Pair Problem Solving

I use Think-Pair-Share regularly in my introductory-level general chemistry courses. It’s a nice way to inject a relevant learning activity to ensure students don’t spend too much time being passive sponges in class. It’s important that the question isn’t too easy to answer. And I always tell students ahead of time that I will be calling on them rather than asking for volunteers. That ensures everyone participates because no one wants to ‘look ignorant’ if they’ve been given time in class to think about something and check their explanations with a classmate or two. It’s quick and active!

 

I’ve done group problem solving for things that require some parallel work to generate data which then needs to be put together. Certainly it needs to be something that students cannot do alone easily in a short time period so they have to help each other divide and conquer! I don’t do this very often because it requires the right kind of problem to solve, one that takes a bit more time and resources. It also requires a bit more instruction and organization – I assign the groups to make sure there’s an appropriate ‘balance’ of different technical and communication skills.

 

I’ve participated in Pair Programming one-on-one with research students who are working on a coding project. When I’ve done this, the student is always the ‘pilot’ at the keyboard, and I’m the ‘navigator’ who watches for errors and makes (hopefully) helpful suggestions. I’ve only done this with a student who is experienced writing code and has taken several programming classes. I’ve never tried this as an instructor in a class, but then I don’t teach coding and would probably do a bad job at it.

 

What I haven’t done, but I just stumbled on, is Thinking-Aloud Pair Problem Solving (TAPPS). I’m surprised I hadn’t encountered it before, given that I read about pedagogy regularly and relatively widely. It’s similar to pair programming. Students work in pairs with one being the ‘explainer’ and the other being the ‘questioner’. This could work well if students are provided with a more challenging worked-solution of a mathematically-based problem. The explainer has to go through the solution step-by-step with the questioner asking for clarification if something is not clear or potentially providing some help if the explainer gets stuck. Or the pair could be trying to work out the solution to a problem in which case the ‘explainer’ is akin to the ‘pilot’ or ‘problem-solver’ who writes things out while the ‘questioner’ could function as a ‘navigator’.

 

I think TAPPS could work very well in mathematically-dense physical chemistry courses. I’m starting to look over my course materials for P-Chem 2 this semester to see where I might be able to incorporate TAPPS; or at the very least I will make notes to myself as the semester proceeds of what I can change for the next iteration of the class. It could also work in G-Chem 2 for some of the more-involved problems. I will probably need to experiment a little with the parameters of what works and what doesn’t. I’m sure it will also take some rejiggering of the course content so that sufficient time is given for a TAPPS activity.

 

One potential concern I have is that students may feel uncomfortable with having their working-on-the-fly process be exposed to another student, especially if they are not confident in their understanding of the material. So it might require some other less threatening pair activities earlier in the semester, and then have the same pairs tackle TAPPS activity later on after some trust has been established. To balance things out, maybe TAPPS problems should come in pairs so students take turns being ‘explainer’ and ‘questioner’ even in a single session. Since TAPPS should be aimed at something longer and more challenging than a Think-Pair-Share, different pairs might also work at different speeds so I’ll need to build in something to address this.

 

Anyway, I’m excited to potentially try TAPPS in my classes. Maybe an old dog like me can learn new tricks!

Seedship

Let’s say Planet Earth becomes uninhabitable to humans. Let’s say we have the technology to build an interstellar spacecraft to find a new habitable world. This ‘ark’ will contain some number of ‘colonists’ along with whatever resources can be included so that (human) ‘civilization’ can be jumpstarted again on extra-terrestial soil. Sounds like a plot for many a sci-fi book or movie.

 

Let’s say that any orb in our solar system is not practically habitable (sorry, Mars!) or that we humans have also fouled up any planets or moons that might have housed us. Let’s say that there’s no alien teleporter gate (as in The Expanse) or wormhole (as in Interstellar) or light-speed-jumps (too many examples!) or any of those devices in sci fi that get us over the long boring leagues of space. If so, we’d need a cryogenic setup that maintains the colonists in stasis and that wakes them up when a suitable habitable planet is found. Let’s say that no one wakes up too early (as in Passengers with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence).

