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November 15th, 2009
04:28 am - I want to be a human being, not a human doing
Who Wants To Be? held an event as part of the Wunderbar Festival in Newcastle last on Friday night. The principle of the show is that the audience decide what to do with the admission fees raised at the box office through a process of brainstorming, refinement and eventual voting. If the principle appeals at all then you're likely to be swept up by the show in practice, with easy-going moderation and imaginative, high-tech presentation reflecting the game at high speed. There were technical problems, but they didn't matter. My wife and I (and, I'd bet, a hefty chunk of the audience) left feeling good from a happy ending, others would have at least felt like they had received a good run for their money; the £10 admission fee felt like it was well worth the money.
( Read more... )
Meg and I both really enjoyed ourselves and send our impressed thanks to both the Who Wants To Be? staff and the Wunderbar Festival team. There are many sorts of people who would have enjoyed the show; for instance, I think there would have been a fair degree of crossover between people who would have enjoyed Who Wants To Be? and people who would have enjoyed the Sandpit session the night beforehand. If the concept appeals, the implementation has a very high chance of hitting the target.
Two nights at the Wunderbar Festival, two excellent events! Since then, I have learned that the Wunderbar Festival intends to be a biennial event. Roll on late 2011, I say; more of the same would be very welcome, but different events inspired by the extremely high standards of creativity and following vaguely along the similar sort of fun could delight us in familiar-but-different ways. My eyes have been opened in wonderful ways and I'm thrilled to have new talent, that's right up my street, to follow.
Wunderbar by name, sehr wunderbar by nature!
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November 14th, 2009
03:07 pm - Sandpit: huge hit!
Sandpit at the Wunderbar Festival the night before last was excellent. Hurrah! Many, many thanks to everyone involved.
( What I played, how great it all was, and why it was good. Hopefully of interest to everyone who likes games of whatever sort. )
So what's next? Well, Sandpit were funded to hold a national tour, with the rest of their funding focused upon what they do in London, so there's currently no reason and no funding for them to return to these parts, alas. The incentive for me to come down to London is even greater now, though - as recently discussed - trips from here to London are pretty significant journeys and the difference between going on your own to Newcastle for an evening and going on your own to London for a weekend is pretty considerable. Getting to know more people to make the trip more practicable will help. On the other hand, if I've managed to help convince the people that I already know in the London area that they might want to come with me to a future event, so much the better, You know I'm going to be blogging about future events as they come up, closer to the time...
If the Sandpit movement were to remain restricted to London, though, it would be a tremendous shame; tips of the hat to BARG of Birmingham and Iglab of Bristol who have made similar things work on a much smaller scale around the provinces already. (Yet I know there are people in those areas to whom the good word has not yet spread, or at least not yet sunk in. Conversely, I'm annoyed that I managed not to hear about the Great Street Games in Middlesbrough last month.) In fact, there's even been a guide written about one way to make such an event work. It's punk: not so much "here's three chords, now form a band" as "here's three rulesets, now start a game". I would hope that the Sandpit tour leaves many little sandpiles in its wake at the places it has stopped. Has it done so yet?
So this brings about the prospect of getting these sort of games going in this neck of the woods - ideally Teesside if we can make it work, but Durham would be OK and even Tyne and Wear would work at a push. (Or I could look south to York or Leeds.) What I'd like to happen is that a couple of dozen people say similar things and we can form a consensus of "yes, we must get together locally to play these games again". One would hope that the Sandpit organisation could help in getting such people in touch with each other; if not, there's always posts like this. I'm naturally a follower rather than a leader, and am not the richest in spoons to make things happen, but sometimes in life (as in HipSync) someone has to be first onto the dance floor.
You dancin'? I'm askin'!
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November 7th, 2009
12:55 pm - One Man Mindzine
This is a summary of some of the most exciting developments in the world of mental sports at the moment. I wrote a similar piece last year and thought at the time that it might be a one-off, but if lots of interesting events happen at this time of year every year then perhaps there is the scope for this to become something more like an annual piece - at the risk of it reporting on the same events each year!
Coming up soon, in progress at the moment, or just having completed, depending upon how quickly I finish this piece, are the World Puzzle Championship, the World Othello Championship and the World Memory Championship. The intersection of the latter two is, as ever, the lovely Ben Pridmore, who writes about the start of the Othello event, which takes place this year in Gent, Belgium.
The World Memory Championship is back in its faute-de-mieux location of London this year after the original sponsor in Bahrain pulled out. There are no cash prizes this year, but very generous sponsorship for 2010 means that 2009 can offer prizes of accommodation (and, for the top performers, travel) to the 2010 event and still claim to have the most valuable prize fund yet, beaten only by that for next year's event. Hmm-mmm. I can only theorise why the Bahrain sponsor pulled out (readers with long memories, which may not be the same thing as competition-honed memories, may recall that I like everyone I've met in the memory world except for two specific egomaniacs) and hope that next year's Chinese sponsors do not do likewise. Ben Pridmore suggests Memory-XL may be providing some sponsorship which is not being publicised, for some reason.
Florian Dellé and Simon Orton have the excellent memory-sports.com blog (of which one highlight, among many, is video of Ben Pridmore memorising a pack of cards in under 25 seconds) and should be updating live from the event; a poll therein unscientifically proposes Ben Pridmore as the favourite to repeat his title, and while I wouldn't read too much into a flip one-liner, Ben professes his own confidence. Good luck to all, though I don't think there's too much doubt where my rooting interest lies.
