Units of Knowledge: The Cecil

How do we measure one's knowledge? IQ seems a convenient way to codify a person's ability -- potential, that is, to learn and acquire knowledge. However, we have no convenient way of measuring a person's wealth of knowledge. Of saying that A knows a measurable amount with is greater than the amount known by B.

The first step is to create a unit of measurement for knowledge. I propose to call it the Cecil, after the Straight Dope's Cecil Adams. The Cecil, an amount of knowledge equivalent to one page's worth of knowledge. A thousand Cecils would make a Kilocecil, a thousand pages worth of knowledge, or roughly a book's worth. A Megacecil would be a million pages worth, the length of a thousand books.

So how do you know how many Cecil's worth of knowledge you have? Well, you need to tally up the amount of pages you've read. This includes printed books and web pages, magazines and sports pages. Everything written down anywhere is knowledge.

If you hear a lecture, get a transcript of it, and count how many pages it prints off as. Alternatively, assume that it takes an average of one minute's worth of speaking to fill a page, and count every minute you listen as one Cecil. An hour's worth? 60 Cecils.

Television is knowledge as well. But television includes visual as well as aural media, so it may be worth more Cecils depending on the content. If you watch a news program and get added content from text on the bottom of the screen, you may be accumulating one and a half or two Cecils rather than just one for every minute watched.

What about a song? Well, it depends on the song. Many songs repeat the same lyrics over and over again, but in others the artist sings or raps unique lyrics extremely quickly. Many songs also express meaning through the music itself and not lyrics, which can be harder to quantify. But in general, assume that no song can exceed more than two Cecils for every minute of playtime. Some songs may only be expressed as fractions of Cecils (See: Katy Perry's California Girls) or no Cecils at all (See: Every novelty song every written).

We also need to account for essentially valueless or repetitive information. How many times have you heard the same song, or seen the same news story on two different outlets, or seen a movie with a cliche plot?

Now you, like myself, have probably not been studiously recording how many pages you read per year.  But you can make a rough estimate to figure it out. For a week, record the number of Cecil's worth of knowledge you take in. Multiply this by 52 and you can get a rough idea of how much knowledge you absorb in a year. Multiply this by the number of years you've been alive (childhood counts, you learn more as a kid than at any other time, it's just intangible knowledge like "Now I need to breathe in," and "Gravity is a persistent force which makes me fall on my butt when I try to stand up."). Then you can get a general idea of how many Cecils of knowledge you possess.

What is the usefulness of this measurement? Beyond the obvious bragging rights and nerd cred sure to come with exchanging Cecil values over the internet (as in, "Dude, my Megacecil count just hit 23. I am the boss of this town." "Sweet dude. That is just aces."), we can use the Cecil for more useful purposes. A politician might tout his knowledge of a certain subject in Cecils -- who are you going to vote for, the guy with 4 Megacecils worth of foreign affairs experience, or the guy with 8 Megacecils worth of John Wayne movie trivia?

Of course, we'll need a board to certify that self-reporting of Cecil values doesn't get out of hand. This board will be a cadre of dedicated information afficianadoes, well versed collectively in every topic of information imaginable. Disputes over Cecil values will be referred to board, which I am calling the "Elucidated Council," for rigorous vetting. Over the course of weeks, the Council and the prospective applicant will lock themselves in drafty but well appointed chambers beneath the Council's manor house in the Swiss Alps. Then, exhausted, they will emerge, and breathlessly tell the public, waiting with bated breath, the true measure of a man's Star Wars knowledge.

The Elucidated Council would need to be run by a man of unusual and broad cunning, a man who surpasses the Jack of All Trades by becoming a true master of all areas of inquiry. But where could we find such a man? Who among us could rise to the lonely task of administering the world's reckoning of knowledge?

Well, who else?

The Trinity of Self

I've been trying lately to wrap my mind around my... well, my mind. That's right: I'm trying to use my mind to understand my own mind, which opens up a lot of rather frightening existential doors. I've often been told that the mind is capable of understanding anything but itself, a proposition which I've resolutely tried to prove wrong, with varying results.

Just a word of warning to the unsuspecting reader, this post might journey pretty far afield into the hinterlands of my own disjointed, completely unprofessional psychowhatsit. So here we go.

Freud said that there are three parts of a person: the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. This idea is probably the most well-known and salient expression of the trinity of self-awareness that I'm going to be talking about in this blog post. Everyone is probably familiar with this concept, but if you're not, check out the wikipedia article real quick.

For a while now I've been developing my own theory of the human experience which has its roots in traditional psychology and philosophy, significantly the work of Sigmund Freud. In my conception, there are three parts to the human self, that part of a guy (or gal) that runs the body and the brain and has imagination and reason. These part are in constant struggle with each other. The Body, or the Id -- animalistic, natural, self-interested, jealous, crazy, horny. The Mind, or the Superego -- proud, wise, self-important, greedy, stubborn, paranoid, afraid. The Soul, or the Ego -- the balance, the heart, the center, the source of morality.

