Playing with History: A Review of Europa Universalis IV

Today I'm going to talk about a game I've been playing for about a year now called Europa Universalis IV (or EU4 as I'll be abbreviating it for the rest of this post). EU4 is a game published by Paradox Interactive and created by their in-house studio Paradox Development Studio (PDS) and is what's known as a grand strategy game, which resembles your average strategy game in the same way that piloting the Space Shuttle resembles driving your car to the store. That is to say, it's a lot more complicated. This is not a game for the faint of heart, the short of patience, or the unwilling to learn.

That doesn't really explain what EU4 is, however. At its most basic, EU4 is no less than an ambitious simulation of history covering the time period from A.D. 1444 to 1821 down to a time resolution of a single day (that's 377 years, for those counting). This is the Age of Exploration, of the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the rise of the modern scientific method. It was a time of great global upheaval, with the (re)discovery of the New World and the great Columbian Exchange, of the eclipsing of long-standing overland trade routes between Asia and Europe by new and more profitable sea routes and the rise of modern economic systems. It was an era when national border were often in flux, and when the very concept of nation-states began to attain its modern form. Spain, Portugal, France, and England all formed vast colonies overseas, while enjoying unprecedented trade revenues at home due to the monumental advances in ship construction enabling the new oceanic trade routes. Old nations fell, while new ones were born, including the United States towards the end of this period. It was the time when Europe (western Europe, specifically) began to wield an influence far outstripping its relative geographical size, the effects of which are still very much with us nearly two hundred years later.

It was a very dynamic period in history, is what I'm trying to say, and an extraordinarily interesting one to poke and tweak and fiddle with in an attempt to see how history could have played out differently.

This is complemented by an absolutely beautiful map of the world on which the game plays out. Load up the game and you'll find yourself staring at this (as always, click for a bigger view; my desktop resolution is 1,920x1200 so screenshots get squished a bit):

For the full effect, have the gorgeous strains of the main menu theme playing while you read the rest of this post:

If you enjoyed that, you can listen to the full soundtrack here. By the way, in some of these screenshots, you may notice that coastlines look a bit wonky; that's because I'm playing on Linux and one of the recent patches messed things up slightly. Other than that minor graphical glitch and a known one that required me to disable dynamic shadows, I haven't had a single problem running the game.

(Future Edit! The coastlines glitch was fixed a few months later in a patch, and the shadows one apparently was too, though I didn't notice exactly when. Paradox Studios' Linux support is really quite good, along with their support of their released games in general.)

The entire game takes place on a single map of the entire world, so PDS put a lot of thought and love into it. This takes the form of multiple “mapmodes,” which allow you to overlay different information on the background of the map. The mode visible in the first screenshot is the “terrain” mapmode, which gives a reasonable approximation to a satellite view of the Earth. It's quite pretty, and includes such delights as snow cover appearing and disappearing in time with the seasons.

It is, however, not very useful from a standpoint of knowing where all the various countries are, so most of the time you'll be looking at the “political” mapmode, which turns the world into a gorgeous illustrated atlas:

Look at it. Just look at it. I'll be the first to admit that I have something of a fascination for maps, and love to spends long periods of time poring over them, but you have to admit that that's pretty. The world is divided into thousands of provinces, much like the game Risk but much more detailed. Each province is either owned by a country, or unowned and waiting to be colonized. (There are also large areas of wasteland that can't be colonized, representing areas of the world that historically were difficult or impossible to colonize during the time period represented – places like the Sahara desert, central Africa, the central Amazonian rain forest, etc.)

The really cool part is that the map dynamically updates – including re-drawing the names of countries – whenever provinces changes owners. Over the course of a single game you can watch empires rise and fall simply by scrolling around the map. Unfortunately, due to the inbuilt zoom limits, I couldn't grab the entire world, so here's a shot showing the Americas:

Each of the little splotches of color you see on those maps is its own little nation-state, many of which have their own unique set of National Ideas that give them various bonuses throughout the game that help them perform as they historically did. (Every nation has some National Ideas, it's just that a lot of the smaller states share sets of ideas, such as the “sub-Saharan west Africa group,” or the “south-east Asian group.” Those vast areas of the Americas (and Australia, and south Africa, etc.) without color represent areas where there was no real political structure organized enough to be considered a state, and where Europeans of the time saw prime real estate for colonization.

The political landscape in 1444 looks quite a bit different to the political landscape today. Let's zoom in on Europe:

Looking at it, England and Scotland (still separate countries at this point) look pretty close to their modern-day boundaries, though Ireland looks a bit fragmented. The Iberian peninsula has a recognizable Portugal, though Spain as we know it doesn't exist, still divided between the competing states of Castile and Aragon (and tiny one-province Navarre). To its north, France is barely recognizable as the blue blob spread roughly around its modern-day region. And to its east, what's going on with the German region? Or Italy?

Welcome to the Holy Roman Empire. This unusual political structure had been around since either A.D. 800 or 962 depending on where you start counting – it's fascinating reading, but too much to summarize here. At this point in time, it had become a loose federation of several hundred principalities (though abstracted down to about forty in the game), all nominally under the control of the Holy Roman Emperor. The emperor was nominally elected upon the death of the previous emperor, though in this time period it had become more of a rubber stamp for what was practically a hereditary rule by the Habsburgs. It was such an important part of Europe that there's an entire mapmode devoted to it, and it was only dissolved in 1806 after defeat by Napoleon's armies.

Of course, while plenty of things were happening in Europe during this time period, there was a lot going on in the rest of the world too. For instance, let's take a look at Asia:

You'll notice that this picture is dominated by China under the Ming dynasty. China was the strongest power in the world at the beginning of this period, and familiarity with the game's mechanics brings home just how powerful it was. China owns dozens of provinces at game start and has a greater income than any other state. The only reason it wasn't dominating even more of the world was its belief in its own superiority to all the surrounding barbarians (a rather reasonable belief at the time) and a corresponding inner-facing focus.

To the west in India are a host of competing states of various sizes, soon to be conquered by the even-further-west Timurid horde, on their way to controlling most of India and forming the Mughal empire. To the east Japan is divided into a host of little states, in its appropriately-named Warring States Period prior to unification. To the north of China are a number of nomadic states including the Mongols that terrorized Europe not long before, whose descendants still control most of central Asia and some of whom historically will bring about the fall of the Ming dynasty and the rise of the Qing dynasty.

I'm getting sidetracked into history here (and that's without even touching on what was going on in Africa and the Americas!), but that's because I find it so fascinating. Paradox Studios have set up a giant historical sandbox with hundreds of historical actors, which then interact and develop over time. On average countries follow a broadly historical trend, though as with any open system there will be plenty of things that don't follow history, and suggest how it could have happened instead.

And that's where the fun really comes in. Remember those hundreds of different nations spread across the globe? You can take control of any one of them and play them.

For instance, here's a game where I played as Austria, and a-historically reformed the Holy Roman Empire from a gaggle of small states into a single massive country spanning much of Europe, with manpower reserves over a million strong, capable of calling up armies of fifty thousand on a whim. As you can see, Spain was also pretty lucky that game, taking over much of north Africa and part of Italy.

In another game (one I'm currently in the midst of playing), I started as Poland, then integrated the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into it to form one big Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a nation strong enough to bring the nascent Russian empire to its knees. I lost one war to the Ottomans early on while still weak, but if they decide to attack again they're going to find me a hardened and determined Defender of Europe.

One final screenshot from a game where I didn't play as Europe: in this game I started as the small Indian nation of Vijayanagara (the yellow nation at the south tip of India three screenshots up) and eventually conquered all of India and most of the Timurid Empire to the west and formed the westernized nation of Hindustan (whose name is amusingly splayed out on the map, which happens from time to time). This game as you can see the Mamluks reversed history and completely destroyed the Ottoman Empire and went on to form Egypt. Bohemia has also become quite the regional power in eastern Europe.

I could talk at length about the many features of EU4, its religion system which includes special mechanics based around the Protestant reformation, its system of trade routes stretching around the globe which can be manipulated to great effect if you know what you're doing, its nuanced diplomacy between nations, or any of a number of things. It really is packed with all kinds of simulated systems, and due to Paradox's policy of post-release support it get regularly updated with both free patches making sweeping improvements to the base mechanics and paid expansions that add whole new systems on top.

All this talk of features does underscore one of the problems of the game though, that of its steep learning curve. I must have played for nigh-on fifty hours before becoming really comfortable with the rules and not regularly getting defeated in wars. Although there are some tutorials to get you started and a lot of tooltips in-game, if you take it up you'll most likely be spending a lot of time reading up on aspects of the game on the official wiki. Though EU4 is apparently much more accessible than its predecessors (I haven't played them, personally), it still takes a significant amount of time, energy, and brain-power to master. I now have over two hundred and fifty hours of play time in, and while I have a pretty firm grasp of most of the mechanics I'm still picking up various tips and tricks.

Even with that amount of play time, there are still lots of regions of the world I have no experience playing with. I've never played a nation in Africa, and only once in North America that ended about 20 minutes in when my tiny tribe declared a foolish war and got promptly defeated and annexed (this was quite early on while I was still learning). The point is, this is a game I can see myself playing for years to come due to its incredible replay value. I could play dozens of games without ever playing the same nation twice, and get different experiences every time. EU4 is a game tht takes a lot of work to get to know, but is incredibly rewarding once you do so.

The amount I'm learning about history, geography, and historical geography is quite satisfying too. I've come to recognize quite a few different flags due to countries being identified by them in-game. I've been spurred to read up on the Holy Roman Empire due to the interest sparked by the game. I now know where dozens of small states that didn't survive to the modern day were located. I love history, and likely know much more about it than the average person, and I'm still learning all kinds of things about it from this game.

In the end, who is Europa Universalis IV for? Ultimately I think it's best suited for diligent lovers of history who are willing to put in some work for what is a very rewarding game. If you fit that description, I heartily recommend it. A hui hou!

Visiting Laupāhoehoe and Kalōpā

Last month a friend and I took a trip up the coast of Mauna Kea to visit the Kalōpā State Recreation Area. This is a small state park located 2,000 feet (610 meters) up the flank of Mauna Kea, with a small patch of native forest. Along the way we stopped at Laupāhoehoe Point, a small rocky tongue of land sticking out of the mostly high cliffs along the Hāmākua coast. Getting down there requires navigating a winding road hugging the face of the cliffs nearby, which gives some really nice views of the cliffs as you descend:

Descending along the cliffs towards Laupāhoehoe point (looking southeast).

From the point, the view back along the coast to the southeast was pretty neat (it helps that the weather was beautiful):

Click for a larger version.

(Edit 11/6/18: I've replaced the original hand-made panorama with one from Hugin, but you can still see the original one by mousing over the image above.)

The trade winds were blowing stiffly from the northeast, kicking up some impressive waves on the rocks. I tried to catch some of the amazing pictures that resulted:

Anyway, after having lunch at the point, we headed back up the flank of the mountain to get to the park. The high elevation led to a pleasantly cool temperature as we hiked through the forest made up of native ‘ōh‘ia lehua and kōpiko trees.

Kōpiko are the tall thin ones, ‘ōhi‘a aren't really visible.

We took a nature trail which was established in 1976, which had a nice informative pamphlet pointing out various sights along the trail. There were tons of different kinds of native ferns in different parts of the forest, some of which were rather pretty:

I even found a single orchid in bloom:

This angle makes it look like the orchid is about to attack me.

All in all it was a nice little jaunt through a native upland forest. There were a variety of other interesting sights along the way (such as a number of invasive strangler figs at various points in their life cycles), but due to the thick foliage they proved difficult to photograph. If you ever get the chance to check it out, I'd definitely suggest it. The one caveat is that we got lucky with clear skies; the Hāmākua coast has some of the highest annual rainfall levels in the state (and the world), due to the humid trade winds blowing in from the northeast and running into Mauna Kea, so it rains pretty often. But if it's not raining, it's a nice place to see some native flora. A hui hou!

Visiting Pu‘u Huluhulu

Back at the beginning of the month I took a trip up Saddle Road to Pu‘u Huluhulu in order to pick up some cinder for use in my comet-making presentation. Pu‘u Huluhulu is a cinder cone at the base of Mauna Kea, on the Saddle region between it and Mauna Loa (its name means, roughly, “hairy cinder cone” due to the trees growing on it, which contrast with the barren lava fields all around). Here's a shot of me at what I've read used to be a cinder quarry on the west side of the pu‘u.

 The day was really overcast and intermittently rainy, so there was a lot of moisture condensed on the foliage. (The white patch behind my head in the picture is actually a bunch of tiny hailstones, which must have happened pretty shortly before I got there.)

Many of the trees that cover Pu‘u Huluhulu (and give it its name) have this really neat looking lichen growing on them. I got some interesting pictures of it with a low depth-of-field:

At the top of the cinder cone is a flat patch, from where you can look out across the Saddle region. This picture looks towards Mauna Kea – if you enlarge it you can see the Mauna Kea access road winding its way up near the center. Fifteen minutes after that picture was taken the clouds descended to completely block that view.

Pu‘u Huluhulu isn't a very large cinder cone, and after half an hour I'd traipsed over most of it and gotten enough pictures to satisfy the artistic urge (most of them weren't really interesting enough to show). It's a pleasant little hike if you ever get the chance – despite being nearly a mile in elevation, it's short enough to keep you from getting too winded while hiking it. A hui hou!

Making a Comet

This past week I took part in Journey through the Universe for the second time. Journey through the Universe is an annual event, running for the past eleven years, where astronomers and engineers from the various observatories on Mauna Kea go into classrooms and give talks to the students there. Most of the time these talks include some sort of physical demonstration or hands-on activity. This year I talked about comets, and as part of my talk I created a miniature comet.

Comets are basically, in the immortal words of Fred Whipple, “dirty snowballs.” They are composed of varying amounts of rock, dust, and various ices such as water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia. In preparation for my presentation I did a few test runs of the comet-making recipe I found, including two at work which proved quite popular with my coworkers. I took some pictures of the process (though in poor light, unfortunately) and thought I'd share them here.

We start with a plastic garbage bag inside a large plastic mixing bowl. (When dealing with dry ice, you really want to keep it away from metal as the extremely fast cooling of the metal causes it to emit nails-on-a-chalkboard-level screeches.)

Next, we add some dirt and stir it in.

Then, we add a dash of ammonia and some corn syrup, to represent the assorted organic molecules detected in comets. Organic, in this context, is used in the chemistry sense, meaning “a molecule containing carbon.”

Now, we crush up two cups of dry ice by pounding it with a meat tenderizer, add it to the dirty water, and stir vigorously. This produces an impressive amount of fog, making it hard to see what's happening, but you can feel the ice start to freeze up pretty quickly.

When it's mostly frozen, you can pick up the bag and form the comet like a snowball (something I have basically zero experience doing, I should note). When that's done, we've got a comet!

(Man, that light is poor.)

I don't usually take pictures of myself, so this actually took quite a bit of practice, and I got a bunch of melting dirty comet-water on my hand and a cramp in my leg in the process. Here's a close-up look at the comet:

This comet may actually be the best one I've made so far. I initially thought some of the chunks of dry ice were too big, but thinking about it now I think that may actually be a good representation of real comets. After making the comet I stuck it in a pan in front of me on my computer desk and watched it as it melted over the course of a few hours. This last picture was taken about half an hour after making the comet, and show pits where the water ice froze around some dry ice which has now melted, leaving a pitted surface.

This is quite a fun project to do. The part where you mix the dry ice and water is especially visually impressive, and quite popular with bystanders. You'll most likely have dry ice leftover, too, so you can have more fun with it after the fascination of watching a comet melt has worn off. A hui hou!

JCMT…Transferred!

Yesterday, February 28th, marked my last day as an employee of the Joint Astronomy Centre. Come today I've been officially terminated from my position there and become an official employee of the East Asian Observatory. It's somewhat of an historic occasion; it marks only the second time a world-class observatory has been transferred from one owner to another.

The first was UKIRT back in October, but that involved only five staff members and transfer to two organizations that have both been around for a while (the University of Arizona and Lockheed-Martin). This time there are over thirty of us involved, being transferred to a new organization formally created just last year.

As you might imagine, transferring operations from an organization with over thirty years of history to one with just a few months' worth is a tricky process. We've dealt with all kinds of transfer-related issues in the last few months, and will undoubtedly have more that pop up Monday morning, but the tenacity that led us to stick with the telescope instead of finding different jobs will no doubt see us through. Exciting times, to be sure!

Next week I'm taking part in the Journey through the Universe program again, where I'll being visiting classrooms in Hilo and giving a talk about astronomy. The project I picked this year is quite visually impressive, and I've got some pictures of a test run I did so expect to see those up here pretty soon. A hui hou!

Inkscape, New and Improved

This post is either a little late or a little early, depending on your perspective. The piece of news I wanted to point out is that Inkscape, the free and open-source vector image editing program, has recently had an updated version released. If you read this blog you'll have seen images made using Inkscape, as I use it frequently (the image in the previous post, for instance, was made with the previous version of Inkscape).

Why is this big enough news for me to want to post it, you ask? This particular update is both large, and a long time in coming. Like, almost four-and-a-half years in coming. The version number jumped from 0.48.5 all the way to 0.91! This long period of development apparently resulted in over 700 bugs being fixed, and the addition of a new internal rendering engine which should bring some performance enhancements. There are a whole host of other little improvements and additions, which are better explained in the official release notification.

I mentioned this post could be considered both early and late; it's late, because the new version was actually released at the end of January, but I only learned of it at the end of last week. It's also somewhat early because I haven't actually had a chance to use the new Inkscape version yet; I'm waiting for the packages to be made available for Debian (which Linux Mint Debian Edition uses). It's currently available for Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE, though, and I'm sure I'll get to play around with it soon enough. If you're looking for a good vector graphics program, I encourage you to give it a try! And if you aren't, take a look at it anyway; you just might find it to be the solution to problems you didn't know you had. A hui hou!

OBAFGKM

Every first-year astronomy student at some point runs up against the sequence of letters “OBAFGKM.” (Remembered with the help of the catchy mnemonic “Oh Be A Fine Girl/Guy, Kiss Me.”) All stars are classified according to their spectra and classified with one of these letters, along with some additional information for further granularity. It brings up the question, though: where did this opaque string of letters come from in the first place?

To understand the origin of our modern classification system, we must go back to the very first attempts to construct such a scheme based on the then-novel discipline of spectroscopy. Spectroscopy, as a reminder, is the measurement of an object's spectrum, the chemical fingerprint of an object woven into the colors of the rainbow; it encodes all kinds of valuable information about the object's chemical and physical properties.

Back in the 1860s and ‘70s, an Italian priest and astronomer by the name of Angelo Secchi was one of the first to apply spectroscopy to the stars. He divided stars into five categories based on their spectra. These classes were mostly arbitrary and have since been superseded, but they were an important first step in the process.

In the 1880s, the American astronomy Edward C. Pickering was compiling a catalog of stellar spectra, which resulted in the Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra. His assistant the Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming divided Secchi's five classes into more specific classes with letter headings running from A to N, with a few more for unusual spectra. These categories were based on the strength of the absorption lines of hydrogen; category A had the strongest lines, then B, and so on. This is an arbitrary choice, though a reasonable one, given that hydrogen makes up 70% of the matter in the universe.