I can't immediately recall a World Puzzle Championship with as strong an online presence as this year's Turkish event, so many congratulations to the organisers there, who have long been very strong participants in the puzzle movement. Probably their most significant innovation has been the series of Oguz Atay Puzzle Contests taking place online over the preceding months, so us sub-championship-level competitors finally have a season that's more than one contest long. They claim the final OAPC will take place while the World Puzzle Championship itself is in progress, but I hope there will be sequels to the OAPC, maybe with a different name, before long. Would-be participants who want to practice for the annual qualifying test should consider them excellent practice. The official site is being updated while the event is in progress, which earns thumbs aloft, and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) motris has posted great reports of his first day and his second day.
Even with that said, I'd still like to see World Puzzle Championship web sites improve further still, with the target having to be round-by-round score updates being made available online as soon as they're available to the participants, live coverage of the play-offs (I'd like video or audio commentary, but I'd settle for a minute-by-minute update) and I'd like to see interviews with participants and captains along the way. (Though participants and captains might not necessarily want to be distracted between rounds to give interviews...) The only open question is who's going to win the event: the WPC site has this page with participants' recent past form; it's hard to see past the usual suspects.
Also on the puzzle front, motris two weeks ago reported from the US Sudoku Championship, which he won in 2007. This year he was the first to finish the final, but didn't spot that he had made three errors, so Tammy McLeod ended up as the first all-correct solver, continuing the tradition of Google employee success. Probably the most interesting story is that of the third-placed finisher in the final, whose play in the final was so far in standard from his standard of play to reach the final that accusations of malpractice have been made. Cheating would be impossible, or at least very hard, in the grand final where everything is visually above board; cheating in the qualifying round to reach the final (where even third place is worth $3,000) might be possible. Perhaps from now on the qualifying rounds might generate nine qualifiers, not three, for the advanced division finals with (off-stage?) closely supervised semi-finals whittling the nine down to three. (I'd prefer "3 from one semi-final of 9" to "one from each of three semi-finals of 3", but either could work.)
The really interesting thing about this allegation is that the name of the third-placed finisher has shown up on the radar in the past in connection with suspiciously wildly inconsistent previous performance at chess, which made the New York Times when it happened. Investigations are on going: motris has more and more, and the situation has even been reported in the Philly Inquirer (tournament sponsor), the AP wire and America's NPR.
Mention of chess leads us to the Tal Memorial 2009 tournament, taking place in Moscow at the moment, which is going to be the year's strongest event, a round-robin between ten of the thirteen highest-rated players in the world. It includes current world champion Vishy Anand, but it doesn't include current world #1 (and Anand's opponent in his upcoming world championship match, a defense "on the road" - so to speak - in Sofia next April) Vesselin Topalov. All five games in the first round were drawn, with the highlight among them being a six-hour struggle between past world champion Vladimir Kramnik and probable future world champion Magnus Carlsen. Magnus is, fairly narrowly, so far the best-developed of the 1990 vintage of chess prodigies and can handle himself on TV better than most, even at the age of just 18 (and 11 months); while he approached the top without it, his recent coaching from Garry Kasparov can't have hurt, and last month he earned an outstanding 8/10 to destroy a very strong field in the Nanjing Pearl Spring tournament.
Magnus hails from Norway, an excessively civilised nation which is currently running extremely well in the world of mind sports, with another young Norwegian recently winning the World Monopoly Championship. The interesting thing from an organisational viewpoint is that the BBC report suggests they were using the Monopoly speed die, an innovation introduced in the Mega Monopoly variant in 2007 that reduces the number of turns on which players do not land on property that will lead to money changing hands, speeding up the game. This raises the question of what constitutes Monopoly canon these days; if the world championship uses the Speed Die, then why should anyone play without it? I had thought that Monopoly was a sufficiently established classic proprietary game, if that's not a contradiction in terms, that a rule change would be unlikely to be accepted as canonical as it might be in, say, chess. However, games seldom stop evolving; chess' timing procedures regarding very long games change over time, Monopoly brings in its speed die and the World Series of Poker introduces a six-month pause within the Main Event.
Speaking of which, the World Series of Poker's Main Event reaches its conclusion this weekend, with the final table being played among the players who have become known as the November Nine from midday Pacific time today. All players are guaranteed - and have already received - over a million and a quarter US dollars, with a relatively shallow increase in the prize structure to about double that for fourth, about triple that for third, just over five million dollars for second and just over eight and a half million for the winner. Another delay has been built into the tournament structure, so that when the nine have been reduced to two, play is suspended until 10pm Pacific time on Monday night; I would be amused by the second and third stacks both being all-in on one hand, then both being eliminated at once to confound their plans. Darvin Moon has over 30% of the chips on the table and almost a 2:1 chip lead over any other player, but is so lightly regarded that he's no more than a fairly slight favourite in the betting. Phil Ivey, despite being third shortest stack with only about 5% of the remaining chips, is sometimes as short as fourth favourite in the nine-runner field.