Okay, so admittedly this is getting a bit far away from Freud. He conceived the Superego as more of a controlling, moralizing force. In my conception, the Mind possesses a lot of bad traits. The Mind is a dominant force, obsessed with control and micromanaging. You could really switch the Superego and the Ego here because I conflate a lot of their traits, but just keep in mind that those are the basis for my ideas and nothing more.

The Mind is your greatest asset, and your greatest ally. Reason resides in the mind, and reason is what raises a man up from the level of a beast. Reason, and foresight. The mind is able to analyze patterns to predict the future, allowing humans to plan ahead. This planning leads to agriculture, to industry, to technology.

But the Mind necessarily pulls man away from his natural instincts. In raising him up from the level of animals, he loses his empathy.

The Body, the Id, is the opposing force. It represents everything the Mind is not. It is in tune with nature, and revels in the natural violence and chaos that comes with a complete lack of social order. It is also passionate, and instinctive. It is protective of loved ones, but also jealous when they turn their affections away.

The Body is refreshing to a person who lives entirely through his Mind, and vice versa. A human ultimately grows, and the Ego, the center, becomes stronger, out of experience.

Let's put it in video game terms: You have a player-character who has two jobs to take levels in. Each job can level up to a maximum of 50. The player-character gains stat-increases and skills from mastering each job. And the player-character retains these stats no matter which job it is currently gaining experience in.

So to extend this metaphor further, the player-character can never achieve its full potential unless and only unless it attains the maximum in both jobs. So the player-character's maximum level is 100, twice that of each individual job.

The player-character also benefits from the balance of skills. The two jobs are opposite: one is an attacker, one is a defender. Thus, the player-character leaves himself open to weaknesses if he does not achieve balance.

So in this metaphor, the player-character is the Soul, the attacker job is the Body, and the defender job is the Mind. The Mind plans; the Body acts; the Soul maintains balance.

For the sake of argument, let's say you accept my theory as true (or at least as a reasonable expression of human awareness). What does this knowledge of our psyche do for us? Can we reap any benefit from it?

The answer is an emphatic yes. By knowing that we have two selves, a actor and a planner, we can achieve balance between the two. The problem for most of us, myself included, is that we favor one side over the other. We assume, usually erroneously, that we have strength in one or the other, but not both.

This couldn't be further from the truth. We all tend to favor one side or the other. I plan obsessively: it's one of my greatest weaknesses. I stay up at night thinking about exactly what I'm going to do tomorrow, down to the hour. Incidentally, this is probably why I'm in law school.

But just because we favor one side does not mean that we lack the capacity to use the other. We all have the capacity to plan and the capacity to act. And what most of us fail to realize is that the "you", the core of yourself, is the Soul, not the Mind or the Body.

Somewhere, deep down below all of our conscious thoughts and actions, is the source of what humans call morality. We perceive some things as "good" and some as "bad." Maybe this is God. Maybe it's just a rational desire for organized society. Either way, most of us recognize some form of ethics, a moral code. This code is the balance between the Mind and the Body. This is the Soul, the arbiter between the chaos of the Body and the order of the Mind.

It's not for me to speculate on the metaphysical and post-life implications of this theory because ultimately we can't know and we'll never know what comes after life. The point of all this is that if we recognize this trinity of self, we are able to work to achieve balance. Through balance comes peace. Through peace comes happiness. And happiness, after all, is the universal goal.

(These ideas are my own, but at the same time they spring from the works of others. The most obvious thanks have to go to Sigmund Freud, but also to Aristotle and other Greeks for giving us the ideas of pathos, logos, and ethos, and also to the Legend of Zelda for the concept of the Triforce balancing Power, Wisdom, and Courage. Though these ideas are slightly different from my own, their contribution to this philosophy cannot be denied or diminished. Thanks to all of the wise men who came before me.)

Nintendopolis: Super Mario Brothers

When I was growing up in the mid-90s, every kid on the block had to take sides in a vicious, brutal contest. Whole families were torn apart; lines in the sand were dutifully drawn. That conflict is thusly stated: who would win in a fight between Mario, a plumber from Brooklyn, and Sonic, a blue hedgehog that runs real fast.

At the time, there were only two console gaming companies that really mattered in the US, both of them owned and operated by Japanese game makers. These were, of course, Nintendo and Sega. While the irreconcilable march of time has shown that, in the end, Nintendo was the more steadfast of the two, Sega, in their prime, was a force to be reckoned with. Neither side gave quarter; neither asked it. The two giants simply did their level best to destroy each other, and we, the collective gaming community, profited from their competition.

