out to help her dig up the rest while my siblings and father basically responded with a collective "meh."
We didn't end up uncovering them in order, (and we never did finish) so as we were doing this there were breaks in the path. I liked that uncompleted image so much that when I went to make Amita I wanted to recreate that, but we didn't have anything resembling those stones. As a result, I just used the stone terrain until, one day, Legolas commented on how he didn't like the look and I concurred, telling him what I had envisioned. The next thing I knew he presented me with those stone road graphics that are remarkably dead on to their real life inspiration, which is a testament how awesome Legolas is. Anyway, I happily went about placing them throughout Amita and made sure to maintain the breaks as the idea is that there once was a completed road here, but it has hasn't been properly maintained and therefore grass and dirt has overtaken parts of it.
-Amita's similarities to where my grandparents lived [in the latter parts of their lives] doesn't stop with the stone pathway. It was very green and lush with a few evergreen trees on the property and it was surrounded by woods on all sides. If you go down to oneof the meadows, there's a path leading to a creek just like there's a path leading to the creek in Amita (although the one in real life is much, much smaller). The real life creek doesn't end in a pond, but actually neither does the Amita one - Nobody knows this, but in my head the creek actually continues on underground.
-Wrath of the Fey isn't the only quest I had planned for Amita. I have a write up (and some partially completed maps) for a four part quest series that throws you into the plight of our villagers as a way of exploring more of the area's backstory. Each individual quest has its own name and the series of those quests is called "Trouble in Paradise" which is a play on the idea that Amita looks so wonderful of the surface but some really horrible things are going on there.
-I used to play this Sega Genesis game called "Light Crusader" that was about a knight who returned home to find the kingdom he served was going through a hard time. To make a long story short, villagers were disappearing and nobody knew why. Well, you would go around talking to the remaining villagers and all the while this very sad music would be playing that, at least from memory, kind of reminded me of the church music that Wyvern has. So, when I heard that I knew that's that was the music for Amita. When I listen to it, I conjurer images of a guard knocking a peasant into the mud, a mother weeping as her child is taken off to be trained as a soldier, and a family shivering in the cold because their house burned down. Basically, all these really horrible, sad, depressing things. Therefore if you ever wondered why I chose that music for Amita or if you thought that I put no effort into the selection... well, here you are.
-Amita actually means sister in Latin. The reason I selected this is because I thought that it would be great if Amita was built to be the sister village to New Verden and now it's this closed off enclave that, frankly, is no New Verden at all. But, also an interestingly little bit is that I decided to create a little theme around this and use Latin words for many of the names of npcs throughout the village. I picked words that represented something about them so, for example, Panis means bread. Unfortunately, I didn't realize some people might misconstrue that at the time, but luckily only a select few players have ever brought it up [and one wizard].
-Since the ogre chieftain map hasn't been available in the orc tower for quite some time, you may not be aware that there's actually a note there from the Oaken Village sorcerer responsible for luring the orc hoards to the island. In the letter he promises that orc tribe a reward if they come to the island and join other tribes in the besieging Oaken Village. So, there's a nice little tie in there.
-There's a lot of hidden little bits within the village that you're probably unaware of it. I love easter eggs in games and there were actually quite a few in Wyvern's early content that are fun to look for. So, I threw a lot into Amita. Hint: Certain trees might have something carved on them if you look closely.
-You may not have been around long enough to remember, but there used to be a gateway on New Verden's west wall that led to the path that led to Davos. Obviously, that means that you would arrive in Davos from the east, not the west as you have undoubtedly become so used to it. Well, I had actually designed Amita with the intention that when you got to what is now Davos' entrance, you would come to the path that leads to Amita (this, btw, is also why the creek ends like it does as I couldn't have it continue to the edge of the map and then not re-appear in Davos). However, Rhialto immediately began speaking about finding a place for it on the world map, so I didn't even bother mentioning that and an icon was then created/placed a little bit south of New Verden. However, some time later, Legolas came to me with the idea of putting them all together with the tutorial in the center. So those three villages ended up together after all.