Endgames: link of the indeterminate time period is Tao of Poker, a blog that's my first choice for ramblin', gamblin' tales of fear, loathing and poker in Las Vegas and beyond. Hardly an unknown gem from the rough, but still my first choice to get the feel for poker. Earlier this month I learnt that Liverpool FC manager Rafa Benitez was caught up in Stratego fever growing up in Spain in the '70s, and he's still associated with the game today. Separated at birth: Extreme Makeover: Home Edition's moody carpenter Paul DiMeo and World Series of Poker commissioner Jeffrey Pollack.
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October 21st, 2009
11:19 pm - United we stand
It's been a while since I've posted. No news generally isn't good news; my quietness comes as a result of general vague gloom and struggling self-confidence. Meg was ill with a chest infection for over three weeks, though she's recovered enough to go back to work; I have been fortunate enough to avoid catching the bugs going around. (Well, since August.) Work is going very well.
Two weeks ago, the United Football League - referring to the version of the sport known in the United States of America as football - kicked off its inaugural game in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Las Vegas Locomotives hosted the California Redwoods at Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas at 6pm PST. You can watch the UFL games live at no cost online on their web site; if you're in the USA and your TV provider carries it, you can watch it on the Versus and HDNet channels. The next match features the Florida Tuskers hosting the California Redwoods, kicking off at 7pm Eastern on Saturday in the Citrus Bowl in Orlando; again that will be available online, but it's one of the games that will be broadcast in the USA on Versus.
If you're not a fan of American Football, this will mean nothing to you. If you are well-disposed towards the sport, I think the UFL is well worth following, and offer you ten reasons why football fans should give the new venture a try. ( Beneath this cut tag, at least. )
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September 7th, 2009
06:32 pm - The Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz: the results
Somewhat later than planned, here are the results of the Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz. 34 players took part in some fashion: 5 set lyrics but didn't solve them, 12 solved lyrics but didn't set one and 17 both set and solved lyrics. The top five finishers in descending order were bopeepsheep with 36 points, ![[info - dreamwidth.org]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) addedentry with 30 points, huskyteer with 29 points, venta with 28 points and pinkfinity with 24 points. (I have listed you under the name and site with which you solved lyrics.)
( The results in detail. Most likely to be of interest to players. )
I hope you enjoyed the game, apologise for the late results and thank you all for playing!
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August 21st, 2009
07:18 pm - The Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz: part two
I have picked up a summer cold. Yhis is annoying, but I have had such a fortunate run of good health (not sure, but maybe 18 months since my last one) that I am surely overdue. It doesn't feel like a horribly bad one; a nasty sore throat, but not so bad that Lockets and, supposedly, Ultra Chloraseptic cannot mostly take care of it, and a sniffly, slightly runny nose. Fingers crossed for being better before I return to work on Monday, oddly enough, after popping into work for an afternoon yesterday as cover for someone who has picked up a different stomach bug that's going around. All warm thoughts to those of you who have to cope with far worse on a daily basis, of course.
Within the cut-tag below are the lyrics for the Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz. Please identify as many as possible and, for the last question, suggest which is your favourite. Please don't nominate your own lyric as your favourite. You are most welcome to enter even if you didn't submit a lyric. You don't need to name the artist because everyone has covered everything; you are expected not to use search engines or other external assistance, on your honour. If you have access to both, I'd prefer to receive answers on Dreamwidth, but answers on LiveJournal are welcome, or by e-mail at a pinch. One entry per person, please, not per account. Answers and scoring will, hopefully, be revealed on Tuesday or Wednesday.
( 22 supposedly easy lyrics within. )
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August 19th, 2009
10:42 pm - The Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz
Last Thursday, venta - and here I quote - "had a fabulous idea. Everyone likes lyrics quizzes, right ? Well, nearly everyone. But they take time to write...
So, what we need is the self-writing lyrics quiz. But that's not the kind of thing that automated systems are good at. Instead, how about a cooperative effort where everyone does a little bit ? You fill in one lyric in the poll below, you fill in the answer, and by tomorrow we'll have enough for a proper quiz (and everyone will get at least one correct). I'll post it up on Friday afternoon, which is the right and proper time for such timewasting nonsense.
So:- Be correct. At least have a little google and make sure you've got the words right.
- Don't be too obscure. Even if that band from Brighton are brilliant, don't use a line of theirs if there's not a good chance that a decent number of people will have heard of it."
The idea was indeed a fabulous one, but in practice, the finished article turned out to be unexpectedly, disappointingly difficult. We were idly kicking around concepts of scoring systems in the comments. Let's give it a go as a punchy one-shot.
Here's the simple version of the rules. This is a two-stage game. In the first stage, suggest a song lyric that you believe about two-thirds of entrants to the game will be able to identify. In the second stage, which will probably start on Friday, identify as many lyrics correctly as you can, and suggest which lyric (apart from your own) was your favourite. You score points for correctly identifying song lyrics, points for having your lyric identified by as close to two-thirds the number of entrants as possible, and points for having your lyric named as other people's favourite. That's it. Simples.
No more lyrics, please; the first stage has concluded.
Poll #1446048 Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz: lyric me, do!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 16What is your easy lyric for the Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz? From where does your easy lyric come?
( Full version of the rules. )
( Style guide. )
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August 16th, 2009
11:01 pm - Usain Bolt may prove to be as legendary as Muhammad Ali
( Spoilers for the World Athletics Championship. )
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July 30th, 2009
11:35 pm - Brainstorming a hypothetical UK puzzle convention
Here's an idea to kick around. There are plenty of games conventions in the UK, as discussed previously. There are plenty of puzzle conventions around the world. However, unless you know something I don't, there isn't a puzzle convention in the UK. Why not? What might one include?
