An Embarassment of Blocks

As I've started to progress at Studio X and learn more material I'm finding it difficult to come up with good, distinctive names for the blocks used in various forms. This is a function of several factors:

• Studio X doesn't name blocks like it names strikes. Every strike (more or less) has a unique, descriptive name, whereas the same is not true for blocks.
• There are a lot of important variations on basic blocks which are hard to describe concisely in English.

So I'd like to take a moment to think about blocking terminology in the context of the notation system and see if I can't come up with some systematic conventions that will help simplify the blocking bestiary.

The ultimate purpose of a block is to prevent a strike from hitting the defender. Should we describe blocks in terms of the strike? I think not, because there's more than one way to block a strike and one block may be effective against multiple strikes. but, instead of describing blocks in terms of the anticipated strike what if we describe the block in terms of the region being protected? That seems like a better mapping since each block is designed to protect a particular region of the body against a particular class of strikes.

What do I need to know to execute a block?

• The region to be protected. We've already come up with a system for designating regions in our discussion of targeting and grappling.
• The region that serves as the blocking surface.
• The direction of the strike. We can obtain sufficient granularity using the 6 cardinal directions (front/back, left/right, up/down).
• How the energy will be dissipated. This item merits further thought because it's not something that we've tackled before.

What you do with the energy of an incoming strike is one of the fundamental (if not THE fundamental) dichotomies in the martial arts: "hard" vs. "soft", "internal" vs. "external", "yin" vs. "yang". At one extreme the defender can halt the strike, dissipating the energy using eir musculo-skeletal system. Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, they dodge/deflect the strike, allowing the energy to dissipate harmlessly once it misses the target.

So, for example, a block could be described as a "rightward deflection of a front/rising strike to the stomach using the right hand" except for the tiny problem that, while the description is technically accurate, it's totally useless for most purposes. Students, especially beginning ones, will have no idea at all what block is being called for. The challenge in front of us is to translate this technical description into something approaching plain English.

Slicing the problem another way, let's switch the focus from the incoming strike to the performance of the block. Using region designators for the blocking surface and area being protected still seems like a good idea to me; "block your stomach with the palm of your right hand" should be sufficiently clear to even a beginning student. What's left is figuring out a good way to describe the motion of the blocking surface relative to the protected region.

After chewing on the problem for awhile I've managed to convince myself that it is sufficient for mnemonic and didactic purposes if we describe:

• The nature of the motion: Is it linear or circular?
• The direction of motion in terms of upward vs. downward and inward (towards the center line) vs. outward (away from the center line)¹.

The template for describing a block would then be something like "<linear|circular> <inward|outward> <upward|downward> of the <region> using the <region>". Which, while clear, is not particularly concise.

When I was writing the original draft of this post this was the point where I went off into the details off what blocking notation might look like. But since then I've come to the realization that there's a fairly deep symmetry between blocks and strikes. In the case of a strike you're projecting a striking surface along a defined trajectory towards a target region. In the case of blocking you're moving a blocking surface in a defined trajectory in relation to the target region that's being protected. It's been easier to describe strikes than blocks because strikes have a better nomenclature, thus allowing us to sidestep the specification of striking surface and trajectory. So really, what it comes down to is finding a decent naming system for blocks. Let's turn our attention to that for the moment, shall we?

Blocks have, as mentioned above, the following characteristics:

• A blocking surface
• A trajectory that can (usually) be described in terms of circular/linear/static and inwards/outwards/upwards/downwards
• A region being protected

How do we turn the above into comprehensible names? As strikes tend to end with "punch" or "kick" blocks should end with "block". Preceeding the "punch" or "kick" is usually a descriptive name that implies trajectory and striking surface; it's these descriptive names that we're lacking when it comes to blocks. It seems to me that the blocking surface should, in general, preceede the "block", giving use name like "palm block", "elbow block", "forearm block", and so on. The remaining trajectory items can be described by prepending the appropriate identifiers in the order which makes the most sense in English: "inward linear palm block", "outward circular forearm block", "static palm block", and so on. In the cases where descriptive names do exist, such as "intercepting block", we can use those instead. Changes in trajectory, such as blocking to the side rather than to the front, can be handled using the usual direction notation. The only item that remains to be described is the region being protected; that can be done using the same notation we currently use for describing the target of strikes. The only difference is that, in the case of blocks, the region specifier is interpreted as a region on the defender's body rather than a region on the attacker's body. One final simplification that this symmetry brings is that I can get rid of the use of "double" in block descriptions since a "double" block can be written as paired left and right blocks of the same type.

Ok boys and girls, I'm off to experiment with the above and see if it works in practice.

---

1 Technically there's a third dichotomy, towards vs. away from, but it's a subtlety which doesn't seem all that important in this context.

A Grammar for Describing Forms, V2

I've made more headway on my project to simplify notation typesetting, details of which can be found at Shiny Ideas. As a byproduct of this work I've refined the grammar which I previously described here; the updated version is as follows:

start → line*
line → blankline | actionline | definitionline
blankline → [ \t]* '\n'
actionline → left ',' center ',' right (',' annotation ){0,1} '\n]
definitionline → \w+ '\n'
left → atom*
center → atom*
right → atom*
annotation → .+
atom → direction | jump | turn | literal | action
direction → 'LEFT' | 'RIGHT' | 'FORWARD' | 'BACK' | 'BACKLEFT' | 'BACKRIGHT' | 'FORWARDLEFT' | 'FORWARDRIGHT'
jump → 'JUMP'
turn → ( 'TURNLEFT' | 'TURNRIGHT' ) ( '(' \d+ ')' ){0,1}
literal → \" .+ \"
action → symbol ( '(' modifiers+ ')' ){0,1}
modifiers → direction | symbol | grapple
symbol → \w+
grapple → 'GRAPPLE'

The changes from the previous version are as follows:

• Addition of definition lines. These are intended to allow named blocks of notation to be interpolated with another notation block i.e. if you have a particular sequence that repeats multiple times you can define it once and then insert it in multiple locations. Note that this feature only makes sense in the context of the larger notation document format that I'm currently developing.
• Action lines may now include an optional annotation.

There may be a few more, small modifications as I actually put this grammar to use, but at the moment I believe it encapsulates all the notation I've developed so far.

Book Review: Keeper Of Light And Dust

Against my better judgement I picked up a copy of Keeper of Light and Dust by Natasha Mostert, a novel about an MMA fighter, a chi vampire, and the woman who loves them. As a work of fiction it doesn't amount to much: the characters are lightly-penciled archetypes, the plot is predictable¹, and the computer bits brought to mind nothing so much as the worst hacking scene of all times. At least it kept me entertained on the plane.

However... the book merits discussion for reasons apart from its plot. It contains a lot of concepts related (sometimes tangentially) to the martial arts, many of which I'd never been exposed to before. Being the kind of person who collects verbiage like other people collect shot glasses I'm compelled to research these terms and present them for your amusement. Additionally, Mostert brings in a lot of real-world research throughout the work which putatively supports the existence of chi. Since one of my stated purposes in running this blog is to take the woo out of the martial arts this presents an excellent opportunity to critically review this research. This, in turn, will lead to some general criticism of the book's presentation of chi and the scientific method.

Interesting MA Terms From The Book

The first item is a cluster of 3 concepts: seme, haragei, and kobudera. I've run into seme in the past while reading Miyamoto Musashi: His Life And Writings², but the other two are completely new to me. Seme is hard to articulate; it's attacking without actually attacking, the projection of something which impairs the ability of your opponent, but the nature thereof depends on who you're asking. In the book what's being projected is chi, though I'm inclined to go with the more materialistic explanation that seme is the art of letting your opponent psyche eirself out. Anyone who's sparred before knows that you can sometimes get a sense of how good someone is just by the way they walk and hold themselves. Or you may have seen that person spar before and know exactly how good they are. In any case when it comes time to spar you may find yourself thinking "I'm toast" (or "Ey's toast"), which can have a definite impact on your performance. Seme would then be the art of engaging in that set of behaviors most likely to engender the reaction "I'm toast" in your opponent.

Haragei and kobudera are a pair of opposing ideas somewhat related to seme³. While seme is essentially the projection of the appearance of skill, haragei and kobudera are, respectively, the detection and concealment of intent. These words correspond (more or less) to the clumsier, but more familiar, English concepts of "reading your opponent" and "not telegraphing". Mostert takes some liberties with both, transforming them into chi-based skills that work at a distance.

Another interesting conceptual cluster revolves around various "dim". There's dim mak, which has been done to death and I won't get into here, but the book also mentions "dim ching". The Internet is, of course, rife with inaccuracies, but if this thread is to be believed then dim mak and dim ching comprise, along with dim hsueh (not mentioned in the book), a tripartite system of pressure-point-style attacks. One term corresponds to nerves, one to arteries/veins ("blood gate"), and one to chi flow, though there seems to be some disagreement on the 'tubes as to which is which. There is also a mention of "12 dim mak katas" which seems to have some basis in reality; a search for "dim mak kata" on Google mostly turns up references to Dim-mak's 12 Most Deadly Katas: Points of No Return⁴ by Erle Montaigue. Since Mostert references another one of Montaigue's works (The Encyclopedia of Dim Mak) in the postface I suspect Montaigue is the ultimate source of the kata reference. In any case, next time some fool starts going on about "dim mak" now you can say "Actually...".

Moving on to more esoteric territory we come to gogyo (aka wu xing), a mnemonic/philosophical system centering on the 5 traditional Chinese elements (earth, wood, metal, fire, and water) which is translated variously as the Five Phases, the Five Agents, the Five Movements, and/or the Five Steps/Stages. The gogyo system finds multiple uses in the context of the martial arts:

• In Taijiquan and Xingyiquan the 5 elements are used to denote directions and footwork patterns.
• The 5 elements can be interpreted as representing processes or stages of combat; in this context to speak of one element transmuting into another is a way to map out the overall evolution of a confrontation.
• In the context of ninjitsu (as its used in the book), each element refers symbolically to a class of butsu associated with that element.

It's interesting to note that the elements are never interpreted literally; contrary to popular belief gogyo (and its counterpart godai) is not an alchemical system.

Research Supporting The Existence Of Various Supernatural Phenomena

Normally I'd be (mostly) inclined to give the science presented in Keeper a pass; its a work of fiction and there's generally no reason to suppose that an author endorses all the words ey put in eir character's mouths. However, given some things she says in the book's postface⁵ it's clear that she's a true believer and (probably) intends the material presented to be taken at face value. As I noted above, the plot centers around a ninja-like figure who is killing MMA fighters by stealing their chi, which provides Mostert with ample opportunity to reference the work of various scientists (some fringe-y and some not) while nattering on about biophotons, meridians, and that sort of thing.

Mostert mentions the work of five scientists⁶ throughout the course of the book: Robert Becker, H. Henrick Ehrsson, Celia Green, Fritz-Albert Popp, and Elisabeth Targ. With the exceptions of Becker and Targ (which I'll get to) these are legitimate scientists doing legitimate work, which would seem to lend credence to any claims which Mostert makes, right? Wrong... in no case does the research which she references come anywhere near supporting the things she implies it does.

Let's start with Fritz-Albert Popp, the progenitor of biophoton theory. It turns out that biological systems emit photons. This is not terribly surprising; we've known for quite some time that atoms, be they organic or inorganic, emit photons when they transition from one energy level to another. There's nothing magic about this, no need to invoke chi or any other supernatural phenomenon to explain it. Even if we accept Popp's (highly debatable) thesis that these emissions are a form of intra-/inter-celluar communication we're still miles away from energy-and-meridians territory. As this gentleman points out there's zero support for the notion that these photons form some sort of coherent energy field responsible for the health of the body.

We find a similar pattern when we look at the work of H. Henrick Ehrsson and Celia Green. Both researchers are mentioned in Keeper in the context of astral projection, but neither provide any reason to believe that such a thing exists. Ehrsson asked a question which is so obvious as to be overlooked: Why does our consciousness perceive itself as situated within our bodies? Well, it turns out that we make use of visual cues in conjunction with our other senses to "localize" ourselves; once he figured this out he was able to induce out-of-body experiences in a laboratory setting⁷. As with Popp's biophotons there's no need to invoke supernatural causes; this is just the brain being fooled by a clever set of artificial stimuli. Much the same can be said of Celia Green's work; she saw no supernatural significance in out-of-body experiences.

Which brings us to Robert Becker. Becker is an orthopedic surgeon who seems to have done a fair amount of reputable work on the use of electrical stimulation to accelerate healing in various tissues. Keeper, however, mentions some later work he did in which he identified areas of low electrical resistance corresponding with the body's acupuncture meridians, the idea being that the current flowing through this secondary system corresponds to the flow of chi in TCM. The various searches I did to try to find more details on this research all lead back to The Body Electric; as I don't have access to a copy I can't say anything about the validity of his findings.

Last, but not least, is Elisabeth Targ, who is famous for conducting a trial that demonstrated the efficacy of remote healing. What's less well know is that she went fishing for significant results after the fact; I'll let XKCD explain why that's a bad idea. A larger, follow-up study published posthumously found no effect.

In conclusion, with regards to the science in Keeper:

• Biophotons do not imply chi.
• Out-of-body experiences do not imply astral travel.
• Who knows what's up with Becker.
• There's no evidence that remote healing does anything at all.