-Have you have been to the maze east of the orc tower and been frustrated to no end while trying to navigate multiple maps? Well you're not alone. Few have ever completed it since its too complicated for players new to the game and it doesn't reward experienced players enough to encourage them to try it. But, yours truly has been caught in its web even though I designed it - As you may or may not know, the trick to the maze is unlocking items hidden within it in a specific order and, when working on it, I made a little hand drawn map detailing what order players had to go in to aid me when putting it all together.
Well, when all was said and done, I got this idea that I should test it as a player would to get a feel for how difficult it truly was as wizards hadn't been linking together multiple mazes like this and so I didn't have a solid reference for what I was putting players through. As a result, I didn't use any of my wizard powers to help myself get around and I turned that hand drawn map over. Well, big mistake - I completely forgot the order and was stumbling around for who remembers how long going back and forth through the maze trying to randomly figure out where I had to go to next and I cannot begin to tell you how out of my mind with frustration I was. So, for those few of you who have taken up the challenge, I want to let you know that I feel your pain and am so very sorry.
That said, I'm not so sorry that I can say that I would never have put anyone through that again. In fact, I had planned to utilize and expand on the idea of linking together maze maps in future areas. I won't go into that now, but perhaps I'll blog about one of my more evil unseen designs in the future.
Have a question regarding Amita? Ask me in the comments.
Posted by Arilou at 11:57 PM 3 comments
Arilou
I'm just your average, insane wizard that enjoys world domination and feasting on the blood of innocents. I also like long walks on the beach and fluffy bunny rabbits, as well as having intelligent conversation with the voices in my head. All in all, I'd describe myself as a fairly normal fellow.
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the HAES® files: History of the Health At Every Size® Movement, Part I
by Barbara Altman Bruno, Ph.D., LCSW
In response to requests from our readers, the Health At Every Size Blog is honored to reprint Barbara Altman Bruno’s history of the HAES movement. Most of the installments of this history have been previously published in ASDAH member newsletters. This post is Part One in a series that will appear in the coming months.
The Health at Every Size (HAES) model exists because of prejudice against extra weight/fatness. This prejudice has occurred quite recently in the history of humans, since a relatively adequate and reliable supply of food has only been available during the past two to three centuries.
Scrutiny of weight only became a growing social issue around the beginning of the 20th century. One of the contributing factors was the development of ready-to-wear clothes, which did not allow for as much individual size variation as had clothing that was hand-tailored. The size constrictions of ready-to-wear helped prompt Lena Bryant, founder of Lane Bryant, to comment that rather than trying to make one’s figure conform to fashion, fashion should conform to the figure.
Another factor was the development of reliable, portable and affordable scales, so that for the first time, people could measure their weight in private. Yet a third factor was improved eye care, which led to people scrutinizing!
One of the major experiments to validate many of the experiences of weight-loss dieters occurred in the mid-1940s. Ancel Keys wanted to study the effects of starvation on humans(1). Keys wanted to find out the conditions and needs of populations in Europe after liberation. He recruited 36 young men, conscientious objectors, who were tested and found to be physically and psychologically healthy. He housed them in dorms at the University of Minnesota.
For the first three months of the study, the men were able to eat freely (about 3,500 calories a day). Their routines required them to walk about three miles per day and do other movement and chores. For the next six months, their rations were cut by half. Their diet consisted of what might be available to eat in European famine areas – mostly root vegetables, cabbage, and wheat – but they were given adequate vitamins, minerals, and protein. Within about two months, they lost half of their total body fat. They became irritable, lethargic, unkempt, uninterested in sex, and obsessed with food. They all lost a quarter of their starting weight.
One cut off a fingertip, two suffered severe enough mental breakdowns to excuse them from the full six months of semi-starvation.
At the end of this period, the men were given more food but remained miserable and ravenous, even after eating an average of 5,000 calories per day. Not until nine months after recovering their starting weights did their body fat and muscle return. Six of the men ended up with an average of nine and a half pounds more body fat than before entering the experiment.
Keys’ study, The Biology of Human Starvation, was published in 1950. During that same year the Framingham study began, which would eventually show that life expectancy was lowest for thin men, followed by the lightest and heaviest women. A U-shaped curve, wherein except at the weight extremes, weight makes little difference in life expectancy, has since been found in the Framingham study and many others.
During the 1950s, the Cold War was in full throttle, and one of the fears was that Americans, enjoying postwar prosperity, were becoming “soft on Communism.”
Also in full throttle was psychoanalysis. In 1957, psychotherapists Helen and Harold Kaplan concluded, “Almost all conceivable psychological impulses and conflicts have been accused of causing overeating.”(2) A few years later, Albert Stunkard would find no correlation between neurosis and overweight, but an inverse correlation between weight and class.
The decade of the 1960s was one of intense possibility, both for good and bad. A charismatic, youthful president vowed to put a person on the moon before the end of the decade, and ultimately succeeded. The Beatles rose to mega stardom. Birth control pills finally gave women control over their reproductive processes and the second wave of feminism began. The Civil Rights Act was passed. President John Kennedy, his brother/attorney general Senator Robert Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated. The Stonewall riots began the gay rights movement. The Vietnam War raged, as did the counterculture protests against it.
Also, Weight Watchers began and became popular around the United States. British waif-like model Twiggy became the new beauty standard and Thin was In. And the gastric bypass began.
In Vermont, Ethan Allen Sims experimented on students and later, prisoners, to test intentional weight gain of 20-30 pounds. One subject required 7,000 calories a day to maintain weight gain. All the subjects doubled their normal daily intake of food and required an extra 2,000 calories a day to maintain their extra weight. Like the subjects of Keys’ weight-loss experiment in the 1940s, Sims’ subjects also got lethargic and apathetic, and rapidly returned to their pre-experiment weights once they stopped overeating.
An article called “More People Should Be Fat!” appeared in a major national magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Its author was Lew Louderback, whose experience as a fat person married to a fat person was augmented by research into fatness. The article said that:
Sexual responsiveness in women is positively and significantly correlated with a general positive attitude toward food and eating.
Among survivors of heart attacks, fat people live longer than thin people.
Fat people have a lower risk of tuberculosis.
Fat people have a lower suicide rate.
There are “thin fat people” who suffer physically and emotionally from having dieted to below their natural body weight.
Forced changes in weight are not only likely to be temporary, but also to cause physical and emotional damage.
Dieting seems to unleash destructive emotional forces.
The five-year cure rate for obesity is virtually zero.
Eating normally, without dieting, allowed Louderback and his wife to relax, feel physically better, and normalize and stabilize their eating and weight.
It has now become so “in” to be thin that fat people’s civil rights are repeatedly and openly violated.
Fat people are discriminated against in jobs and in education.
The persecution of fat people is not for health reasons, but aesthetics.
Bill Fabrey, a young engineer with a fat wife and a history of preferring larger women, read Louderback’s article and was elated to find that he was not alone. He had been enraged at the mistreatment accorded his wife and other fat people. He contacted Louderback in 1968 and they helped each other: He helped Louderback research his subsequent book, Fat Power, and Louderback supported Fabrey in founding the National Association to Aid Fat Americans (NAAFA) in 1969, a nonprofit human rights organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for fat people through public education, research, advocacy, and member support. NAAFA would subsequently change its name by the mid-1980s to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.
The size acceptance movement was born.
(1) Ancel Keys, The Biology of Human Starvation. University of Minnesota Press, 1950.
(2) As quoted in Bennett, W, and Gurin, J, The Dieter’s Dilemma. Basic Books, 1982, p. 29.
© Copyright 2009, Barbara Altman Bruno
Barbara Altman Bruno, Ph.D., LCSW, is a clinical social worker, size acceptance activist, and HAES pioneer. She has presented at clinical conferences, appeared in television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and demonstrations, and has written many articles, including well-being columns for larger people, guidelines for therapists who treat fat clients, a brief history of HAES, and a book, Worth Your Weight (what you CAN do about a weight problem). She is former co-chair of education for ASDAH and is on NAAFA’s Advisory Board.
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Tags: Ancel Keys, Bill Fabrey, biology of human starvation, fat, fat acceptance, HAES, Health At Every Size, lane bryant, Lew Louderback, NAAFA, national organization to advance fat acceptance, size acceptance


Five Geography Themes in the United States
By Grace Riley ; Updated September 26, 2017
••• Jupiterimages/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images
People can identify locations in absolute or relative terms.