( Help me brainstorm! )
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July 29th, 2009
11:47 pm - Can I stay with you in London for games this weekend, please?
The weekend before last saw Manorcon, the UK's biggest convention for games on the Fluxx-to-Settlers of Catan-to-Diplomacy axis. Sadly there seems to have been very little buzz about this year's event, so I fear I will just have to assume that it was glorious. It had a treasure hunt organised by Michael Colao, so for that alone I am disappointed to have missed it. Those who were there, please tell me more!
This weekend sees the Hide and Seek Weekender in London, which will (probably?) be the largest UK festival for pervasive, sizeable urban and other need-a-better-adjective-for-this-sort-of-thing games. While it's technically not the same as the Hide and Seek Festival in previous years, I can't really tell what the difference is. The programme has been released and it looks quite spectacular. Friday night, whose tone is set by the "Beyond Werewolf" subtitle, looks full of physically sedentary but intellectually frenetic delights; many of the weekend's games are rather more active and rambunctious. I will attend if I can find an appropriate gamer with whom to crash. Hint, hint. (Seeing as I would be travelling down on Friday, a quick response would be great...) If you're vaguely interested, a nice side-effect is that many of the games' rulesets are available at Ludocity, so you can get a better feel for whether you'd be likely to enjoy yourself or not. (Another hint: yes.)
I do still love Manorcon and the people who go there as much as ever, but the Hide and Seek event offers something that's new to me; the emphasis is a little less about playing games and a little more about playing. (I emphasise "a little".) That's not to say that Manorcon and the DipSoc posse at large fall behind on play; while it's tremendous to read this Hide and Week report from last year, which evokes as much general goodspiritedness as you might dare to hope for, what is Fort Gype if not the intersection of Mornington Crescent and foam furniture?
( On the boundary of games and play, and the most memorable game I ever played at ManorCon: Somewhat Demiurgic Drinking Perudo. )
One of the most exciting items on the Hide and Seek schedule is a session (actually two sessions) of Projector Games, wherein some wondrous brainiacs have managed to reimplement some simple arcade games so that 3-4 dozen players may participate at once, competing as individuals. Their version of forty-player Bomberman looks particularly rum; I note with amusement that players are distinguished from each other by using depictions of playing cards as iconic avatars, of all the things.
A considerable technical achievement and the principle of "more players = more fun" is a sound one. Arcade games like Gauntlet made a big play of their four-player nature, with six- and eight- player games rarer still. What Projector Games are doing might yet have a business model to put a further dent in the ongoing struggles of amusement arcades. As a sidenote, dr4b has suggested Sega's new Block People arcade game has more "OMFG THAT'S SO COOL!" value than any game since DDR a decade ago, and I can see why. Executive summary: "arcade Lemmings with physical Lego".
Will we ever get to play Block People, though, in a country where - stereotyping - arcade dwellers are likely to steal or at least disarray the physical blocks so crucial to the game? Odds against, surely, though it might have made an appearance at Insert Coin 09, a UK amusement arcade convention that clashed in the calendar with Manorcon. I can see the attraction of paying once to attend a weekend of interesting arcade games on free play, with the sorts of tournaments, vendors and events that you might naturally hope for. The event possibly didn't receive a massive amount of buzz, but what there was has been strongly positive, so we can consider even the first event to be a good start. I'm glad the event exists and I hope it goes on to bigger and better things very soon. So many game events, so little time. Oh, and the UK Pinball Show was the weekend just past.
It's exciting to see the different sorts of games start to interact with each other and different conventions take a broader look at the world of games. The UK market leader is Birmingham's every-June UK Games Expo featuring RPGs, CCGs, miniatures war games, board games but also the "Living Dungeon" live action not-quite-role-playing RPG and some degree of exposure to console, LAN and online games. Even the board game section started to segment slightly with a greater degree of involvement from abstract games, i.e. yer mind sports, as well as Manorcon fare. The terribly-titled GAME 2009 (Manchester, October) seems to have a similar vibe, though probably only about as much content as UK Games Expo did in its own first year. It has some good people involved, though; in an interesting tweak, it even has a local (and yet unnamed, but probably guessable) chess IM putting on a simultaneous display. (£5 per player, paid to the IM. Fair deal.)
Talking of Manchester and video games, the Urbis exhibition centre features Videogame (sic) Nation, which does what it says: video and computer game history, going up to the current year, with a strongly British slant. Iain suggests it's worth the three sovs charged and I trust his opinion; some of the special guests look like being worth an extra fiver to see as well if you're in the right place at the right time.
I fundamentally approve of exhibitions regarding video and computer games; there was one at the Dorman Museum in Middlesbrough a few months back, entitled "Pong to Kong". It was entirely decent, and well worth zero pounds admission fee, though not particularly large and not so spectacular that I am kicking myself for not blogging about it until after it has closed. (Ahem.) Lots of old machines and games to look at, but very little to actually play, and a couple of machines with MESS set up (because the exhibition clearly do own the ROMs...) would have gone a long way. The highlight was a collection of old video game TV commercials, but most of them were credited to - and available from - the TVspil.dk archive. Sadly the exhibition has moved on - not sure if it's a travelling work or not - to be replaced by Clothing Connections. Less to my taste, oddly enough.