This stood until 1901, when Annie Jump Cannon, an American astronomer, rearranged the lettered categories and dropped all the letters except O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. (She also came up with the famous mnemonic in the opening paragraph.) This re-sequencing of the letter categories worked because it followed what the spectra were doing – a sequence of spectra according to Williamina's original scheme of A–N would result in the hydrogen absorption lines smoothly varying from bright to faint, but other spectral lines wouldn't necessarily follow a specific pattern. With Annie's re-organization, all the lines would vary smoothly (at least, more smoothly), although the theoretical work necessary to explain this wouldn't be fully completed until the 1920s.

[Edit 2/24/19: I've since realized that this should all be discussing absorption lines rather than emission lines as I originally put since that's what we actually see in stellar spectra. For this demonstration, at least, the idea of varying strengths still works, just realize that it's backwards from reality and when I'm talking about emission being bright/faint it should really be absorption being strong/weak.]

Below, I've made a picture to help illustrate. In this picture we have some extremely stylized spectra, with a few fictitious emission lines at various wavelengths. For the purpose of this picture, hydrogen is the emission line in the yellow part of the spectrum (although in reality hydrogen has one red line and several blue ones as seen in the Balmer Series). The left side has the spectra organized according to Williamina's original sequence, while the right side has Annie's re-organized sequence. If you watch the yellow line on the left side of the graph you'll see it smoothly varying from bright to faint as you go down. On the right, all the lines are smoothly varying, but not just from bright to faint; some go from faint to bright, while others go up and then back down.

Spectra fit nicely into Annie's scheme, but it wasn't apparent why until the Indian physicist Meghnad Saha derived a theory of ionization in the 1920s which the British-American astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin used in her doctoral dissertation to show that the sequence of spectra was actually a sequence of surface temperature. (This has been called “the most important dissertation in the history of astronomy.”) O-type stars have the hottest surface temperatures, while M-type stars have the coolest (our Sun is a G-type star, for reference).

This is an important point, and one that requires quantum mechanics to appreciate fully. Atoms emit photons of light when electrons in them drop down from a high-energy state to a low-energy state, the exact states determining the wavelength (or color) of the light. Without an external source of energy, electrons will sit around in the lowest energy state they can reach; the continuing emission of light from stars comes from the heat of the star constantly exciting electrons into higher-energy states.

Pivotally, the efficiency of this process depends on the exact temperature. Put simply, too cold and the atoms of a given element (hydrogen, for this example) won't get excited very often and thus won't put out too much light. Raise the temperature and you should get more and more excitation and the brighter light, right? This is true, but only up to a point. Once a certain key temperature is reached the emission of light will actually begin to drop off again. The reason for this is that higher temperatures actually make the electrons too excited to drop down to lower-energy states easily (or at least, make the transitions that correspond to visible light; in reality, they'll be making other transitions that correspond to non-visible light).

It turns out that A-type stars are ones where the temperature is just right for exciting hydrogen, thus giving them the brightest hydrogen lines. As you go away from A-class the strength of the hydrogen lines drop off as the stars become either too hot or too cold. And that's where that odd sequence of letters comes from!

Addendum: In reality, there's a bit more to classifying spectra than just these letters. In practice each letter class is split into ten subclasses using the Arabic numerals 0–9 (a practice also started by Annie Jump Cannon), and also a luminosity class denoted by either Roman numerals or additional letters for special cases. For instance, our Sun is classified as G2V, indicating a main-sequence star with a surface temperature of about 5,800 K.

End of an Era for the JCMT

Last night marked the last night the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) operated under the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC) which has operated it since it saw first light in 1987, twenty-seven years ago.

The telescope is still on track to be transferred to its new management under the East Asian Observatory (EAO), though delays in procuring funding by EAO have led to a one-month extension of the transfer date, which is now set for the end of February. In order to save on operating costs the telescope will remain dormant for the month (starting slightly early), so last night was its last night operating under its current management.

It's going to be a strange month, as some of us at the JAC will literally have nothing to do for the month (mainly the telescope operators), while some of us (myself included) will be running around like mad trying to get a hundred and one things done in order to make the handover go smoothly. And once we finally do come to work on March 1st as employees of EAO we'll no doubt have a lot to learn trying to get the fledgling organization off the ground. Interesting times, to be sure. A hui hou!