Studying the whole world -- which is the essence of geography -- is an imposing task that becomes much more approachable when our knowledge of the world is categorized into distinct concepts. In 1984, the National Council for Geographic Education and the Association of American Geographers designed the five themes of geography to facilitate geography education. In subsequent years, National Geography Standards became the basis for curricula, but the five themes remain part of the foundation of geography education.
Location: Where Is It?
There are two types of location: absolute and relative. Absolute location is precise, fixed and unchangeable, such as longitude and latitude or a street address. An absolute location is independent of the surrounding geography and remains the same even when other geographic qualities change. For example, when Tennessee seceded from the Union in 1861, the longitude and latitude of Memphis remained 35 degrees, 15 minutes north latitude and 90 degrees, 4 minutes west longitude. Conversely, a relative location is dependent on the surrounding geography and, in some cases, could change or cease to be true over time. For instance, in 1861, Memphis was located on the banks of the Mississippi River about 120 miles south of the Union-Confederate border. Both of those locations are relative because they are based on Memphis’ distance from other locations. While Memphis’ relative location on the shores of the Mississippi remains true as of 2013, the city’s relative location 120 miles south of the Union-Confederate border ceased to be true in 1865 when the Union and Confederacy rejoined to become one nation again.
Place: What Is It Like?
Though location and place sound similar, they describe completely different attributes. “Location” identifies where something is, while “place” identifies qualities of a location. You can articulate place by describing physical, natural, human or cultural features. For example, Memphis is a humid city on the banks of the Mississippi River, and most of the city’s residents speak English. The city’s position on the banks of the Mississippi River is its location, its high humidity describes its natural place, and the predominance of English among its citizens describes its place in cultural terms.
Human/Environment Interaction
Humans and the environments in which they live constantly impact each other. The glittering skyline of a metropolis or cultivated rows of apple trees in an orchard are examples of humans impacting their environments because they had to change the environment to create those landscapes. The ability of the apple trees to thrive in their location, due to rich soil, or the consequences of a flood filling the streets of the metropolis are examples of how the environment can impact humans. The interaction between humans and their environments can be positive or negative. While pollution is a negative way that humans interact with their environments, picking up trash to remove pollution is a positive way that they affect their surroundings.
There are three primary components of movement: origin, path and destination. An immigrant arriving at Ellis Island, a family driving to the Grand Canyon, a rock slide, a river emptying into an ocean and a shipment of goods all are examples of movement. In the context of studying geography, describing movement may be an important quality of the person or thing that moves, or it may be an important quality that connects two locations. For example, if a turn-of-the-century immigrant traveled from Ireland to Ellis Island, the immigrant's act of movement would be critical to understanding his own geographic location. Additionally, his movement also would describe a transatlantic immigration route that links two places: Ireland and Ellis Island.
A region is a physical area that is united by a specific physical, natural, human or cultural characteristic. A region may include areas that share the same physical feature, such as the states that comprise the East Coast of the United States. Cultural regions are born of a shared cultural trait that most, if not all, of the people in the region possess, such as the U.S. South. The South has semiformal, debated physical boundaries, but it is defined by a specific set of cultural attributes, including a regional dialect and cuisine.
National Geographic Education: Frequently Asked Questions
Arkansas Geographic Alliance: Teaching the Five Fundamental Themes of Geography
Hunter College of the City University of New York: The Five Themes of Geography
National Geographic: National Geography Standards Index
Grace Riley has been a writer and photographer since 2005, with work appearing in magazines and newspapers such as the "Arkansas Democrat-Gazette." She has also worked as a school teacher and in public relations and polling analysis for political campaigns. Riley holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in American studies, political science and history, all from the University of Arkansas.