On Chi And Empiricism

The last thing I want to do is tackle head-on the mind-numbingly inane discourse on the scientific method that pervades the book. It's replete with misconceptions and crude caricatures, the worst of which is the following statement which Mostert places in the mouth of Ashton (the chi vampire):

"The Western medical mind has difficulty with the concept of chi. It cannot be dissected under a microscope and does not fit the empirical model. You can't exactly cut through an artery wall and look at it."⁸

Lord-o'-fucking-mighty! You can't cut open a battery and see electricity either, but science still accepts that electricity exists because we can observe its effects on the world around us. The "empirical model" is nothing more than the systematic study and analysis of observable effects. To say that something doesn't fit the empirical model is ultimately a self-refuting claim; how can you possibly know that something even exists unless it leaves some tell-tale trace in the physical world? Recognizing again that this is a work of fiction, but Ashton's statement is idiotic even in the context of the book. Here's how you apply an "empirical model": You line up n MMA fighters and observe that, when Ashton pokes them in a particular fashion, they keel over and die in short order. That doesn't demonstrate chi per se, but it definitively establishes that something unusual is going on which warrants further investigation.

Of course it's never that cut-and-dried in the real world; the chi crowd doesn't typically make claims which are so easily tested. What they mean when they say that something "can't be studied empirically" is that their assertions either aren't falsifiable or are, in fact, demonstrably false. As Tim Minchin so elegantly puts it, it's "either not been proved to work, / Or been proved not to work.". People needing further convincing should read Orac's collected writings on TCM.

And don't get me started on the whole "Western medicine" trope. Establishing correlations between cause and effect is not some sort of Western cultural artifact. The recipe for gunpowder didn't just land in the lap of the Chinese; they figured out through repeated observation that when you mix a few things together in the right proportions it makes a lovely big boom.

Anyhow, that's my $0.02. Keeper is marginally interesting as a source of MA esoterica, but not good for much else.

---

1 Barring the eventual fate of the aforementioned vampire; that's actually an unexpected twist which I'll not reveal here.
2 Notes 145 and 199. Chapter 12 also has an interesting discussion of kizeme (seme practiced at the highest levels) in the context of a duel between kendo masters.
3 Which raises the question of whether there's a word for the opposite of seme i.e. the concealment of skill. In many competitive situations there may be a tactical advantage in having your opponent underestimate you (see "shark, pool"); I see no reason why this wouldn't be the case in the martial arts as well.
4 Which I'm sorely tempted to buy just to see what's in it. If I do I'll make sure to post a review here.
5 "Increasing your chi sensitivity is central to the discipline of martial arts.", p. 307.
6 Six if you count Edison, but he's only mentioned in passing in the context of out-of-body experiences.
7 The paper is behind a paywall, but you can get the gist of it by reading the responses to the paper.
8 P. 102. I also think it's bad from a literary standpoint; I find it implausible that an MD of Ashton's ostensible intelligence would make such an easily-refuted assertion.

A Simple Grammer For Describing Forms

After talking with Scav about notation variants I thought it'd be super useful if there were some generic format for representing a form than could then be displayed in whatever manner suited the user's fancy. It turns out not to be terribly difficult¹, the main challenge being the development of a grammar that is both concise and unambiguous at the same time.

When writing forms down for typesetting what I've done to this point is to put the symbols into a .csv file in the same way I want them to be displayed on the page and then run the file through a fairly simple formatting script to turn it into a table. That .csv file looks something like:

RP SK,,RP
,BACK DDE,
SS,,

This format has the benefit of being extremely concise; every character sequence is short and absolutely necessary. However, if I need to do any complex typesetting for something like a grapple it suddenly becomes an effing disaster:

<div>(LOW)<br/>&#x21c8;<br/>BB</div>,,
,,BS HP
IB,FORWARD,
,NS,

It's no longer concise; the use of HTML for typesetting introduces a lot of extraneous characters which interfere with human comprehension. Additionally, in doing so I've committed the cardinal sin of mixing meaning and representation, making the file basically useless except in one particular situation. And I still have to do a lot of manual touchup of the resulting HTML so that things align properly. Wouldn't it be peachy-keen if there were a way to write down the meaning ("forward bird break against the opponent's left, outer wrist" in this case) in a easily typeable, easily readable fashion?

Turns out that the system I've been using is almost comprehensible to a computer as is. There is, however, an unresolvable ambiguity that arises from the use of direction ("forward", "back", etc.) to denote both the motion of the body and the direction of a strike. Consider the sequence

FORWARD RP

That could mean one of two things:

• Move forward while executing a reverse punch.
• Execute a forward reverse punch.

