Game of Thrones D&D character alignment charts

For tonight's collapse-and-decline-themed entertainment entry, I update the most popular entry posted during the second year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News and the third most popular entry of all time so far, Dungeons and Dragons alignments for Game of Thrones characters.  I was inspired by the premiere of Season 4 of Game of Thrones tonight and also by the conversation I had in the comments of the original entry.*

Lindsay: Hmm. I would've put Tyrion at Neutral Good, and I'm not sure I'd give Cersei or Littlefinger an Evil alignment. Cersei seems more Chaotic Neutral to me, particularly the "amoral, selfish asshole" subtype of Chaotic Neutral. I have no idea where to put Littlefinger.

Brienne of Tarth, my favorite character, is obviously Lawful Good.

Jaime Lannister changes about midway through the series so far ... on the Good/Evil axis he moves more toward Good, although I don't know that he changes much on Law/Chaos.

Definitely agree that Varys is Lawful Neutral. I'd also say that Doran Martell is a good example of that rather tricky alignment. (At least, *I* find it hard to figure out.)

Me: The thing about this table is that it's entirely for the first season. Later seasons, which feature different characters as well as showing character development of the survivors from the first season (Poor Ned Stark--even without reading the books, the casting of Sean Bean should have been a giveaway that he'd die at the end of the first book) result in alignment charts by the same creators as this one that look more like what you think. I should post them in a follow up.

From Mighty God King, the same source originally used for Season 1 via io9, are the charts for Seasons 2 and 3.  First, Season 2.


Next, Season 3.


I'm looking forward to the chart for Season 4 already.

*I was also a bit worn out from writing My readers love to write comments about pets here and Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Ocean inside Enceladus) at Daily Kos, so I was looking for an easy entry to write.  I found one.

SciFi is Now: Mugshot from DNA

Discovery News explains this bit of science fiction made real in Using DNA To Create A Suspect's Mugshot!

Technology used to fight crime and catch criminals is getting pretty advanced. A new experimental technique can take the DNA from a single strand of hair and generate a mugshot! Anthony is here to tell you how this technology works and what it could mean for the future of crime fighting.

Here is the original press release from Penn State: 3-D model links facial features and DNA By A'ndrea Elyse Messer on March 20, 2014.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- DNA can already tell us the sex and ancestry of unknown individuals, but now an international team of researchers is beginning to connect genetics with facial features, degrees of femininity and racial admixture.

"By jointly modeling sex, genomic ancestry and genotype, the independent effects of particular alleles on facial features can be uncovered," the researchers state today (Mar. 20) in PLOS Genetics. They add that "by simultaneously modeling facial shape variation as a function of sex and genomic ancestry along with genetic markers in craniofacial candidate genes, the effects of sex and ancestry can be removed from the model thereby providing the ability to extract the effects of individual genes."

In essence, by including sex and racial admixture, researchers can learn about how certain genes and their variations influence the shape of the face and its features.

Gloves to cover fingerprints won't be enough in the future.  When this technology is perfected, perps will have to wear hair nets, too.  Of course, their skin will still shed, leaving dead cells in the dust at the crime scenes.  So, criminals in environment suits, too?

My readers love to write comments about pets

In Student worksheets for the second and third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News, I mentioned that I was going out of order.

I'm doing something irregular by writing this entry now.  I'm skipping the tenth and eleventh place entries and featuring the twelfth most read one instead.
...
Don't worry.  I'll work back up to them in the next two retrospectives.

I'm returning to the tenth place entry now, but I'm also examining the entries with the most comments.  As I wrote in Statistics for the third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News, comments were up last year in comparison to the previous year and first year, and one of the reasons why is that I've written about pets, which seems to get my readers to comment more.  In fact, two of my entries about pets have the most comments of any on this blog.