I always came down on the Nintendo side of things. In considering the source of my life-long obsession with Nintendo's various mascots – Mario, Donkey Kong, Link, and Samus Aran, among other – I realize that it stems from first impressions as much as anything.

Back then (the mid-90s, you'll recall) Nintendo and Sega were both on their second consoles – the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (known originally as the “Super Famicom”, short for Family Computer, in its home country of Japan), and the Sega Genesis. But console gaming captured my attention much earlier than that.

I can't remember the first game I ever played, but I am almost positive it was Super Mario Brothers. This game does not really stand up too well to the test of time, primarily because the graphics are extremely pixelated, and the controls, by today's standards, are woefully unresponsive. But this seminal game was responsible for creating a generation of rabid fans, myself included.

What was it about this seemingly simple game that captured the imagination of so many, children and adults alike (but let's face it, mostly children)? I can remember going to my aunt and uncle's house when I was a kid, a regular occurrence given that my hair continued to grow, and my aunt could cut it for free. This house, a holdout of the glory days of the 1980s, was the place where I first experienced video games. My aunt would cut my hair, and meanwhile my uncle would entertain me with the latest games on his shiny new Nintendo Entertainment System, the first console of its kind in America. I would sit at his feet for hours, begging him to play just one more level, or better still, to let me try.

Super Mario Brothers was an innovative game. It updated the basic platforming conventions proposed by earlier games like Pitfall, and established many of the ideas that paved the way for the 2D side-scrolling games of the 90s. Mario had a crucial weakness, one which did not quite bleed over into his myriad sequel adventures: he could not run beyond the left boundary of the screen. Mario's single-minded focus on moving to the right created a sense of purpose in the gamer. Unlike today's sandbox games where there is little to no direction given to the player, Mario fans had no choice but to continue along the linear path set out for them by the game.

Careful players might discover, however, that Mario did not necessarily have to play the levels in the order set out. Hidden warp zones allowed players to skip entire worlds (a world being, in this case, a collection of four stages), but only the most enterprising players might discover these secrets.

Of course, my uncle knew all their locations, and he dutifully passed on this knowledge to me. I committed it to memory twenty years ago, and I still know that the first warp zone is at the end of 1-2 (you take the elevator platform to the top of the screen and jump onto the ceiling, of course!). In turn, I will pass this knowledge onto my children someday, and they will become vested guardians of this hallowed gaming secret.

So is it this structure that makes Mario so compelling? The forced linearity, combined with the hidden ability to jump forward? Partially. But there's more too it.

Mario, unlike many of his contemporaries, was a shape-shifter. In the spirit of his spiritual predecessor, Donkey Kong's Jumpman, Mario could pick up objects to gain greater power, eventually becoming a fire-spewing monster of unparalleled might.

His arsenal of power ups capped out at two: a mushroom and a fire flower. This seems limited to today's attention deficit gamers, hooked on picking up new guns or gaining new abilities, multiple colored bars representing hit points, magic points, skill points, experience points, any number of growth mechanisms. Mario didn't need such trivialities.

Mario, at any given time, ran the risk of losing everything he had gained thus far through a single hit from an enemy. Unlike modern games with safety-net save points, Mario had only one chance to make it to World 8 and save the Princess. He also had no way to lock in his growth as a character. No, I don't mean the metaphysical truths that he had come to understand over the course of his journey. Taking damage in Mario Brothers not only put Mario one step closer to death, but made him considerably weaker. Regular Mario lacked Super Mario's ability to break blocks, as well as Fire Mario's ability to toss magma at the passively homicidal turtles in his path.

So as a young gamer, I can recall physically jerking the controller in an attempt to avoid impending contact with a Goomba. My uncle would shout “left!”, and I would actually move the controller to the left – this was in the days before motion sensing, so naturally this accomplished nothing short of yanking the controller plug out of the system.

Why was I so terrified of taking damage? Why could a few pixels coming into contact elicit such a strong reaction? I think the answer is temporal: I didn't have all night. At some point, I would have to turn off the NES and go home, until next month when I needed another hair cut. And when the red light on the front of the console switched off, all of Mario's progress was lost, irrevocably.

The magic of Super Mario Brothers lies in its ability to push the player inexorably along the path to the finish. Mario must move forward, never back, and any kind of progress might be undone at any time. The player always comes back for more, not only out of a stubborn desire to overcome the many pitfalls of the game, but also to seek out the secrets strewn throughout – invisible treasures, hidden passages to new worlds, vines sprouting into the clouds.

Every adventure into Super Mario Brothers plays out differently than those that came before. There came a time when I began to discover secrets my uncle had never managed to unearth – and there will come a time when my children can teach me something about a game I first played twenty years ago.