If I'm a human I'm going to look at the greater context to figure out what's going on. For example, if it appears on the left or the right it's a targeting instruction, since all movement glyphs appear in the middle column of a line of notation. It would be simple to teach that rule to a computer. But consider the following technique:

,LEFT DDBF,
SS,, 
TK,JUMP FORWARD,
SS,,

Does "LEFT DDBF" mean "move left while executing a double downward backfist block" or does it mean "left double downward backfist block"? I know which interpretation makes sense, but making that distinction is beyond the capabilities of a computer. That being the case we need some simple way to let the computer know that the direction is a targeting modifier and not a movement. Here's what I've come up with so far:

start → line*
line → blankline | actionline
blankline → [ \t]* '\n'
actionline → left ',' center ',' right '\n' 
left → atom*
center → atom*
right → atom*
atom → direction | jump | turn | action
direction → 'BACK'|'LEFT'|'RIGHT'|'FORWARD'|'FORWARDLEFT'|'FORWARDRIGHT'|'BACKLEFT'|'BACKRIGHT'
jump → 'JUMP'
turn → 'TURNLEFT'|'TURNRIGHT' turn_modification_clause{0,1} 
turn_modification_clause → '(' \d+ ')' 
action → symbol modification_clause{0,1}
modification_clause → '(' modifiers+ ')' 
modifiers → direction | grapple | symbol
symbol → [A-Za-z]+ 
grapple → 'GRAPPLE' 

What this works out to in English is

• A notation block is composed of carriage-return-delimited lines.
• All lines are either blank, or have three fields (left, right, and center)
• Each field is composed of multiple atoms.
• An atom can be:
  • A direction, indicating motion.
  • A jump.
  • A left or right turn with an optional modification clause. The modification clause can be used to provide a number of degrees; when omitted 90° is assumed.
  • An arbitrary symbol indicating a strike/stance with an optional modification clause. The modification clause can consist of a direction, a symbol (indicating the target), and the keyword "GRAPPLE" indicating that the move is a grapple. The usual defaults are assumed if no clause is supplied.

This seems to be pretty compact; in most cases it won't be necessary to type anything more than short symbols and commas. I suspect that as I work with this I'll probably expand it a little bit to account for things like comments, but this is the gist of it. Thoughts?

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1 Those interested in the technical details can look here.

Left-To-Right Version of MA Notation

Scav has put together a sample of a left-to-right version of the MA notation system. It looks interesting and may have long-run potential.

Studio X: Sparring Techniques: Rank 2

Key

• BSw: Back Sweep
• DDBB: Double Downward Backfist Block
• DFB: Downward Forearm Block
• HBS: High Bird Stance
• IB: Inward Block
• KH: Hook Kick
• MG: Monkey Grab
• OB: Outward Block
• OSH: Outward Sidehand
• RP: Reverse Punch
• ShS: Shuffle Step
• SK: Snap Kick
• SS: Sparring Stance
• STK: Side Thrust Kick
• TS: Twist Stance

6

RP
SK
BSw
	↑ ShS
SS

7

HK
TS
	↑
SS

8

RP			2
FSw			1
IB		(ROW) ⇈ OB/MG
SS

1: This is a short sweep; the defender is trying to hook the attacker's leading foot forward to get em to overcommit eir weight onto eir front foot.
2: There's a slight syncopation to the rhythym here; the punch doesn't follow immediately, but rather waits until the attacker has settled the bulk of eir weight on eir front foot. The monkey grab from the preceeding action is maintained at this point; the defender should pull back on the grappled arm while executing the reverse punch, effectively pulling the attacker into it.

9

	← DDBB
SS
STK	↑ ⊙
SS

10

HBS OSH
	↑ ShS	DFB
SS

Studio X: Sparring Techniques: Rank 1

Key

• CS: Cat Stance
• DBB: Downward Backfist Block
• DDE: Double Downward Elbow
• FS: Forward Sweep
• KT: Knee Trap
• OB: Outward Block
• RP: Reverse Punch
• SK: Snap Kick
• ShS: Shuffle-Step
• SS: Sparring Stance
• STK: Side Thrust Kick

1

Yup, first technique is just a punch:

RP
SS

2

RP SK		RP
CS
	↓ DDE
SS

3

RP
SK
KT
	↑ ShS
SS

4

RP
STK
FS
	↑ ShS
SS

5

SK DBB	⊙
RP
		RP
OB
SS