So all manner of exciting gaming developments there and it's a thrill to see tentative steps towards convergence between all the different genres, and media, of the gaming world at large. I have a nasty feeling that there are actually very few people who care about this crossover and convergence - if the Mind Sports Olympiad has taught us anything, it's that there's sadly less crossover between fans of different mind sports than you'd hope - but it's all play expressed in a wide variety of forms.
The 2012 edition of the Olympic Games, in London, is set to be accompanied by the Cultural Olympiad, doing all manner of... cultural... things. The definition of that is deliberately vague, which you might interpret as laudable inclusiveness or confused uncertainty. Recently, Roger Mosey, the BBC's "director of London 2012", asked what the Cultural Olympiad should include; it seems that he's either as open-minded or as unclear on the matter as the rest of us. Given that he asked it on the BBC Sport web site, he didn't get a great deal of constructive suggestion.
However, he did get one jiggery_pokery (hello) mentioning the first World Mind Sports Games in Beijing in 2008, not least because it could take advantage of the physical Olympic Games infrastructure. Should a World Mind Sports Games event be funded by the Cultural Olympiad? I think so; Mosey responded "interesting - I'll pass that thought on" and I live in hope that he really does, and that (as seems likely) he has the ear of someone relevant. Arguably I should have revealed my former professional interest in the field, but I'm completely - involuntarily? - out of the loop with the Mind Sports Olympiad these days. Does anyone know if this year's event is even happening?
As much as the Cultural Olympiad is set to include (and, indeed, already includes) participative sport events, I would love to see the Cultural Olympiad feature a celebration of play. More to the point, I would love to see what all these wonderful playful people - and here I'm pointing back to the top of this post - could do if they were able to get their hands on some Cultural Olympiad money. Hint, hint, hint.
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July 3rd, 2009
01:23 am - Old school
1. Wow, it's hot, especially when we can't ventilate this house nearly as much as we'd like, bearing the safety of our indoor-only cats who are far more adventurous than they are streetwise. We're having difficulty sleeping due to the temperature and that's having all manner of knock-on effects.
2. Few sporting tournaments take place anywhere as euphonious as Wimbledon, whose annual lawn tennis championships are in progress at the All England club. I'm not a particular tennis fan, but I've been enjoying this year's championship. It's certainly exciting that Andy Murray has reached the semi-final and has at least as promising a set of prospects as Tim Henman ever did. The only thing to grumble about is the rather fussy and slightly pretentious typeface used on all the electronic scoreboards, which I suspect is a new development compared to last year.
I'm particularly enjoying the developments in the infrastructure, though, and this year's event has two excellent developments. ( A roof, a court and the future. )
3. Recently, I enjoyed reading that the school I attended between the ages of 11 and 18 has been granted planning permission for a major new redevelopment. ( Read more... )
4. In Beavis and Butthead-style news, I was charmed to hear that MLB's Philadelphia Phillies have recently given a number of starts to 23-year-old pitcher Antonio Bastardo.
5. Please might I borrow a Windows XP Home Edition DVD from someone? I have a valid licence but no disc and need to reinstall. I am not ruling out installing some other OS at some point in the future, but need to extract years' worth of specifically formatted data from my Windows-only (?) mail application first. Mac OS X is not on the cards. I've used it on Meg's Mac; while I like it, I think we all know that, in the style of the British version of the "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" campaign, I'm a Mark rather than a Jeremy.
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June 19th, 2009
11:16 pm - Puzzles, poker and pain
1. Tomorrow sees the US Puzzle Championship, used as the qualifying test to select the national teams for the World Puzzle Championships in the countries of most, though certainly not all, of the people reading this. Theoretically I think you were meant to have registered by yesterday - whoops - but I registered yesterday and was still directed to the puzzles. (But perhaps I'll be disqualified for late registration! Who knows?) This year's puzzles look really good; I haven't tried the qualifier for several years, but this year's look fun. They also look accessible; I don't know how many I'll be able to finish, but I feel like I have a shot at most of them. (The last few, which will go completely over my head, look really inspired.) Threepeating US champ motris comments, as does test compiler Nick Baxter.
I'll be going in to the puzzles tomorrow "cold", but this test looks like it has a lot more to offer to more modest solvers - like me! - than previous years' tests do. If you've ever been attracted to the thought of taking part, this year looks like a really good one to try, even if it's your first one. Let Really Smart Guys, a lovely near-live blog written at the 2008 World Puzzle Championship, inspire you! Conversely, if you're frustrated by the annual puzzle championship schedule for national-class solvers apparently being one event long, the monthly-ish Oguz Atay Puzzle Contest is similarly very fine; I enjoyed stinking the place up in its fourth edition.
2. The World Series of Poker is in progress at the moment; in fact, it's about half-way through. Numbers are similar to those from last year; some tournaments are attracting more players than last year, some slightly fewer. My gut feeling is that it bodes well for the main event; while I haven't seen anyone quote an over/under for entrance figures and I'm not sure how the online qualifier numbers compare to last year's, I'd guess at about 7,000 - a little more than last year's 6,844 but below 2006's 8,773. The big story so far is that Phil Ivey has won two tournaments in the first half of the event; Brock Parker won two short-handed ("6-max") tournaments in quick succession and Ville Wahlbeck has impressed by so far taking first, second and third places in three of the five $10,000-buyin events he has so far entered.
3. Many people have observed the phonetic similarity of the name Johnny Marr, who plays guitar (for the Smiths, as it happens), to the French phrase "j'en ai marre", often translated "I'm fed up". However, "j'en ai marre" is just a sentence fragment; you would use it in the context "j'en ai marre de ((quelque chose))", or "I'm fed up with ((something))". There is a lovely bit of British English slang, "mardy", which could be translated as "fed up" in a similar way. (A BBC h2g2 author has more.) Accordingly, it's got me wondering whether the phonetically similar "marre de" and "mardy" might have some sort of linguistic link. Etymology or coincidence? (Or, alternately, perhaps someone doesn't like Tuesdays...)
4. ( Excel question. )
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June 14th, 2009
08:03 pm - A little light transport blogging
1. I have inadvertently dared huskyteer to ride a thousand miles in 24 hours on her scooter. (Perhaps it counts as a motorbike; I'm not sure if there's a continuum and where her vehicle is on it.) She is doing this as part of an organised attempt by the Riders Branch of the Royal British Legion. The ride takes place next weekend; she writes more about her attempt here, should you want to sponsor her. It represents the sort of craziness of which I approve, and sets me wondering how far you could ride in 24 hours if you were prepared to take advantage of the German autobahns. Someone with the mental stamina to keep going for twenty-four hours could probably cover in excess of 3,200 km (two thousand miles) if they got consistently lucky with traffic jams and roadworks, but about half the autobahn network is no faster than highways anywhere else in the world and the congestion apparently can be terrible.
This puts me in mind of other epic journeys; the closest Britain has to one involves wondering how long it might take to get from John O'Groats to Land's End, or vice versa, by scheduled public transport. (The significance of this particular journey is that it's conventionally regarded as the most north-easterly point of mainland Great Britain to the most south-westerly point. That said, there are locations further in each of the four major compass directions; see Dave Gorman's Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stop And Stand Up tour, passim.) Without flying, Transport Direct makes finding the route almost disappointingly simple; the southbound journey can be completed in just over 21½ hours, by virtue of taking the overnight sleeper from Inverness that calls at Crewe, and the northbound journey takes a little over 24 hours because the connections don't fall nearly as neatly and you get stuck in Wick for two hours.
Transport Direct is so capable that it almost takes the fun out of trying to create the shortest routes, though if I were actually going to perform the journey then I think I would check its conclusions rather more thoroughly, not least to try to create some back-up plans in case of late running. (Or just buy an All Line Rail Rover and wing it for the rest of the way.) It's sufficiently authoritative-seeming to accept its conclusions at face value for the purposes of this purely academic exercise, though. You might be able to finesse the time a little further by checking different days of the week, or conceivably different times of the year. However, I don't believe it's smart enough to take advantage of scheduled flights, so I suppose the next task would be to try to create the quickest possible journey in either direction taking available scheduled flights into account.
2. National Rail have released a May 2009 map of the Great British rail network. It's deliberately geographically inaccurate, which is part of its charm, but still useful. (Sadly it only has two dots for little Pontefract's three stations, but there are so many other stations it misses out - for entirely obvious reasons - that quibbling about one dot for a small town is splitting a hair.)
3. London is probably the most interesting city to blog about for transport developments in my view, at the moment, but it's far from the only one with news. Manchester made a bid to fund a number of extensions to its tram network from the Transport Innovation Fund, but the bid (which also covered a number of other transport improvements) was conditional on the acceptance in a public ballot of a peak-time weekday road pricing scheme. The ballot rejected the proposal, but since then government funding (mostly local and regional) has been found to start work on some of the extensions. In Singapore, the first part of the Circle line of the MRT system has opened, a little like the East London line compared to the future London Overground loop. Extensions will follow in the near future; eventually Singapore's Circle line may become teacup-shaped, much like London's own Circle Line from December onwards.
4. ( Onto London as such; )
5. With a delightful URL, a Finnish writer reports upon his recent trip to a conference discussing Personal Rapid Transport: driverless automated podcars that can follow a number of routes along a track. (I've blogged about the subject before.) The conference discussed the state of the art; the first modern system(s?) - and the word "modern" here tips its hat to West Virginia - are scheduled to become fact, in infant but yet fully functional stages, within the next six months. The theory is lovely and it's always wonderful to see potentially disruptive technologies come to fruition. The logic is convincing and the omens are promising; we'll just see how the unknown unknowns pan out in practice.
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June 12th, 2009
03:46 pm - What are you playing at?
As usual, this is essentially another post about games of various sorts. While Meg and I don't play all that many games with each other, we are pretty playful a lot of the time, and if we are sufficiently playful then perhaps we will ascend to coming back as kittens in our next lives. :-) Most of my blog entries refer to play in some way or another; I guess my last post was just an attempt to play at the European Election, or at least to play at being a predictor. Similarly, Iain played at being a minute-by-minute journalist with his European election UK-and-more results liveblog (and part 2) and, honestly, did a better job than the professionals. Sign him up! While I take my job seriously, I guess the differences between being an electricity trader and being a poker trader (a poker player who plays with other people's money; they keep most of the profits) aren't so big; we don't refer to participants in the market as players without reason.