The entry from the third year of the blog that received the most comments was Dog census in Michigan posted on June 4, 2013, which received seven comments and 341 page views, making it also the tenth most read entry of the third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.  The person I credit for driving page views was Julie Bass the Garden Renegade, who linked to this entry at her blog and then commented on it there.

i have several stories all competing to be shared with you, but the one that just flipped my switch was one posted by my friend pinku-sensei over at crazy eddie’s motie news (http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2013/06/dog-census-in-michigan.html).

here’s my satirical take on it, and then you can hop on over to his blog and read the actual (non-hysterical) story:

basically the folks who rule the universe in a certain city in michigan (but you could really insert any name of any city in michigan, because they are all equally plausible in this story…) can now scramble a tactical team in full gear, assemble on your property, breach your door, and strip search all members of your household to determine if you are sheltering any fugitive animals. (i wonder if you could tell them there is no such thing as an illegal animal? or that they just aren’t documented yet???) if they determine you to be on the wrong side of the law, they will publicly flay you alive or some such other appropriate punishment, but not before confiscating all of your worldly possessions and transferring your assets unto themselves, because that is the actual real reason for their sudden diligence in the pet realm; they are lacking in funds.

it’s all about the payday… and the power…and the pecking order…

In one day, her link drove more than 95 people to read the entry, and the page views continued to pile up.  Thank you, Julie!

That wasn't all.  She vented her frustration in a comment at my blog.

how do you type the loudest possible scream??? this is my 3rd time reading your post, and the first time i was calm enough to watch the news clip... if the city is so benevolent to want to hire someone to go door-to-door to give information, how about giving info just about shots and spay/neuter? if they pay too much to transport animals to the humane society (thus justifying this program to raise money for the city by invading your privacy), here's a thought: STOP DOING THAT AND MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS, CITY!!! if an animal is dangerous and menacing, dial 911, otherwise, man up and stop expecting the city to be your babysitter unless you want then to be overbearing like this knocking on doors nonsense. ugh. wanna know how i really feel???

I did my best to give a helpful response.

Hi, Julie!

"how do you type the loudest possible scream???"

ALL CAPS and formatted with the BOLD (or STRONG) HTML tags, like so.

AAAAAUUUUGGGHHH!

I'd add the BIG HTML tag, but the comments section of Blogspot won't accept it.

That, or just embed a screaming sheep video.

Julie appreciated my suggestion.

okay, so now i have a new reason to love you for a source of information: the screaming sheep video!!! priceless!!! who knew?!?!?!?!?! ;)

She liked it so much, she embedded it in her next entry, thank you sir, may i have another?  As I wrote in a comment on that entry, I am so glad I introduced her to that meme.

Speaking of which, here it is, the screaming sheep video.


As Julie wrote, "and how was your day?"

As active as this entry was, it wasn't the one that had the most comments left at it last year.  Follow over the jump for an entry from the second year that finally got the attention it deserved during the third year.

Student worksheets for the second and third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News

I made the following program note in Poverty and austerity for the third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

I'm showing "The End of Suburbia" this week and this is the kind of information I can share with my students.
...
Entries about "The End of Suburbia" and other films I show my students will be the subject of the next retrospective.  How timely!

I'm doing something irregular by writing this entry now.  I'm skipping the tenth and eleventh place entries and featuring the twelfth most read one instead.*  It's because of the timing.  Otherwise I wouldn't be posting this retrospective while my students are looking for answers.  I can tell, as "end of suburbia answers" is one of this week's top search terms.  That written, it's not the top post in this entry.  Instead, it's Showing "An Inconvenient Truth" to my students again posted on April 15, 2013, which had 337 page views.  This did not get any play over at Kunstler's blog at the time, as the closest I got was mentioning that I was "compiling environmental news for Earth Day ranging from local events to how NASA is marking the occasion."  Instead, I think it was through web search, although "Inconvenient Truth" did not get above the threshold of 81 uses that would have been recorded among the top ten search terms for the history of the blog.


