Monthly Archives: April 2012

Magic tech levels

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In the world of Daggerfall, a kindly mage or priest may heal you in a minute, unlike my state-appointed doctor who usually just tells me to exercise more. ^_^

Yesterday I wrote about how the chance of women doing dangerous work depended largely on the medical tech level of society:  If plagues keep killing people off, someone has to supply more babies. Each human has a slightly different immune system, so rolling the dice over and over makes perfect sense in that perspective. This is how it has been in the real world, but any fantasy world using mortals will have to contend with the same issues.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but I would also argue that any sufficiently researched magic is indistinguishable from technology. For instance in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, the One Power is reliable and thoroughly researched, making magic a very predictable thing. Healing is available but limited by the number of channelers in the world.

In Stephen Donaldson’s first Covenant trilogy, the Land is rich in magic. It is not well understood, but simple healing magic is widespread. The citizens there seem to be no worse off than modern man when it comes to surviving ordinary afflictions. There are of course other dangers in Covenant’s dreams, but ill health is not the worst of them.

In contrast, the Middle Earth of Tolkien – while fantastic in some ways – does not have widespread magic use. Magic is spectacular, miraculous, and rare. The elves seem to have healing power and are pretty much immune to non-violent death, but they live by themselves for the most part. Ordinary people and hobbits cannot expect to have their wounds cured quickly and cheaply in their local village.

The inhabitants of the role playing game Daggerfall, on the other hand, are in luck: Pretty much any town or large village has a temple where diseases and wounds can be healed either for free or at a reasonable price. There are also potions to be bought. The Mages Guild also has a school of Restoration, as well as selling various healing items.  With regard to diseases and accidents, Daggerfall would be a better place to live than the modern world. (Of course, the rampant violence makes up for this.)

If you create your own fantasy world, it would be wise to give some thought in advance to the “magical tech level” of the world, or the parts of the world where your story takes place. Is magic widespread, reliable and well understood? In that case, life may be similar to modern life in many ways:  Affordable health care, fast transportation, long-distance communication and so on. The principles would be different, but humans have largely the same basic needs and desires everywhere, so magic would be used to accommodate them much like technology is here.

A classic example of this is the “Darkness” series by Harry Turtledove, set on the continent of Derlavai. This world has undergone a thaumaturgical revolution similar to our industrial revolution, and magic is used in much the same way as technology is here. In fact, the series is an elaborate paraphrase of the second world war, but different in details so as to remain unpredictable.

It can be quite interesting to look at books and role playing games in this way, seeing whether their “magical technology” is in line with the culture described. And of course, it will be useful if we try to write our own fantasy stories, as some of us like to do.

 

Tech levels and gender roles

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Women warriors in plate male, from the game Skyrim. I’ve seen less realistic things. But also more.

In the current era, gender roles are a lot more loose than they used to be. The career choices, for instance, are actually choices. Female soldiers may have a tough time getting along with their male comrades (this varies a bit from country to country) but there are still a bunch of them. More and more doctors are women, although the number of male nurses have not risen to the same degree. And while most carpenters are still men, this is now largely a personal choice: You won’t become an outcast if you take an unusual job, at least if you are a woman.

When kids these days play sword and sorcery type role playing games, they are as likely to run into a female warrior or thief as a male, even though the setting of the game is “medieval”, and in the actual Middle Ages this was extremely rare. Is it simply a projection of our modern ways of thinking into the past? Why didn’t women become soldiers and adventurers in the Middle Ages?

If you think it was because of the particular religion in the Middle Ages, you are way off. The religion may have made up a cultural framework for the era, but all religions had to adapt to the real world to some degree. And in the real world, women needed to have children, lots and lots of children, to even keep the population steady.

The era of rapid population growth started only a couple centuries ago. Part of this was progress in agriculture, of course. But if starvation was what limited population size, it would have made perfect sense to have female soldiers. That way, in the unfortunate case that they fell in battle, there would be no children of them henceforth and fewer mouths to feed.

