My Brush with True Greatness

The Battle Mode in Super Mario Kart, for the Super NES, is a game of elegant complexity. You can learn how to play it in five minutes. The objective is to race around a playing field, pick up weapons or defensive tools which are in boxes you drive over (each box's contents are somehow randomized), and fire weapons at your opponent - three hits ends the game. Between beginners, it is mostly a game of chance. Whoever gets the best weapons (stars of invincibility and red shells, which seek your opponent like a heat-seeking missile), will likely win the game. This element of luck is never completely gone, no matter how skilled the players become - it's difficult to beat up anybody who consistently picks up red shells when you keep getting banana peels.

But a skilled Mario Kart player will usually demolish his unskilled opponents with ease. Once a player has a feel for the controls, he can collect and use many more weapons than his opponent, who is bumping into the wall and trying to do foolish things like turn around. The skilled player will of course know when and how to fire each weapon, as well as how best to evade his opponent's fire. Finally, the experienced player knows each of the four playing fields like the back of his hand. He knows where he is in relation to his opponent at all times, and can attack or avoid him with ease.

A game between two skilled opponents is a thing to behold. While luck still plays its role, the game becomes a battle of wits. I learned to play with two roommates in grad school. As our tactics improved, we became aware of each others' habits, and continually had to refine our games to stay competitive. It is very easy to obsess over such a fun game. Our matches became highly sophisticated over the year we lived together.

One day one of my roommates was online and found out about a challenge by a young man named Shane. He claimed to be the best Mario Kart player there is, and offered substantial money prizes to anyone who could beat him (i.e., it wasn't a bet; there was no risk to those who accepted his challenge, except for hurt egos). Shane happened to live in a UT dormitory, and my friend and I were both at work nearby, so we emailed him, accepting the challenge.

Shane was a small-framed Asian guy with a pleasant nature and a ponytail. His copy of Mario Kart was hooked up somehow through a computer, but on his website he claims it uses Super Nintendo hardware - after playing it, I can attest to its authenticity. Shane suggested a warmup on race mode. I actually nailed him with a banana peel, a weak weapon which may only be dropped or thrown in a long, barely-aimable arc. The peel sits still until someone runs over it, at which point it counts as any hit. So when my nearly-perfectly thrown banana peel scored a hit, my confidence soared. Shane beat my friend, 20-4, and me, 20-3.

Now, his website shows his year-by-year win-loss record, which, for those years in the early 2000s, which are posted and relevant to this post, although I don't remember which one it was, likely 2003, hover around 98% victories. (Shane's rewards are for a certain number of consecutive wins against him, or overall wins, first to ten. He says he has never given out any money.) So holding him to 87 and 83% made us feel better, and after the match, Shane was mostly gracious and guessed that we must not lose very much.

I hail Shane as the number one Super Mario Kart player in the world. My friend and I have discussed the matches since, and it isn't easy to discern how he beat us so badly. He seemed to do the same things we did, just a bit better. He did seem to have an uncanny sense of direction on the playing fields. He was always in the right place at the right time. His aim is dead on. His tactics were not new to us in general, I think it was mostly his ability and execution that did us in.

I have one complaint about the whole affair, which probably is not applicable to his other foes, some of which he has faced on neutral courts, I believe. This is, to my recollection, a bird's eye view of the room layout:

____C_____


____S_____
______O___

where C is the computer screen (about 13 inches if I recall correctly), S is Shane, and O is the opponent. I believe this to have given him a slight but meaningful advantage.

People not familiar with the game are incredulous, but I will attest that posture and placement are of the utmost importance for playing Mario Kart. I have gone on runs against my friend of eight straight victories, where I have been sitting intently in front of the screen and he had reclined on the couch behind me. Once he sits up and gets down in front of the TV beside me, he is able to compete. I have no idea why this is so important, but I assure you, dear reader, it is. I think his setup was unfair.

Mind you, I was thoroughly outplayed by Shane; I am trying to make the argument that I could have taken six or seven games, certainly not the majority, had the playing field been level. I made no mention of it at the time; indeed, I didn't think of it. I am sure that if I had complained, he would have accommodated me. He lived in Jester Dormitory, whose rooms are tiny and jail cell-like, purportedly because the architect was an experienced prison designer (source unremembered).

The UT student newspaper ran a story about him later. I was hoping he would mention the two guys who gave him an uncommonly good game, but he didn't. Or they didn't print it.

So I need some practice, but I'd play Shane again. I'll play anybody, too, but I'm not comfortable enough to offer cash prizes beyond a dollar or so. Anybody interested in this wonderful game should leave a comment.

No Way . . .

I have seen more solar eclipses than what I saw on my drive to work today. I was turning left into the Pickle Research Campus and I was behind a Dodge pickup that was also turning left. We both had our blinkers on, and they were in sync. I can’t say perfect sync, and I doubt it was – I’ll bet if we had sat there and watched long enough they would have gotten out of sync. But I must have sat there for thirty seconds watching my left turn signal and his, and they stayed together the whole time. I always figured that if I ever were to see such synchronous turn signals, it would be between two cars of the same model and year, but I drive a small Mazda. That made it extra special to me.

Tipping Is Not Just a City in China

The only person to ever say that to me (this post's title, I mean) was a young man behind a counter in a dance club in downtown Austin. He said it and pointed to a plastic jar on the counter as he took my roughly $5 cover - no band was playing, just dance music. To quote Joyce, my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

That is all I will say about that in this post.

What I will talk more about is tipping at restaurants. It's something that is expected in the USA, and a rule of thumb is to add 15% to your bill for adequate service. 20% is easier to calculate and, for the places where I generally eat, usually only means maybe another dollar, so I take that route and proudly boast that I am a good tipper. But I think this custom is problematic for two reasons.

The first is simply the fairness between restaurants of different priciness. A waiter serving, and a cook cooking, $10 hamburgers work about as hard as those cooking and serving $25 steaks. Maybe not quite, and you could argue that you expect better, more formal service at pricier restaurants. But not two and a half times as good and formal. There are a couple of very good Vietnamese restaurants in town that I frequent where I can get a delicious, filling meal for about $6. By my usual method I owe them $1.20 for tip. The service is as good, if not better, than at a certain Tex-Mex joint in town where I typically spend $10-15, and leave $2-3 for tip. So I punish the Vietnamese for keeping their prices low. (This, after My Lai.)

So I decided a while back that good service of a well-cooked meal deserves at least two of my hard-earned dollars. If it's just me or I'm with one other person, I pay more - economics of scale kind of thing. I of course pay more if the bill is more, but in my heart I think it's lame.

The other drawback of our tipping system is broader, and involves our cultural ideas of the role food servers play in our lives and how they should be compensated for it.

In many places in Europe and, I'm told, in Australia, tipping is not customary. It's been my experience that in most places you can leave the change you get or whatever, but it's genuinely not expected, and if you leave more than $1 US or so they will think you left it by mistake.

Now, in the USA, waiters can be paid less than minimum wage - $2.13 per hour - because tipping is expected (and, for parties of six or more, often required).

(Side note: as I understand it, when the minimum wage was $4.25 per hour, the waiter's minimum wage was 50% of this, and this lower wage was not increased when the minimum wage went up to $5.15 per hour in the 1990s. This is not my fight, but that's bullshit.)

But the point is, our laws depend on our tipping convention (or at least our waiters' getting paid does). If tipping were not socially compulsory, restaurant owners would have to pay their waitstaff more money, so they would charge more for food. It would likely cost the consumer no more or less to eat; it would simply change the path of much of the money. The upside to our method is that it arguably improves service - we have a choice to modify our waiters' pay, so they refill our drinks faster in hopes of getting the extra cash for it.

But our way has a bad indentured-servantry smell to it. I feel like a boss cutting a paycheck after every meal. I judge your service to be adequate, yours to be sub-par, yours to be exquisite.

Thank you, yes sir, most righteously decided, sir. Come back and see us.

Your groveling disgusts me, lickspittle.

And so on. I don't believe this to be the capitalist ideal. The money-for-goods-or-services transaction should be an exchange between two free and willing entities, and the money should be so much as to compensate for the good or service. End, if I may quote Hedberg, of transaction. Why the need for the good or service provider to praise the money provider for his generosity? Why is the customer always right? Certainly it is a result of the customer's greater freedom in choosing business partners - there will always be someone else who will grovel more for the money. But I don't want groveling, and I don't want the person serving me my food to feel inferior to me. All I want is a Cobb salad.

In Scotland, the service isn't rude. I was never told to take my stupid fish and chips and shove them up my arse as they were laid before me. But I was never asked for a tip, either - it was never assumed that the transaction wasn't just fair pay for good food. If I were to receive bad service in a place where tipping wasn't expected, I suppose I would express my disappointment by not eating at that restaurant anymore. So by removing tipping, bad service becomes pernicious to the restaurant as a whole, more than to the waiter as an individual. This may be a reason why restaurant owners prefer tipping. I, for one, believe an employer's success should be intimately tied to that of his employees' - the stronger this tie, the better the working environment, and the more satisfactory the working experience for all those involved.

Finally, if tipping improves service so much, why don't we tip librarians? Dentists? Plumbers? Why isn't everyone paid a pauper's wage and made to dance a jig for the rest of his salary? Relying on tipping is another way for those with money to gain special treatment. It emphasizes the benefits of status, and engenders competition where it isn't useful. Just ask a black man trying to hail a cab.

I mean, I hear it's difficult.

The Green Felt Void

My master's thesis supervisor told me once that the claim has been made that if you scaled a billiards cue ball up to the size of the Earth, the cue ball would have a more rugged topography. I think it's probably true. A cue ball is 2.25 inches (5.715 centimeters) in diameter, plus or minus 0.005 inches (0.0127 centimeters). I am going to round some stats for the Earth to keep the math simple. It is roughly 13,000 kilometers in diameter. Mount Everest is about 8,900 meters high, and the deepest trench in the ocean, the Mariana Trench off Southeast Asia, gets to about 11,000 meters deep. So the Earth has a range in topography of about 20,000 meters.

If you scaled the Earth down to the size of a beach ball, one meter in diameter, then the range in topography, from the highest to lowest point on the mini-Earth's surface, would be about 0.0015 meters, or 1.5 millimeters. If you scaled Earth all the way to the size of a cue ball, the range in topography would be about 8.8x10-5 meters, or a bit less than one one-hundredth of a millimeter. Unfortunately I have no idea to what finish cue balls are polished, but the Earth, shrunk to the size of a cue ball, would be about ten times smoother than the officially-allowed range in cue ball dimensions.

Whether the Earth would roll as well as a cue ball is a slightly different question. For one thing, a cue ball's topography is probably spread pretty homogeneously around its surface. Perhaps more importantly, the Earth is not spherical but oblate. It is wider at the equator than at the poles by about 43 kilometers (difference in diameter). This difference would be about 1.9x10-4 meters on our cue ball Earth, or about 0.19 millimeters. So the Earth, even given its non-sphericity, could qualify as cue ball-shaped (the range allowed is plus or minus 0.127 millimeters, or a total range of 0.254 millimeters). But because the Earth's deviation in size is systematically distributed, not randomly distributed like I suppose a cue ball's is, it could roll a little funny.

But so that's how smooth the Earth is. My girlfriend and I went camping with some friends at Big Bend National Park in West Texas over the Labor Day weekend. Up at about 4,000 feet, the air is noticeably colder than where I live (somewhere around 400 feet). Local weather and lack of humidity certainly affected things, too. But 4,000 feet was our base camp elevation. We went on day hikes - ones at lower elevation (down to around 2,000 feet I think) were much sweatier. We got up to over 7,600 feet, and had we not been hiking, we would have been shivering. This is a difference of about one mile. I travel over four miles to work every day. It just goes to show how much faster things change vertically than they do horizontally in this crazy world.

Information was gathered from:

Basic Earth Facts
http://geography.about.com/

http://geology.com/

World Pool-Billiard Association
http://www.wpa-pool.com/index.asp?content=rules_spec