Sessions: Education, enforcement needed in opioid fight
Updated: 2:07 PM EST Mar 7, 2017
Recalling his days as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told thousands of New Hampshire young people Tuesday that it would take education, prevention and a crackdown on drug gangs to turn the tide against the rising rates of addiction in the country. Sessions, who made a surprise appearance at a summit on opioid awareness for middle and high school students in Manchester, New Hampshire, described how "drug use had surged" and "cities were filled with heroin addicts" during the 1980s. But thanks to prevention and education, he said "drug use was no longer cool and acceptable. Crime fell and addiction fell." "We can turn the tide against drugs and addiction again in America just like we did previously," he said. "We have proven that education and telling people the truth about drugs and addiction will result in better choices. Drug use will fall. Lives will be saved. Less money will be going into cartels and the drugs gangs, weakening them." Sessions said prevention — as emphasized Tuesday — is just as critical today as New Hampshire and other states battle a surge in opioid abuse. Drug overdose deaths resulting from the abuse of heroin and prescription painkillers rose 33 percent in the past five years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New Hampshire saw a 191 percent spike. "A lot of people still don't realize how addictive prescription drugs can be," Sessions said. "These drugs are powerful, and opioid addiction can take hold quickly. Too many teens and adults have overdosed, and the road ahead for people fighting addiction is so tough." Going forward, Sessions said the federal government will focus on the excessive prescription of pain medications in the country as well as the criminal gangs that bring drugs into the country. "Criminal enforcement is essential to stopping the transnational organizations which ship drugs into our country in huge amounts and to stop the thugs and gangs who use violence and extortion to move their products," he said. Treatment, he said, also is a tool, but often comes too late after addicts have lost their jobs and families. And it often doesn't succeed. "For many, addiction can be a death sentence. I've seen families spend all their saving and retirement money on treatment programs to try to help their children just to see sometimes those programs fail," he said. "It is so heartbreaking."
MANCHESTER, N.H. —
Recalling his days as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told thousands of New Hampshire young people Tuesday that it would take education, prevention and a crackdown on drug gangs to turn the tide against the rising rates of addiction in the country.
Sessions, who made a surprise appearance at a summit on opioid awareness for middle and high school students in Manchester, New Hampshire, described how "drug use had surged" and "cities were filled with heroin addicts" during the 1980s. But thanks to prevention and education, he said "drug use was no longer cool and acceptable. Crime fell and addiction fell."
"We can turn the tide against drugs and addiction again in America just like we did previously," he said. "We have proven that education and telling people the truth about drugs and addiction will result in better choices. Drug use will fall. Lives will be saved. Less money will be going into cartels and the drugs gangs, weakening them."
Sessions said prevention — as emphasized Tuesday — is just as critical today as New Hampshire and other states battle a surge in opioid abuse. Drug overdose deaths resulting from the abuse of heroin and prescription painkillers rose 33 percent in the past five years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New Hampshire saw a 191 percent spike.
"A lot of people still don't realize how addictive prescription drugs can be," Sessions said. "These drugs are powerful, and opioid addiction can take hold quickly. Too many teens and adults have overdosed, and the road ahead for people fighting addiction is so tough."
Going forward, Sessions said the federal government will focus on the excessive prescription of pain medications in the country as well as the criminal gangs that bring drugs into the country.
"Criminal enforcement is essential to stopping the transnational organizations which ship drugs into our country in huge amounts and to stop the thugs and gangs who use violence and extortion to move their products," he said.
Treatment, he said, also is a tool, but often comes too late after addicts have lost their jobs and families. And it often doesn't succeed.
"For many, addiction can be a death sentence. I've seen families spend all their saving and retirement money on treatment programs to try to help their children just to see sometimes those programs fail," he said. "It is so heartbreaking."


A look at LAT1
University of Eastern Finland
Proper delivery is pivotal in nearly every part of life, from jokes to packages, but there are few instances where it is more important than in the case of pharmaceutical drugs. Delivering medicines or therapeutics to the right targets, at the right dosage and at the right time, is a key focus in every indication. But some drugs are harder to deliver than others, either because of their targets or their formulations. And of such targets, the brain has to be one of the biggest culprits in complicating drug delivery, thanks to the blood-brain barrier.
This barrier protects the central nervous system by serving as a gatekeeper for all substances from the blood into the brain; harmful or unfamiliar substances are blocked while safe substances, such as nutrients and oxygen, pass through. Most drugs fail to successfully pass the blood-brain barrier in high enough levels to have a therapeutic effect, and trying to increase doses enough to get such an effect can come with unwanted side effects.