But in the real Middle Ages, and before and later as well, there were other factors that checked the population growth. One was war itself, of course. From time to time, a king would decide to invade a neighboring country which he thought he had some claim to, and armies rode off (or marched off, in the case of peasants) to do battle. While there were no weapons of mass destruction at the time, battles were quite savage. Many died on the battlefield, and others died afterwards from the wounds. (Even minor wounds were often fatal because of infections.) Thus, in order to have enough warriors at all times, it was necessary for the women to stay at home and give birth to more boys. A woman would generally be much less useful than a man on the battlefield, due to the difference in size and muscle, but if she stayed at home she could give birth to several boys who would grow up to strong warriors in the wars of the next generation.

Basically, if there were any societies that sent their women to do battle, these societies were conquered and replaced by those who did not.

In addition to death by sword, there was also death by plague. From the High Middle Ages onward, bubonic plague was a recurring scythe over Europe. Other horrors like typhoid fever and diphtheria ravaged the land later, and not least smallpox. “A pox on your house” was a curse that was quite likely to come true. While starvation made all these worse, even the well fed could not stand up to the Great Plagues. It was not uncommon in a village for farms to be empty as everyone in the house had died, or only a child or two remained to be taken in by relatives elsewhere. So if you had more than your fair share of kids, there was a decent chance that they could take over someone else’s farm, or smithy, or fishing boat. Usually a relative, of course, but for a while after the Black Death there was land enough for pretty much anyone who could work it.

With germ theory and improved hygiene, death by plague began to dwindle. While it is still a threat, we don’t think much about it right now. Maybe a new super-plague will wipe out most of the human population, in which case I suspect gender roles will begin to revert to their earlier form. I am not eager to see that hypothesis tested in practice, though.

***

 If you are planning to write a fantasy novel, or for that matter a science fiction novel, you should keep the above in mind. Basically the question is: Your population, is it limited by free will? By starvation? By plague? By war? Alien abductions? Infertility viruses? Any combination of the above?

The first of these – contraception and starvation – encourage sexual equality, as this brings population growth down. Any other limiting factors will encourage women to stay home and give birth to babies and raise them.

If food supply is the limiting factor but only temporarily, there may be other ways for society to bring down birth rates, such as women becoming nuns in large numbers. A more drastic solution is to kill female babies, to ensure that most children who grow up are warriors who can expand our lands.

So you see, if you want to have lots of chicks in chain mail, you need to do your worldbuilding right. Or you could target a stupid audience, I suppose.

 

 

Fructose revisited

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Don't mess around, we're baking here!

Don’t mess around, we’re baking here! But what kind of sugar are we using?

I have spoken out against fructose in the past, so maybe it pleases the Light that I am now looking to eat more of it. In this particular case, I cannot recommend you follow my example. But I do have a reason for what I do. It is not just because the voices in my head tell me. ^_^

I am first going to sum up some useful facts about fructose. Then I will explain why it may be useful for me and a few others like me. Finally I will argue why most people should stay away from it.

***

Fructose is a sugar that appears naturally in honey, and in fruits (thus the name) together with glucose. (The proportion varies among different types of fruit.) It is easy to create from corn (maize) and therefore very cheap in the US, where it is widely used as a sweetener.

Where fructose appears in the intestines, it is absorbed into the blood and goes to the liver, where it is given a special treatment that no other sugars get. Unlike all other sugars, fructose can be converted to fat with very little loss of energy. More exactly, the liver converts it to triglycerids which are released into the bloodstream. Hopefully fat cells will pack these away, otherwise they may settle on the inside of your arteries and bad things are likely to happen.

Approximately 20% of the fructose is converted to glucose instead and ends up as blood sugar. This is much less than ordinary cane sugar, which ends up as 80% blood sugar. If you are a diabetic or pre-diabetic, this is definitely something to consider! (I am diagnosed with pre-diabetes, so this is relevant to me.) Fructose is also almost 50% sweeter than common sugar, so for the same sweetness you get about 6 times more blood sugar with cane sugar than fructose!

High-fructose corn syrup, which is the usual sweetener in soda etc in the USA, contains both glucose and fructose. Glucose becomes blood sugar directly, so you still get a spike in blood sugar when you drink it, and then a little later you get the fat from the fructose.