 

Let’s say an Artificial Intelligence has been programmed to scan other worlds for potential habitability, and is also ‘smart’ enough to deal with the hazards of space travel. How might it decide where to land and wake up the colonists? Let’s say the A.I. has only one shot. Once the ark makes landfall, the colonists are awakened. Time for the humans to restart civilization. Hopefully they survive. Hopefully they thrive. Can the A.I. make better decisions than humans (who wouldn’t live long enough if they weren’t in cryogenic sleep)? Is the A.I. smarter than a fifth-grader?

 

Well… you get to try it out, and it just takes a few minutes of your time!

 

Let’s say the roles are reversed and YOU get to play the A.I. That’s what John Ayliff’s Seedship is about. It’s a clever little text game that puts you in the role of A.I. of the Ark! You start with a thousand colonists. The ship has scanners for a planet’s atmosphere, gravity, temperature, potential resources, and presence of water. There are ten probes you can send to the surface to get more details including the possibility of plant life, animal life, structures of other civilizations. (Will you ignore the Star Trek prime directive?) The ship has systems for landing and construction to get civilization restarted, and carries both scientific and cultural informational databases.

 

A lot can happen in space. How will A.I. YOU handle the hazards? Or the opportunities? I won’t tell you what they are so you can have fun exploring on your own.

 

I did surprisingly well on my first try finding a suitable planet. Here are my end-screen stats!

 

I’ve played ten games now to explore different possibilities. None of them were better than my first try (although one came very close). Perhaps multiple arks were sent out in different directions, and hopefully humanity finds a home in some of them – that’s what I imagine is happening when one plays multiple games. Even if you aren’t into sci-fi, you might find Seedship a fun, distracting exercise. For a few minutes, imagine you are the all-knowing A.I.!

Teaching Visually

Reading cartoonist Dan Nott’s Hidden Systems made me think about how I use visuals to communicate chemistry in my classes. Pictorial representations are crucial in chemistry because we’re making the invisible visible. Understanding the properties of molecules and how they behave requires that we consider their structural features. We don’t actually know what atoms and molecules “look” like; we can describe electron probability distributions using the equations of quantum mechanics, but most of us can’t look at a mathematical function and imagine it’s three-dimensional plot. Thus, we use models – simple ones such as balls and springs.

 

Nott examines three complex systems in his book: water, electricity, and the internet. His narrative has a strong sustainability slant that reminds the reader that there is a bigger picture. By definition, examining complex systems requires stepping back to see the larger vista. Nott skillfully weaves the forest and the trees, scoping in and out deftly, without skimping on important details. I was impressed by his use of curved lines, dashes, dots, and arrows, to illustrate the dynamics of such systems on a static page. How impoverished my own efforts are when I draw on the whiteboard or when I show a figure from the textbook. (Some textbooks have more thoughtful visuals than others, a criterion I rate highly.)

 

Reading his book made me do two things. First, I started to reimagine the second half of my first class in G-Chem 1. While I’ve cut back on the philosophical bits on the nature of elements, perhaps I should take it out entirely to make room for more visual representations of molecular structures. I already have an activity where students draw pictures to illustrate four statements in Dalton’s Atomic Theory. I circulate through the classroom and make encouraging remarks. Here’s my slide illustrating the first two statements.

 

I ask the students what shape they drew their atoms and why. Most draw circles, but not all. We discuss what properties they used to distinguish their atoms and have a brief discussion of using simple visual models as representations. Next, we get into the important definitions of molecule and compound. Here’s my slide of the third statement with some discussion questions. I think it’s interesting for students to realize how prior exposure to such model (literally) colors how they view such pictures.

 

There is also a prelude to VSEPR theory as we note the shapes of bent H₂O versus linear CO₂. We then tackle Dalton’s fourth statement of Atomic Theory that gets to the heart of chemistry (slide below). We discuss conservation of atomic matter and we hint at chemical bonds. It’s a great setup for the rest of the semester (if I say so myself).

 

As time is short, I go through the following rather rapidly. We discuss what happens when gazillions of atomistic particles are present leading to the three phases: solids, liquids, gases. (I show pictures from the textbook.) Then I cover the following definitions: pure substance versus mixture; and that the latter can be homogeneous or hetereogeneous. (Textbook pictures accompany all of this.) I then end with a quick activity to test their knowledge by showing various pictures and getting the students to provide the correct definitions. I need to spend a little more time here so I can get students to think of a system that is composed of parts, and that these systems are dynamic. I also started thinking about whether I could scaffold this entire sequence on an interactive web page and get students even more actively involved in visualizing the dynamics. Likely someone has done something similar and I should go hunt down a template I can use.

 

The second thing that Nott’s book reminded me of is the web site Alchem.ie. I stumbled on to it a couple of months back, but because I was so busy with prepping Biochem, I didn’t make time to design interactive G-Chem activities. They have a simple Reactions module that would likely help students think about stoichiometry and how to balance chemical reactions. Here’s a screenshot below where I have incorrectly balanced the Haber reaction.

 

The drawing tools to “construct” molecules are very intuitive. I had no problem figuring it out in a few seconds without looking at a video tutorial (which they also have). I think this would really help students with drawing and checking Lewis structures. Right now, we do lots of drawings in class on paper and, after some practice on simpler structures, I have students work in groups on the whiteboards on more difficult structures. But it would be ideal if starting out they had a tool that helped them evaluate their structures. The Lewis structures module in Alchem.ie has two useful diagnostics that students can turn on or off: checking for the octet rule and the formal charge. In the screenshot below, I turned them on after drawing an incorrect structure for N₂O (one of the harder cases for students).

 

I really liked the dynamic real-time adjustments in Alchem.ie. If you’re a chemistry educator or a student, I encourage playing around in the different modules. There’s something rich about thinking in pictures and in addition being able to interact with them! Something to do with the wiring of the brain that makes such pictures different from reading text (squiggly abstract pictures of a sort). Reading is very new in the history of homo sapiens. It’s no wonder that YouTube, TikTok and their successors that combine video with speech are much more popular than reading books. Ah, multimodal learning – another topic for another day!

Virtual Concrete Boats

Massive I.T. projects almost always have time and cost overruns. This was noted, but not discussed, by an expert on megaprojects in his book. All the other problematic megaprojects involved plenty of physical construction, such as building the Sydney Opera House. This nagged me. Shouldn’t we be much better at the virtual? There’s more control. We’re not at the mercy of the weather, construction materials, or supply chain snags.

 

To learn more, I read Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka. It is subtitled: “Why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better.” Pahlka has lots of experience being in the thick of trying to cleanup mega-I.T.-projects gone awry. My responses to what I learned from her book? I was horrified by the examples. I counted myself very lucky (perhaps, very privileged not to be on a low rung of the socioeconomic ladder) not to have experienced these issues from the user end. But I also now have a greater appreciation of the systemic underlying problems. I felt that Pahlka’s analysis was balanced and thoughtful.

 

The first problem with mega-I.T. revamps is that you’re doing archaeology. You have a legacy system that encodes protocols and data. It has to talk to other legacy systems. Layer upon layer has built up. Expertise in the ‘old stuff’ has dwindled. (Who still knows machine assembly language? I tried to teach myself back in the ‘80s and failed.) Workarounds have proliferated, but as older workers retire their experience is lost. Can’t we just rewrite the code from scratch? Well, yes. But you need to understand what the old system did and it’s a labyrinth, or perhaps a many-level dungeon where you’d better be prepared as you descend. You’re not battling mythical monsters but many a software engineer has been defeated by the opaqueness of inter-dependencies of legacy systems. It’s hard enough debugging my own code – I’d never volunteer to debug someone else’s. You need someone who can do I.T. forensics, a technology archaeologist. Not many people with that expertise.

 

The second problem is protocol fetish. If you work in a bureaucratic organization, you know what this is. Even if you don’t, you’ve had to deal with ‘red tape’ sometime in your life; hopefully not too often. Why do I have to deal with bean counters and pencil pushers? Why are there more forms to fill out? The frontline workers and systems aren’t to blame. Their jobs are to follow and implement protocol. They get dinged if they don’t. Much of the government apparatus does this because if there’s an inquiry or someone sues, the reflexive response is to check if protocol was followed. Ass-covering is the game here. It doesn’t matter whether you have the right intentions, the moral high ground, or can make a good argument that you followed the spirit rather than the letter of the law. When the gavel comes down, the question is: Did you follow protocol?

 

Pahlka relays a conversation with a senior technology official as she tries to get to the root of a problem. The official is cheerful and tries to be helpful but oftentimes he would say: “That’s a question for the program people.” Pahlka pushes to understand why he avoids discussing what the system is designed to do. He respondsL “I’ve spent my entire career training my team not to have an opinon on business requirements… If they ask us to build a concrete boat, we’ll build a concrete boat.” Why? “Because that way, when it goes wrong, it’s not our fault.” In a megaproject, Pahlka notes that there are many stakeholders involved and they give “very specific direction to the technical teams, who can then feel as if they’re merely to do what they’ve been told.”

 

This leads to the third problem: the one-way flow of information and direction from policy to implementation. Pahlka calls this a “waterfall organization” and contrasts it to an agile one. The problem in the hierarchical many-layer top-down approach is that too often, the policy makers think that implementation is someone else’s job downstream. The top dogs think they’ve done their high-level more-valued job, and it’s up to the peons below them to implement. Translating policy to implementation is not as easy as it might seem at first glance especially if you don’t understand the first two problems and you don’t want to hear upstream feedback that makes you look bad. It’s no wonder so many people relate to Dilbert.

 

Pahlka writes: “The sure sign of a waterfall organization is how the people within it treat data. In an agile, empowered organization, data is a useful tool for adjusting course. The people in the organization not only have access to data and the ability to understand it but have the power to decide what to do based on it. If the compass says you’ve drifted off course, no one summons the inspector general or calls for a hearing. You just turn the wheel. In a waterfall organization, on the other hand, data functions less like a compass that helps you steer and more like an after-the-fact evaluation, a grade you get that says how well or poorly you did on something that has already happened… For people stuck in waterfall frameworks, data is not a tool in their hands. It’s something other people use as a stick to beat them with.”

 

In a waterfall organization, you have a lot of project managers rather than product managers. Look at the org chart of most I.T. organizations and you’ll see plenty of project managers. (I learned about project management while serving on multiple I.T. advisory committees as a faculty member, and I have a generally good idea how it works.) The key priority of project managers is to get all the requirement boxes checked off. Pahlka writes: “The idea that some choices could be made, and in fact would very much need to be made, was unspeakable, perhaps unthinkable.” User experience isn’t a priority as a deliverable. Isn’t that shocking? I’m not surprised. I’m also reminded that sometimes when I’m very busy I go on autopilot and unconsciously think that if I ‘delivered’ by lesson plans to my students, I’ve checked off the box on teaching them. Instead, I should be constantly managing the outcome or the product. Are students actually learning? Is what I’m doing actually working?

 

To reduce hierarchy and get stakeholder input, it has become popular to design by committee. It’s one way to put a check on autocratic power. Academia is rife with this approach and it turns out that democratic governments also attempt to do this. That’s the fourth problem, although it’s a problem because of the previous problems. Systemic problems compound on one another when you’re stuck in a system! Why do you have long forms to fill out with all sorts of ‘edge cases’ included? Design by committee! I’m not against wide user input, I think it’s a good thing. But in a committee of ‘equals’ where no one should seem more prominent than the others, policies become bloated. And you’ll be layering them on top of previous policies thereby increasing the bloat and the archaeological layers. I’m likely heretical in academia for believing that more often than not, reaching consensus is overrated, and informed decisiveness is a better approach.

 

While Pahlka’s book focused on mega-I.T.-projects in government, I think her analysis is very applicable to organizational management more broadly. Her emphasis on the systemic and how one might go about improving the system balances the horrors described with practical good advice. She also celebrates wins and there are examples of how government I.T. expertise has seen improvements and successes. Littered through the book is her exhortation that people in private enterprise should spend a stint in government and that more crossover will be beneficial to everyone. There are significant differences between government and the private sector, and she points the varying consequences. It’s a clear-eyed book that doesn’t avoid the messiness of systems and people. I hope more people read it and that fewer concrete boats are built.

Invasion: Fungus Edition

I love eating mushrooms. I love the aroma of cooked mushrooms. I know mushrooms are a fungus, and I generally feel positive when fungi are mentioned. My limited knowledge of fungi as the great recyclers comes from Merlin (the scientist, not the magician). My positive feelings have reduced now that I’ve read a second book featuring fungi: Blight by Emily Monosson is subtitled “Fungi and the coming pandemic”. It’s mostly about invasion.

 

“Rusts, molds, mildews, and mushrooms – we live in a cloud of fungal spores, microscopic spherules of nascent fungi. Fungi are everywhere.” Monosson goes on to list a wide range of examples including uncommon ones such as “in the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl, and behind damp towels hung to dry on the International Space Station”. The spores move easily. They’ve evolved to do so, staying protected as they are carried to favorable conditions where they proceed to have a growth spurt. We humans are carriers too!

 

Fungi are useful, and not just as edible delectable mushrooms. They’re a key bridge for recycling biomolecules, and many are symbiotic organisms. We have them in our gut microbiome. Life-saving penicillin comes from a fungus. But when you’re a recycler, you’re just as likely to be a bringer of death, not just a bringer of life. Monosson writes: “Most fungi live if not in collaboration, then in peace with other living things. But some do not. Some feed on the living rather than the dead and dying.” These are the fungal pathogens, and they wreak havoc as invaders.

 

In one chapter after another, Blight goes through a horror story of fungal invasion. Frogs, bananas, bats, chestnut trees, and more. Humans play a large part in unwittingly facilitating this invasion, be it through prioritizing monoculture cash crops, trading in exotic animals, indiscriminate antibiotic use, and carrying dirt, seed, spores via globalized trade and travel. Human fungal infections on the surface of our bodies are typically annoying but manageable. But once they invade the blood, fungal infections have a high mortality rate. There aren’t many of those yet, but there might be more. Why? Fungi prefer lower temperatures than found in most warm-blooded mammals. But with global warming and more significant hotter microclimates, fungi begin to adapt. It’s the law of evolution. As more warm-temperature fungi proliferate, the increased chances of a pathogenic invader arising becomes significant.

 

When an invasive species arrives on the scene, the question is whether the defenders have evolved appropriate mechanisms to survive and fight off the invaders. Humans have the additional advantage of building tools to aid the defense, even though we’ve not always been wise about taking precautions and anticipating side-effects. By breeding plants and animals to be juicier or fatter, we’ve inevitably bred out potentially protective wild-type genes. And when the invaders arrive, they cause devastation that we try to stem off with chemical warfare. We don’t fully understand the complexity of life and death. Maybe we never will.

 

I also enjoy the aroma of fresh bread. Yeast, a fungus, helps this process along. I’ve been reading The Expanse sci-fi series, and there’s an interesting conversation in Book 6 (Babylon’s Ashes) involving a scientist working to engineer a ‘harvester’ yeast to “generate its own sugars from the radioplasts, and … convert that into higher-complexity nutrients.” In the story, radioplasts are reverse-engineered chloroplasts in yeast that photosynthesize very efficiently and a way to increase food production. Actually, the scientist is being interrogated by a militarized junta who suspect him of being a traitor or part of a rebellion. Thinking he’s about to die, the scientist launches into a soliloquy about biology. I’ve strung together excerpts of his speech.

 

“Biological equilibria? They’re not straightforward. Never. Everyone thinks that it’s simple. New, invasive species comes in and it has an advantage and outcompetes, right? That’s the story, but there’s another part to that. Always, always, the local environment resists. Yes, yes, maybe badly. Maybe without a clear idea of coping with novelty… Even when an invasive species takes over, even when it wins, there is a counterbalancing process… And that process is so deep in the fabric of living systems, it can never be absent. However well the new species is designed, however overwhelming its advantages seem to be, the pushback will always be there. If one native impulse is overcome, there will be another… Conspecifics are outcompeted? Fine, the bacteria and viral microecologies will push back. Adapt to those, and it’ll be micronutrient levels and salinity and light. And the thing is, even when the novel species does win? Even when it takes over every niche… that struggle alone changes what it is. Even when you wipe out or co-opt the local environment, you’re changed by the pushback. Even when the previous organisms are driven to extinction, they leave markers behind. What they are can never, never be completely erased.”

 

I think we are the invasive species par excellence of Planet Earth. We aren’t content to increase the energy content within our bodies, we are the biggest guzzlers of energy for our lifestyle. A decade ago, I would not have anticipated that we’d be burning through planetary energy resources to build server farms to mine bitcoin, a virtual rather than physical resource. And as anthropogenic actions accelerate rising temperatures, the fungi will rise to meet the challenge. We might soon become the invaded. Perhaps the biological recyclers will have the last say.

Magnetoreception

How do migrating species find their way to a specific beach or island or cove or rock hundreds of miles away? One possibility is by using the Earth’s magnetic field as a guide. It’s a controversial theory because the magnetic field is weak and scientists haven’t unambiguously determined if organisms have the appropriate magnetoreceptors. But it means a wide-open field of study and some clever ideas have been posited. I have no expertise in this area so I’m learning all this from Chapter 12 of Ed Yong’s marvelous An Immense World.

 

We tool-inventing humans made the compass. It can be as simple as a lodestone composed of the natural mineral magnetite (Fe₃O₄). Modern compasses are composed of a combination of materials – what goes into making them is quite interesting (but not the subject of this post)! But the lodestone or compass is a tool separate from our body and our evolutionary instincts. For an organism to utilize magnetoreception, the detector must be an integral part of the body and influence behavior directly.

 

There is evidence that at migration time, birds in captivity try to move in a particular direction. By placing their enclosures within an artificially-generated magnetic field, they can be fooled into moving in a different direction. Other organisms that seem to show magnetoreceptive behavior include monarch butterflies, brown bats, mole rats and sea turtles. How these senses have evolved even as Earth’s magnetic field has ‘flipped’ multiple times remains a mystery.

 

Loggerhead turtles seem able to ‘read’ a ‘magnetic map’ of their surroundings. Impressively, they can detect both the inclination and the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field. As Yong writes: “… most spots in the ocean have a unique combination of the two. Together they act like coordinates, much like latitude and longitude.” The turtles have “both a compass to tell them which way to go and a map to tell them where they were. Only with both senses can they change direction at the appropriate places.” But because the field changes, an organism has to keep moving because “magnetic information isn’t especially accurate over short [distances]” but can be effectively used over long distances.

 

Yong discusses the three possible hypotheses for magnetoreception. The first is magnetite, and it’s known that some bacteria utilize them for orientation. But there isn’t any smoking gun evidence for appropriate receptors in more complex organisms. The second is via electromagnetic induction. Electric fish can induce an electric current. If there were receptors that can detect the interaction between the generated current and Earth’s magnetic field, it could be a compass of sorts. But while this might work in water (a conductive fluid), it wouldn’t work in air. How might birds, bees or bats find their way? One suggestion is that the inner ear might contain detector proteins, but once again no smoking gun.

 

The third hypothesis is intriguing. When photons hit certain molecules such as flavins, they can create a radical pair – two unpaired electrons. The progress of this reaction, more specifically the spin-flip rate, is affected by the presence of a magnetic field. As a quantum chemist, I find this idea attractive. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this was proposed by Klaus Schulten (a famous computational biophysicist, i.e., essentially an interdisciplinary chemist) whose idea was ignored for twenty years until cryptochromes were discovered in animal eyes and there seems to be a link between certain photon wavelengths to the visual centers of the brain in songbirds. Yong writes: “Songbirds might be able to see Earth’s magnetic field, perhaps as a subtle visual cue that overlays their normal field of view.” Still, no smoking gun.

 

Yong ends the chapter with a cautionary note: “The study of animal behavior is also plagued by human behavior. People tend to see the patterns they want to see… Scientists are no less prone to such biases… but they do have ways of preventing those biases from interfering with their work… Making matters worse, the quest to find the elusive magnetoreceptor has become a race. The promise of glory and prizes for the winner has created incentives for fast research and big claims, rather than careful and methodical work… Even if scientists do everything right, they might still flounder because magnetic fields are imperceptible… You might be exposing animals to erratic or unnatural fields, and you’d have no idea unless you were constantly doing checks with the highest-quality [and very expensive] equipment.”

 

It turns out to be very difficult to replicate magnetoreception studies because the detected field is weak, and the process is inherently very ‘noisy’. We don’t even know the appropriate window of time to make these measurements since we don’t know how the organisms are detecting and responding to the signal. Do they time-average the signals? We don’t know. It’s very likely that migrating animals use more than one sense. Magnetoreception may play a role but so would other environmental cues. That’s a good reminder to us: Except for the blind, we humans rely dominantly on vision. But often below our conscious notice, our brain is integrating signals from sound, smell, touch and other cues. We’ve evolved to do so for good reason. And to detect magnetic fields? We make tools!

Nations: Rise and Fall

I recently finished a full six-player game of History of the World and found myself pondering the final status of the world. How might history change if certain empires did not arise? The game ends about a hundred years ago at the dawn of the twentieth century. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany gets the final turn. In a full six-player game, six empires (randomly drawn) do not make their appearance. Below are photos showing the state of the world at game’s end.

 

In this game, the United States did not arise as a nation-empire in the final epoch. Thus, North America is a patchwork with parts controlled by England, Spain, Germany, and Russia. Interestingly the Mayans still hold Central America in strength! In South America, the Portuguese control the south. The Inca empire is overrun by several groups ending with German control of Peru. England controls Guiana in the northeast.

 

Europe remains a patchwork of states. In the British Isles, the Scots have held out fortified against England. Go William Wallace! Germany controls much of Northern Europe, displacing France which retains the Spanish peninsula and northwest Africa. The Swedes have maintained their neutrality in strength. Southern Europe has remnants of the Romans, the Goths, and the Holy Roman Empire. Eastern Europe and much of western Asia are controlled by the Ottoman Turks. A key missing empire that did not show up were the Arabs.

 

This leaves the Middle East as a patchwork of states. Old Crusader states still hold Palestine and environs. There are remnants of Macedonia in the Levant and the Sassanids occupy modern-day Iraq. Of the old empires, bits of the Egyptian and Carthaginian empires have held out in north Africa since the first two epochs. The sub-Sahara has migrants from India. An ancient Gold Coast empire still holds out against colonization. The Portuguese rather than the Dutch have colonized South Africa, while Spain instead of France occupies Madagascar. In India, there are tiny pockets of the Maurya dynasty in Hindu Kush. The Mughal empire is still ascendant. England has a foothold in Goa. The Guptas still hold Hindu Kush, the northwest, and Ceylon but have managed to forge ties with the Malay States.

 

The Khmers hold the mainland of southeast Asia. China is controlled almost solely by the Manchu dynasty except Germany has forced open some ports. The Japanese empire still hold their ancestral lands, while England has colonized Australia. There were a number of attempted colonial land grabs by the European states, not all successful. Unlike my last game two years ago (with five players), there was more of a mosaic at the end of the game – tiny pockets of isolated nation-states rather than great empires. The no-shows (Epochs II to VII respectively) were: Assyria, the Celts, the Arabs, the Chola dynasty, the Timurid Emirates, and the U.S. Many monuments were destroyed, but a number still stand in China and Europe.

 

I could design an Epoch VIII to bring us to the present age, except others have already done so for the newer edition of the game. But I’d have to bend the idea of how an empire is defined. If anything, we now see more breakup rather than consolidation. The world today is a strange patchwork of nation-states, with layer upon layer accreting on the bones and dust of old empires. It’s no wonder such entities carry so much political baggage, and world peace remains elusive.