Reduplication in Hawaiian: A Pronunciation Aide

Hawaiian words can often be difficult to pronounce for those not used to its idiosyncrasies. This is compounded when the words start exceeding five or so syllables, even though the actual pronunciation of each syllable is quite simple.

There's a particular pattern I've noticed running through a good number of Hawaiian words, one which can really help pronunciation once you learn to spot it. As a quick reminder, all Hawaiian words are composed of one or more syllables, each of which is either a vowel or diphthong, or a constant followed by a vowel or diphthong. Most consonants are pronounced the same way they are in English, except for w which is interchangeably pronounced as either w or v (mostly due to euphony). The only new sound is the ‘okina (the little ‘ symbol), which represents the glottal stop and is pronounced by simply blocking off the airstream at the back of the the throat, like the pause in the middle of “uh-oh.” Vowels are pronounced as follows:

a…“ah,” as in “father”

e…“ey,” as in “hey”

i…“ee,” as in “machine”

o…“oh,” as in “mote”

u…“oo,” as in “flute”

Diphthongs (two vowels together) are pronounced pretty similarly to English; basically just take the two vowel sounds and run them together. Technically there are only about seven diphthongs in Hawaiian, so not every grouping of vowels is one, but for this post I'll point out any exceptions as they come up.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make in this post is there a common pattern in a lot of Hawaiian words of the form A·B·B, where A and B are usually one or two syllables. For example, take the name of the capital of Hawaii:

Hono·lu·lu

which has a two-syllable A part, and a one-syllable B part. The opposite pattern (one-syllable A, two-syllable B) is even more common, and since it's a bit longer it can be harder to parse on the fly. For example, the dynastic name of the first king of the united Hawaiian islands is:

Ka·meha·meha

Very often when encountering a word that fits this pattern for the first time, I'll try to parse it incorrectly at first, in this case something like Kame·hame·ha. Recognizing this pattern will help you pronounce such words correctly; for instance, the primary stress almost always goes on the A part of the word. (The word division here, as an aside, is “ka,” meaning “the,” and “mehameha,” meaning “lonely” or “alone.” Perhaps appropriate for the first king of the whole archipelago who was famously rather reserved and isolated growing up.)

One more example of this style is the Hawaiian word for “rainbow”:

ā·nue·nue

Here, “nue” is not a diphthong, and is pronounced as two syllables, ”nu-ey.” (The line over the a, called a “kahakō,” just means to draw that syllable out slightly longer – Hawaiian has both long and short vowels.)

When I first conceived of the post I had a whole host of words in mind to illustrate this pattern, and it figures that by the time I've sat down to write it I can't remember most of them. I'll add any new ones I think of at the end of the post in the future. A hui hou!

Edit (11/29/17): The name of the first known interstellar asteroid, ʻOumuamua, also follows this pattern (ua is not a diphthong):

ʻou·mua·mua

ʻOumuamua means “scout” (like in a military sense) from ʻou meaning “to reach for” and mua, meaning forward or ahead.

Hau‘oli Makahiki Hou!

Or “Happy New Year” if you don't know Hawaiian. The year ‘elua (two) kaukani (thousand) ‘umikūmālima (fifteen), to be precise. I'm back in Hawaii after a three-week trip to visit my family, enjoying the warm weather again and recovering from a mild but extremely persistent bug I picked up the last few days I was there.

While in California we took a trip to the Palomar Observatory, home to the venerable 200-inch (5.08 meter) Hale Telescope, which was the largest optical telescope in the world from 1949 to 1992 (when the first of the two identical Keck telescopes was built).

I forgot to get a picture of the telescope itself, but I remembered to at least get a picture of the dome:

Me in front of the Hale Telescope dome.

You can't tell from the picture, but it was bitterly cold up there. The telescope is at an altitude of 5,617 feet (1,712 m), and there was a glacial wind whipping by the entire time we were up there. I mention it because I decided to take my warm hat off for the picture, and very quickly found myself wishing I hadn't done so.

Anyway, here's wishing you all a pleasant new year! A hui hou!