***

Most people with diabetes II (late-onset diabetes) or pre-diabetes are fat, to put it bluntly. Usually you can see this at a glance, but there are also some who have the fat stored mostly around their guts and kidneys where it is not so easy to spot. It is mostly this fat that contributes to diabetes. Fat on the hips and thighs is pretty much harmless, while the fat that is scattered around on your body under your skin is somewhat dangerous but not as bad as the gut fat.

In my case, however, things are a little different. I have another illness that means I can only eat small quantities of fat. After I stopped eating normal fat-rich food in spring 2005, I lost weight for several months. At the end I had lost almost 15% of my weight, and I was only moderately overweight before. The thinner I became, the hungrier I became too. This cannot be helped, after all, the body will try to preserve itself.

Since I could no longer eat fat, I ended up eating twice as much carbs instead.  (Carbohydrates contain half as much energy as fat, and in addition much of the energy is lost when the body tries to convert it to fat. Except for fructose, as I mentioned before, which is converted almost perfectly into fat.)

The constant intake of carbs means my body is always awash in sugar. (More complex carbs are broken down into sugar before they are absorbed into the blood.) So my high blood sugar is not because my fat storage is full and cannot store away the sugar: There is plenty of room for more fat, I am well below my natural weight. Rather, the blood sugar comes from constant intake of carbs, which I have to do:  If I stopped eating carbs as well as fat, I would starve.

However, since my problem is not too much fat, I could eat fructose. The liver would convert it into fat and only 20% would become blood sugar. This would solve the pre-diabetes problem. Furthermore, because of my exercise asthma I can not exercise at high intensity, where you burn mostly carbs. My exercise is mostly in the fat-burning range.  So once again, fructose to the rescue. As long as I exercise regularly, the fat from the fructose would be burned away before it had time to settle on my arteries. Probably.

*** 

 Most of you, however, eat fat. You may not actively seek it out, but you eat ordinary food: Cakes, bread with butter or margarine, mayonnaise, steaks, sauces, fast food, chips and milk chocolate among others. Even cookies contain quite a bit of fat. When you become sensitive to fat, you discover how much fat there is in food that does not even taste fatty. Anyway, you eat fat already.

I am not a fan of the Atkins diet, but one thing it got right (for most people) is that if you eat fat, your appetite for more fat will fall. You will still happily eat something sweet, though. I am sure most of you are aware of the “dessert stomach” phenomenon: You could not eat one more bite of sausage, but you will happily eat a plate full of sugary dessert. The thing is, if you use fructose for this, your body will get far more fat than it thought. Not a good idea. You already have plenty of fat without tricking your body into eating more of it!

Of course, if you have a treadmill at your office desk as some people here in Norway have recently, you can get away with it. But if you live a sedentary life and eat fat, stay off the fructose. Leave it to us who can’t get fat the normal way, OK?

 

The other fools’ days

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Do people on your planet save each other because they want something?

“What, do people save each other on your planet just because they want something?” You could certainly get that impression sometimes. Don’t be fooled though!

I won’t write much, since this is April Fools’ day. People are naturally skeptical of whatever is written on this day. I certainly understand that.

What I’d like was if people would be skeptical of the foolishness of the other 365 days of the year. (Since it is a leap year, I mean. The other 364 next year.)

There are people trying to fool you every day. Fool you into buying something that you don’t need and which won’t make you happy. Fool you into supporting policies that will cause more misery than happiness. Fool you into believing in wrong myths that only close your mind instead of opening it to the true brightness.

For the most part, those who wish to fool you have something in common: They want something from you. Or if not, they are fooled by those who do, and are running their errands. Trace the chain of command back and see whether you find someone who wish to give or someone who wish to take. This is your best bet, I believe.This is what I was taught when I was young, and it has served me well so far.

I hope you will find that I, and the One that I revere, want to see you happy for your own sake. We do not want or need to take anything from you. But if you don’t believe me – and it is understandable if you don’t – then look at those who tower far above me. Buddha, who left a castle and a kingdom to seek Enlightenment. Moses, who chose to suffer with God’s people rather than be called Pharaoh’s daughter’s son. Jesus, who turned his back on the kingdoms of this world and all their glory, and testified that his Kingdom was not of this world. And many, many great lights throughout history, who gave without asking anything in return. This is your best bet to find someone who is not out to fool you. Let us rather become fools for your sake, than you for ours.

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
-Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah.