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This blog is dedicated to Charkhil, avid reader (or at least avid blog-asker-forer).

In Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott satirizes the Victorian social class system as a humorous backdrop for a discussion of dimensionality. It imagines a world in which there is width and length, but no height. A sphere or cone, to a flatlander, would appear as a circle. A pyramid would be a square.

Flatland has become an allegory in popular culture to describe situations where you cannot see the big picture because of a limited horizon. It has long been on my reading list, and I finally got around to it. Here are some thoughts:

• As a philosophical/theoretical discussion, the book doesn’t add tremendously to what you could get from just reading wikipedia.
• It’s short and pleasing to read, in that old school way, similar to Lost Horizon.
• It combines wit and math, again in that old school way, such as in To Mock a Mocking Bird, a combinatory logic puzzle book which was a favorite of my youth.
• It introduces the basic concept of calculus. For example, if you trace a point you get a line. If you trace the line in another dimension, you get a square, etc. I wonder if non-math people would appreciate this description.
• The transformation of the 2-dimensional main character is first from a state of “not knowing that you do not know” to the intermediary state of “knowing there is something you do not know, but you don’t know it.”
• The main character encounters a “lineland” of one-dimension. By seeing the blindness of someone else, he is later able to contemplate his own blindness, and extrapolate to dimensions beyond. I really appreciate that the story includes both a 1-dimensional lineland, and an extrapolation beyond 3-dimensions. I think that a lot of people, though they have some clarity where they are at, fail to contemplate the peaks which still lay beyond them.

I wouldn’t indiscriminately recommend Flatland to everyone (because I don’t think everyone would appreciate it), but if any of these topics interest you, then do pick it up. It’s a short read.

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On to DotA. I’ll just give some thoughts, and the reader can add his own.

1. A DotA team is one unit, and should play as such. Even though there are 5 players and 5 heroes, they should ideally form one cohesive entity. It’s akin to the RTS games where one player controls tens of units, but they are all working towards one ultimate objective.
   
   Yes?
   
   Then therefore, any discussion of what an individual should be doing, or what an individual needs, must always remain within the context of the team. It does not make sense to talk about the individual’s game without referring back to the team’s game.

To be continued another time.