1. This weekend sees the fourth annual Come Out And Play festival in New York City. All manner of city-sized fun, from the high-tech to the no-tech. I'm particularly delighted to see lots of "new sport" games, where the barrier to entry from a design perspective is very low. Many of them look a lot of fun to play, even though they would probably benefit from rather greater athleticism than I am able to provide. Blown-up video games are also wonderful, and this version of live-action Pitfall looks particularly great. All manner of puzzle events, as well, plus games played on subway trains. (Snakes on a plane? Werewolf on a train!) It looks insanely great and I look forward to reading more about it soon.
1'. Perhaps we can hope for some of the best designs to make an appearance at the Hide and Seek Weekender in London over 31st July to 2nd August. Will anyone reading this be going - hawkida, jvvw, perhaps? (bateleur has said he'll be running an interesting-looking game on the Friday evening...) I said I would go to this last year and I didn't, so I'm not going to make any promises this year. Honestly, it would probably take the confluence of a few happy coincidences for it to happen, not least a good mood. However, it all sounds wonderful, and I hope it is as good in practice as it sounds. I have a few potential reservations, largely out of a fear that you probably get the most out of it if you've been there from the start, and I fear my views on the interaction of stories and games may be unfashionable. However, I want it to be amazing fun, I want the people to be really nice and I want it just to be a case of "let your fears go, come with an open mind and let your hair down".
2. However, even if I don't go this time, it's heartening to see that it exists for people to attend; it's also heartening that the pervasive games movement is growing in the UK, only (at worst) a little behind that in the US. We know about the activities in London and Bristol (who have the Iglympics upcoming); it turns out - dog-whistle message here - that Birmingham is the next city in the UK to form a focus for the mystery-adjective games movement, with BARG being a monthly-ish meeting to play interesting games. Excellent! All it seems to take is someone with the spoons, confidence, chutzpah and resources to make the movement move; the source material (the games) are already in place. Some day the movement will make it to these parts; if Middlesbrough has a games club broad-minded enough for RPGs, CCGs, miniatures war games and board games, it would seem to be a likely place to start. (At some point, I'll start going back there again.)
2'. However, Birmingham has more than that; last weekend saw it host the third UK Games Expo, which is possibly even more impressively comprehensive still across many of the media we call game: not just RPGs, CCGs, miniatures and board games but also computer games as well. Again I haven't been, but this is partly because much of the action seems to take place in rather an expensive hotel. As with attendance in London: some year, perhaps. I'm not clear if the BARG people and the UK Games Expo people know each other, but they probably should. Ooh, and UK Games Expo features the Living Dungeon, which seems to be LARP without the scary role-playing bits that might form barriers to entry for the mundanes. (Big on puzzles, no rubber swords.) When it says "Inspired by the likes of Raven, Crystal Maze, Knightmare, and for those more experienced adventurers, The Adventure Game", my heart goes pitter-pat. Again: anyone potentially interested for next year?
3. You can barely see the seam in the segue from the last sentence but one to observing that the other day I discovered a Cyberdrome Crystal Maze in a mall in Dubai! This must be the first new one in, ooh, about fifteen years. Apparently the show was popular enough on the English-language expat channel for the attraction to be viable. Some slightly blurry photos towards the bottom show it's the real thing, and not on too tight a budget. This is simultaneously delightful, retro and potentially inspiring for the future - and to manage all three simultaneously is some going.
3'. But - but - combining a fantasy theme with an attraction where you run around an unduly fancy indoor playground with playing old-fashioned computer games, I may have blogged about this before, but Wizard Quest of Wisconsin Dells, WI looks like an interesting one-off. It's unclear whether it's intended to be the first in a series, but 5-wits' Tomb in Boston sadly seems to have been one and done, with even the plan to rotate games falling by the wayside, and even the awesome-sounding Négone hasn't made it out of Madrid. (Shed a tear, too, for all Peter Sarrett told us about Entros back in the day.) Interesting games at family entertainment centres don't seem to have cracked the business model yet, so perhaps the overtly non-commercial approach (frequently funded as any other art event) as espoused by the pervasive games movement might have to be what it takes - and that brings us back to 1 above.
4. Because sports are just games written large, I remain fascinated by the forthcoming United Football League, playing gridiron football from October 8th and quickly looking to expand outwith its initial US base. Taking on, or even attempting to establish counterpart status to, the venerable National Football League is probably the biggest challenge in sports league organisation going, unless the FOTA (Formula One Teams Association - but not all of the teams) teams do decide to split and start their own series. UFL Access is documenting the UFL's progress and now is a really exciting time in terms of lots of little announcements. It's all factual, and it's going to happen; the league is doing really well at making lots of wise little decisions and dodging the bullets that took down all the other major would-be NFL counterparts - and UFL Access is doing really well at documenting progress. The UFL is taking on a task so vast that there are still hundreds of reasons why they might not make it, but they're doing really well at making good decisions so far.
5. ( Condensing track and field athletics events into TV-friendly shows. )
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June 7th, 2009
02:13 pm - Today's thoughts
1. Several of you are going through rough times at the moment, particularly in terms of health developments. A blanket comment like this doesn't come close to cutting it, and I'll try hard to make the time to send you my warm thoughts while they're still topical, but do know I'm thinking of you.
2. Word of the day, or at least the word I've had going through my head since I woke up, is "escutcheon". It turns out that I didn't know what it means; I thought it meant something like "soupçon", or another way of saying "a small amount". Apparently it has a number of different meanings, none of which are even close to that, and some of which are not to be used lightly.
