Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Dadaist Baseball

Dadaist Baseball is a game conceived about 10 months ago (though I just thought up the name today.) The basic premise is that it is baseball with as few rules as humanly possible.
One night, me and some relatives were bored out of our skulls, and for some reason there were baseball supplies nearby. So we started pitching and hitting, and eventually I decided to designate some bases with some random objects around the yard. What basically came of this was a bunch of people hitting, running around the yard trying to touch the bases in order, and occasionally switching teams and tackling their opponents.
Thus Dadaist Baseball was born. I named it after the Dadaist art movement - Dadaism rejects all traditional connotations of art, and Dadaist Baseball rejects all traditional connotations of sports. It is conveniently designed to do what sports education claims to do but in fact fails spectacularly at: promote a positive, friendly atmosphere throughout the game and teach sportsmanship. The idea was not to win by gaining runs - the one time we played it, we didn't keep score - but simply to have a good time by acting like a freak; in that respect it is similar to the sports found in Calvin and Hobbes. The rules are meant to be abused, selectively ignored and, under the right circumstances, discarded altogether; with that in mind it is surprisingly easy to construct a solid rule set.

RULES
1. The game can technically be played with any number of players. There must be two designated teams with at least one player on each; extra players are essentially allowed to do whatever they want, and switch between teams at will.
1a. Technically, team-designated players can switch teams at any time as well.

2. When the ball is pitched, the batter attempts to hit it with a bat. As long as the bat touched the ball, the hit is valid.
2a. The batter catching the ball in no way invalidates the hit. If this occurs, the bat must still touch the ball at some point.
2b. There is no cap on strikes other than that determined by whims and how bored other players get.
2c. A player could probably get away with not hitting the ball and running nonetheless.

3. To score a run, one must touch all the bases in order.
3a. A player is out if he is tagged with a ball.
3aI. This includes balls other than the one actually pitched by the pitcher; if you don't eventually start whacking people with a bag full of baseballs, the game is not being played properly.
3b. There is no preset route that one must follow for touching the bases. Again, if the routes don't start meandering throughout the field, the surrounding area and, kept up long enough, nearby buildings, you're doing it wrong.
3c. If more than one game is being played, bases and balls from nearby games are perfectly valid to all players, regardless of which game they are playing or if they are, in fact, playing at all.

4. Teams do not switch positions formally. If the game is played properly, players will trickle between the field and the batting team over the course of the game.
4a. Players may also opt to be on neither team for some or all of the game, simply causing mischief and helping either team on a whim.
4b. Players may also choose to cease playing for some or all of the game.

5. Under no circumstances will score of any kind be kept.
5a. If one finds that one's psychological well-being completely depends on keeping score in some way, one should:
5aI. keep score by judging the awesomeness and ridiculousness of given plays, and rewarding points accordingly, and
5aII. seek help.

As you can see, the rules are, for the most part, designed to increase the range of possible actions, rather than limit them. They are, in fact, little more then general statements about the spirit of the game and how it is played, rather than a rigid system. As mentioned, to be played properly, these rules will be horribly abused throughout the game and probably blatantly ignored once or twice near the end (though this is difficult to do). While, in theory, it would be possible to institute Dadaist Baseball school education (this would be one of the better ideas regarding sports education in schools, ever), getting "into it" and playing to win is a self-defeating exercise that will kill the game for everyone and, depending on the magnitude of the transgression, possibly get you beaten with a baseball bat.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Irreligion

Or, ramblings on God.
I recently changed my facebook religious listing from atheist to ignostic (the exact entry is "ignostic, but atheist has more accurate connotations"). I did this mainly because, while I staunchly believe that the idea of the Christian God (and most, if not all, other deities) goes firmly against most precepts of logic, I don't believe that any sort of quasi-sentient quasi-entity that created the universe can't exist.
To summarize and hopefully make coherent my ideas on quasi-theology (a name I just made up now):
Taking a look at the universe, and the way atoms and molecules are structured, we seem extraordinarily lucky to have a universe that exists in such a way to even have the possibility of supporting life. More accurately, it seems like a massive coincidence that subatomic particles so easily line up in such a way as to make atoms, which can then make molecules, et cetera. With the universe beginning the way it did, i.e., from a singularity (not a single atom, naysayers), and bringing time and space with it, I believe that it is either necessarily true or necessarily impossible for other, "separate" universes to exist, and (at the moment) necessarily impossible seems more reasonable. Since the big bang initiated time and space, and since our lack of knowledge of quantum gravity means that we can't possibly understand the conditions at the big bang (yet), it seems possible that the laws of physics could have "turned out differently". With that in mind, there may be some sentience that influenced the laws of physics to turn out as they did.
This idea probably sounds ridiculous, and it probably is - but the point I'm making here is that we don't actually know. However, for an encore I will hereby explain my denouncement of the Christian God.
A casual scan of historical information reveals that mystical ideas were heavily entwined with "science" in past times. As science developed, however, many things held to be facts were denounced, from witchcraft to alchemy. I'll specifically be focusing on two main concepts here: morals and the human soul.
First, the soul. The soul was once thought to be a physical part of a person (the exact source that I got this from escapes me), and carry out several physical functions. As medical science advanced, however, physical and eventually behavioral aspects of the soul were determined to have purely physical sources - which brings me to my second subject, morals. Morality has long been thought to come from God, but there are plenty of articles out there about neuroscientific sources (just take a look at the external links section of Wikipedia's article on morality to get started). And, hand in hand with evolution, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that the brain evolved a moral center to stop our species - indeed, every species - from killing itself off. If we have an instinct that tells us it's wrong to kill our own kind, than squabbles over food and territory (common before we evolved sentience and developed civilization) would have been fatal much more rarely, and thus be more beneficial for the species's survival overall. Obviously, these statements don't disprove the existence of God, but it's not a big logical leap to go from "the Christian church has to keep revising scripture to keep up with science" to "hey, maybe the Christian church was wrong all along."