There is one potential opening, however—the blood-brain barrier expresses a number of transporters that serve to ferry safe substances and nutrients from the blood into the brain. And a research team at the University of Eastern Finland recently published results in Scientific Reports detailing a method for harnessing one such transporter.
The transporter in question is L-Type Amino Acid Transporter 1 (LAT1), which is highly expressed within the brain. As explained on the University’s website, LAT1 “is essential for the transport of large neutral amino acids such as phenylalanine and leucine from extracellular fluids into the cells. Additionally, it transports amino acid-containing drugs such as gabapentin, L-DOPA and baclofen across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). In normal cell membranes, LAT1 is expressed only in blood-brain and blood-placenta barriers. Much of its appeal as a drug carrier is due to its relative high abundance at the BBB versus other tissues. Besides having an important role in brain delivery, LAT1 is significantly up-regulated in several human cancer types including e.g., glioma.”
Adjust Professor Kristiina Huttunen of the University of Eastern Finland’s School of Pharmacy leads a group of researchers that have been studying this transporter for years. Their research has shown that LAT1 can be used for brain targeting and the delivery of drugs across the blood-brain barrier, and this most recent work has demonstrated that LAT1 can be used for intrabrain-targeted drug delivery after the blood-brain barrier has been bypassed. According to a University of Eastern Finland press release, this study also proved for the first time that LAT1 is expressed not only on the surface of neurons, but also in supporting cells, astrocytes and microglia.
The most interesting aspect of LAT1 is that by temporarily converting some drugs into prodrugs, those prodrugs can use LAT1 to enter cells, thereby enabling greater drug delivery. This was demonstrated with the prodrugs of compounds such as ketoprofen (an anti-inflammatory drug) and ferulic acid (an antioxidant), which saw improved cellular uptake versus the parent drugs.
“We were also able to identify structural requirements for the prodrugs that could enable targeting between the different brain cell types in future," noted first author of the study, PhD student Johanna Huttunen.
On the website of the University of Eastern Finland’s Drug Targeting Research Group, which is led by Prof. Huttunen, it was noted that in addition to higher drug accumulation, this approach “is expected to decrease simultaneously unpleasant adverse [e]ffects that rise from unselective drug delivery and distribution of drugs to off-target organs.” Other transporters of interest to the group include “Organic Anion Transporting Polypeptides (OATPs), Monocarboxylate Transporters (MCTs), Organic Cation Transporters (OCTs) and Organic Anion Transporters (OATs),” all of which “are highly and/or selectively expressed on the blood-brain-barrier, and in certain brain cells, such as neurons, astrocytes and microglia or in activated immune cells.”
“By this approach it is possible to multiply the exposure of target cells to the drugs with therapeutically relevant concentrations and solve one of the main hurdles in CNS-drug development; lack of efficacy has been the greatest single reason (46%) for CNS-drug failure in clinical trials in the past … Moreover, this study shows that by careful prodrug design that takes into account transporter selectivity, brain cell selective drug delivery and targeting between neurons, astrocytes or microglia can be obtained in future, which can lead to improved efficacy and safety of neuroprotective drugs within the brain,” the authors concluded.


Acoustic Christmas Concert With John Tesh!
Click here to get tickets (and VIP tickets) to see John Tesh on Friday, December 6th, at 8:00 pm!
If you had a TV in the 80s and 90s, there’s a good chance John Tesh was on it at one time or another: maybe as the host of Entertainment Tonight, or the Olympics, or the Tour de France, or maybe playing in the rain during his widely acclaimed Live at Red Rock concert on PBS.
But there’s more to John Tesh than his TV and hosting persona. He’s also an acclaimed musician and performer with six music Emmys, two Grammy nominations, three gold records, seven PBS specials, and eight million records sold.
Over the past 30+ years, John Tesh’s exciting career has spanned newscasting to sportscasting, composing theme songs to hosting his own radio show – and everything in between.
“A lot of it is just sort of saying yes and just going. When I was 20 years old, I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be a performer my whole life even though I wasn’t comfortable doing it, it was just something that was in me,” Tesh told Christian Wolf during the TOCA Backstage Podcast.
TOCA Backstage interview with John Tesh.