The next most read entry is the one I promised, Guide to entries that contain answers to 'The End of Suburbia' from November 17, 2013.  It came in thirteenth among all the entries I posted during the third year of this blog with 321 page views.  Unlike the entry with the worksheet for "An Inconvenient Truth," this entry earned its page views by my promoting it at Kunstler's blog.

I’ve been giving my students that message of Jim’s for the past five years, as I’ve been showing “The End of Suburbia” to them along with a worksheet they have to fill out that whole time. Last week was one of those showings, and I found two student responses to it worth repeating.

The first was from a student who has been critical of Jim’s message, who, after hearing our host predict that “Americans will elect maniacs who promise to allow them to keep their McMansions and their commutes and that’s going to produce a lot of political friction, probably a lot of violence, probably a threat to our democratic institutions” responded “I’m amazed that all these predictions were made ten years ago and they’ve all come true.” That’s why I keep showing the movie.

The second was a student who found the worksheet posted to my blog (that’s not a first; students have been doing that for years), and gathered enough courage to ask me where the answers were. I have them scattered all over my blog, so I posted a guide for him to find them. He won’t find them all; I’ve only written about half the questions over the past two years. Still, here’s to his following the links.

That's right.  Not only do my students read my blog, but I ever respond to them here if they leave a comment.

Those are the entries about my worksheets that made it into the top twenty for the third year of the blog.  Follow over the jump for the entries from the previous year about "The End of Suburbia" and "Food Inc." that earned enough page views to gain entry into the top twenty for the second year of the blog.

Evolution news for April Fools

I haven't posted any evolution news here since Discovery News on radiometric dating.  That understates the amount of evolution stories I have in my archive, as I haven't posted any of those since Evolution news for Darwin Day.  That means it's time for another compilation.

Under the "if it moves, it leads" policy, Discovery News goes first with Humans Are Still Evolving!

Human evolution happened slowly over the course of thousands and thousands of years. Are we still evolving today? Trace discusses a few recent findings showing how humans, even in the past 5,000 years, are continuing to evolve!

Speaking of humans still evolving, Jennifer Viegas of Discovery News has more on the topic in How Humans Went From Being One Shade to Many.

Our primate ancestors that first lost most of their body hair were likely pale skinned, according to a new study that concludes our human forebears probably evolved darker skin later to safeguard against skin cancer and other problems that can result from too much sun exposure.

The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, helps explain both the historical origins and biological significance of skin coloration in humans.

Follow over the jump for the rest of the paleontology and evolution stories from the past two months of Overnight News Digest on Daily Kos.

Norman Borlag statue in U.S. Capitol

I mentioned Norman Borlag yesterday in class while I was lecturing about the Green Revolution.  That reminded me that I had the following article in my archives after having used it in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Another possible HIV cure) on Daily Kos.

Texas A&M: Norman Borlaug to be enshrined in U.S. Capitol on March 25
Posted on March 7, 2014 by Angel Futrell

The State of Iowa will install a bronze statue of Norman Borlaug, Ph.D., the famous agricultural scientist and humanitarian who saved millions of lives worldwide, in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on March 25, the centennial anniversary of Dr. Borlaug’s birth.

Borlaug’s guiding mission in life was that “Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world” and he worked tirelessly to improve agriculture, nutrition, and the food system for people around the globe. Borlaug founded The World Food Prize in 1986 with the hope that it would come to be seen as the “Nobel Prize for Food and Agriculture” to recognize and inspire breakthrough achievements in feeding the world. His prodigious achievements earned him the title, “Father of the Green Revolution,” and his statue being installed in the U.S. Capitol will be of great significance to people and farmers everywhere.

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner and other congressional leaders made the announcement today, and Iowa Governor Terry E. Branstad and Lt. Governor Kim Reynolds, along with Amb. Kenneth M. Quinn, President of Borlaug’s World Food Prize Foundation, held a press conference to celebrate this momentous occasion and kick off Borlaug Centennial events.

A belated happy 100th birthday, Dr. Borlag, even if I'm just wishing your memory and legacy well.