From Stage Fright to Spotlight
But being a star didn’t come easily to Tesh, although he had a talent for music. He was awkward and felt like he didn’t fit in anywhere.
“I was horribly unpopular…When I was in junior high school, I was 6’6” and I weighed 155, and I had braces, and I smelled like Clearisil because I had acne, so really, the only thing for me to do was to play piano and study trumpet and be a band geek, which ended up being a big blessing for me. I learned what focus, deep work, practice was, and it’s stayed with me,” he said.
Although he had talent and a deep rooted desire to entertain, Tesh battled with crippling stage fright.
“I tried to muscle my way through it, but that didn’t work…it followed me all the way through college, even though I was playing garage bands all through high school…when I got out of college, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to tour or do anything if I didn’t get rid of it. So I hired a guy who specializes in stage fright, and he worked with me for two years, some basic techniques. Things like practicing failing, making mistakes and how you’re going to get out of it…and the other thing, I still use this technique to this day…when you come to the show and you sit in one of the seats, I will have sat in that seat. I sit in all the seats, I meet everybody in the concert hall, all the stagehands, the people who sell the tickets…so that’s my living room, like you’re coming into my house, so when I walk out on stage, I’m totally comfortable,” Tesh said. “There is life on the other side of stage fright!”
An “All In” Mentality
Despite his stage fright, Tesh still knew in his heart of hearts that he wanted to be a performer. Even when he went off to college to study textile chemistry (his father’s choice, not his), Tesh felt pulled towards the spotlight. His junior year in college he took a radio television class and loved it. It felt right and he knew this was what he wanted to do.
After forging a professor’s signature on a form while trying to switch majors mid-semester, Tesh ended up suspended from the university indefinitely – and thrown out of the house.
Then he did what any determined 20 year with nothing to lose would do: he made a fake radio demo tape in the hopes of getting hired at the local station.
“[It’s like] Cortez, when you’ve burned your ships and you only have one choice, you have to go. That spirit of risk is what caused me to say yes, to…going to sports even though I knew nothing about sports, yes to Entertainment Tonight even though they only gave me a 13 week contract, and then yes to starting the radio show. Because what’s the worst that could happen?” Tesh said.
And it worked. The station manager saw Tesh’s work ethic and determination – and gave him a job as a janitor. Since then Tesh has steadily worked his way up the ranks, often leaning into the unknown and taking paths even when he didn’t know where they would lead him.
These days Tesh keeps busy hosting his own syndicated radio show/podcast with his wife Connie, and son Gib called Intelligence for Your Life. He’s also in the process of writing his memoir for publisher Harper Collins. And he continues to perform in concerts all around the country, including his upcoming Acoustic Christmas Concert right here in Torrance!
Acoustic Christmas Concert
John Tesh’s Acoustic Christmas Concert isn’t your average holiday program. Yes, there will be music, and an abundance of holiday cheer, but there will be some interesting, personal touches, too.
“What you’re going to see on stage is pretty much what you would see if you were to come here for Thanksgiving or Christmas at my house. My son, Gib, will be with us, he plays the ukulele and he’s a comedian. Prima, my daughter, who’s 25, is a ballet and modern dancer, she’ll be dancing with us…so you’ll really see Christmas in my living room on stage. We do some spoken word stuff, something we call an Old School Christmas, so it’s really a baby boomer Christmas,” Tesh said.
Celebrate the Season!
John Tesh will be performing his Acoustic Christmas Concert at the Armstrong Theatre on Friday, December 6th at 8:00 pm. Come celebrate the season with this extraordinary performer!
VIP Tickets Available Now
Also available are VIP tickets for the ultimate John Tesh concert experience! VIP ticket holders receive:
One premium reserved ticket located in the first 5 rows
VIP early entry into the venue
Exclusive meet & greet with John Tesh
Personal photograph with John Tesh
VIP access to John Tesh’s preshow soundcheck
Collectible tour program autographed by John Tesh
(exclusive to VIP package only!)
Exclusive John Tesh VIP merchandise item
Official meet & greet laminate
Don’t miss out on this chance to ring in the holiday season with this one-of-a-kind concert experience!
Get Tickets to See John Tesh!
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