Poverty and austerity for the third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News

The seventh most read entry posted during the third year of the blog was Austerity on the personal level from the AP, which earned 431 page views according to the secondary counter.  As I mentioned in Popular retrospectives for the second and third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News, it was briefly in the top ten according to the primary counter.

The entry about Examiner.com that made a move last year was Examiner.com article on tax policy forum, posted September 17, 2012.  As of March 21, 2013, it had 211 views according to the secondary counter, enough for 18th place among all entries posted that year.  Since then, it began a steady rise into the top ten all-time, knocking off first Austerity on the personal level from the AP, which itself kicked out Old man yelling at chair accidentally reveals a deeper truth.

My stats didn't fall in October has more details on the entry's rise.

Austerity on the personal level from the AP surpassed Old man yelling at chair accidentally reveals a deeper truth with 406 page views to become the 10th most viewed entry in the blog's history.  That happened entirely by linking to it at Kunstler's blog.

The entry was Creepily Close, and I didn't even link to it in my first comment there, but my second, when lsjogren confronted me.

“You don’t get it, neon. The consumer binge cannot be sustained”

Oh, I get it. After all, I did write, “Just because the money might not be there doesn’t mean the desire won’t be.” There aren’t enough resources now for all seven billion humans on this planet to live like Americans have for the past 50 or 60 years, and there certainly won’t be enough for the nine billion of us who could be here in 2050 to do so when there will be less fossil fuel energy. That won’t stop Americans for wishing for the Moon for quite a while. Reality will have to swat them really hard for them to give up on their dreams.

Some people are getting the message, though, and are adjusting to their new, less wealthy circumstances, as the AP video at the link shows.

That was enough to pull about 400 page views, most of the 451 that came in from that entry of Kunstler's to my blog that week.

Follow over the jump to more entries about poverty and austerity that made the top 20 most read list from the third year of this blog, including the top entry about Detroit's bankruptcy.

NASA warns about the collapse of industrial civilization

In the very first comment to Captain Erikson's Equation at Greer's blog, reader Ventriloquist posted a link to Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse' at The Guardian.  Greer responded that Ventriloquist was the 21st person to forward that to him, adding "Yes, it's an interesting study, and I'll probably comment on it in a bit."

Since this is right up my alley and Discovery News has a video about it, here goes: Has NASA Predicted The End of Civilization?

A recent NASA-backed study predicted that civilization is on the verge of collapse! We hear doomsday theories like this all the time, so should we be taking this one seriously? Laci is joined by Dr. Ian O'Neill, Discovery News' resident solar physicist and doomsday specialist, to discuss why this prediction any different than others.

This is exactly what I fear and what Greer and others have been predicting for years.  Time to redouble my Crazy Eddie efforts to warn people about it and work to postpone it and prepare for it.

Top April Fools jokes for 2014

I started today with A prank for April Fools Day in which January Jones told Jimmy Fallon of the Tonight Show about a prank she pulled a few days ago.  That wasn't really an April Fools joke, as it was early, but it made for a good placeholder until the real ones for today rolled in.  They have, beginning with CNN's Best and worst April Fool's jokes.

Best and worst April Fool's jokes from Cheetos fragrance to an edible pizza box. CNN's Jeanne Moos reports.

I  used both the corporate PR and humor labels for Daily Kos on 'Cosmos' and manufactured ignorance, but that was humor about corporate PR that wasn't itself funny.  I've never used it when the corporate PR was intentionally funny--until now.  Happy April Fools Day!

Follow over the jump for more geeky humor for the day.

A prank for April Fools Day

I have nothing related to science-fiction, sustainability, or collapse today, but I do have January Jones Pulled a Great Prank from the Tonight Show.

After some truck talk, January tells Jimmy about a prank she just pulled on an old flame who she grew up with in South Dakota.

Oh, wait, there are some things on topic in this clip--cars and real estate.  April Fools!