3. I work five minutes' walk (including a large and ever-so-slightly wobbly bridge) away from Stockton's main shopping centre. To give you a flavour, it features a Home Bargains, a Poundworld, a Wilkinson's and at least one or two more similar overstock stores. At work, we're quite keen on Dunkables, which are boxes of offcut, misshaped, broken and otherwise rejected chocolate biscuits. (Cookies!) I liken the fun of opening a box and discovering what's inside to that enjoyed by those of you who collect baseball cards, plus the biscuits are generally off-cuts of something at the classier end of the spectrum; you know, fancy selection box biscuits. The best pull I've had were biscuits that looked like Rocky (the biscuit, not the fictional boxer) but were made from "chocolate orange" chocolate. I didn't know anyone made those.
Similarly, on Friday, I bought a see-through bag of "Luxury Chocolate Misshapes" just because I liked the look of them, and they did indeed turn out to be genuine examples of rejects from some very famous chocolate box or another. (Without the wrappings, obviously.) Trouble is, I can't quite remember the original boxes well enough to tell if they were Quality Street, Roses, All Gold, Milk Tray or something else. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't Black Magic, but...) There needs to be a web site which catalogues these offcut biscuits and chocolates for ease of recognition. Is there, or do I need to start it?
4. On another similar "does this web site exist - and, if not, why not" front, I'd like to use a web site which automatically ran the "What song are you listening to?" application continuously upon several radio channels and keeping a list of the last few songs played by each radio station. Ideally it would also feature links to the songs' lyrics at one of the million and one lyrics web sites out there. This is a web site which possibly even has a business model, unlike most web site ideas, in that at least it could fairly obviously feature affiliate links to buy the songs that you might just have missed.
5. I understand there is great science behind the concept of picking wines which will go well with different courses of a meal. By extension, it surely ought to be possible to use the same logic to combine non-alcoholic drinks and meals. Suppose you have decided that your four drink options for the day are milk, orange juice, Coke and generic off-brand sugar-free lemon-and-lime, but you don't want to have any of them more than once. (There's always water as a possibility too, I guess.) If you knew you were going to have (over the course of a long day) (a) cheese on toast, (b) my wife's particularly brilliant spaghetti bolognaise and (c) vegetable curry with rice, are there some general principles that can be applied to decide which drink should go with which meal?
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June 4th, 2009
03:28 pm - Who goes? Europe decides!
Today and over the coming three days, the 27 member states of the European Union will re-elect the members who represent them at the European Parliament, the body responsible for debating and voting on (generally EU-wide) legislation proposed by the European Commission. The elections in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands take place today. (Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory, is lumped in with the UK, but the Crown Dependencies that are the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands ignore the election completely.) In England, elections will additionally be held for about 40% of the seats in county councils, district councils and unitary authorities. Additionally, a small number of elected mayors are defending their seats, and for the benefit of the rest of the world who don't get to vote, I may let you decide whether I have muesli for breakfast or steal some of Meggie's crumpets.
I'm not in an area where the local elections are taking place, so I'm most interested in the European elections. As well as the usual news sources of TV news organisations and newspapers, I've been following analysis from three particularly strong sources: Political Betting, ( Read more... ) UK Polling Report, ( Read more... ) and my old mate Iain's blog which I've plugged lots of times before, but it is really good and you should consider reading it. ( Read more... )
Without blinding you with unfamiliar names, the European election in the UK is conducted under a relatively proportional system. Generally:if one party gets twice as many votes as the other in a region, it gets twice as many seats. That's it. It gets slightly blurry when we're scrabbling around the edges of "one seat or no seats" and it's hard to work out the precise nuances of tactical voting, but it's really not designed to reward tactical voting - if sufficiently many people don't accurately represent their first preference, the result rapidly becomes unpredictable. To me, this spells "just vote your true first preference" and leave it at that. I don't claim it's the best voting system possible, but I still like it far more than the one we used in 1994. ( Getting into polling system geekery... )
UK Polling Report feature the most recent polls from each of the newspapers (which are, sadly, up to five days old) and also this last YouGov poll (from a beefy sample, plus YouGov methodology has relatively recently tended to be more representative in practice than the newspapers' interviewer-led polls). The Conservative party are clearly leading in voting intention with about 25%-30% of the vote and it's very close for second place on about 15%-20% between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the UK Independence Party. While the Westminster government has been (more or less) either Labour or Conservative for about a century, when it comes to Europe, we don't have a 2½-party system so much as a 4.7511111-party system in England, with additional very strong players in Scotland and Wales. (That's made up of a half, a quarter and some crumbs.) With apologies, I will demur from blogging from ignorance about the situation in Northern Ireland.
The overarching political concern for the last month or so has been a sequence of revelations regarding MP's expenses. These have embarrassed politicians from across the political spectrum, though the biggest effect has been to continue to augment the antipathy towards "the system" at large. Betraying my leanings, I personally was a little more offended by some of the Conservative MPs' claims, but the court of public opinion broadly seems to have concluded that Conservative leader David Cameron has been a bit more effective than Labour leader Gordon Brown in dealing with the issue. Over the last day or two, a number of ministers have resigned, or at least said they would stand down at the next election. Of particular significance, the minister for Local Government stepped down the day before Local Government elections, which is clearly an embarrassment, not reflected in even the most recent YouGov poll; even the Chancellor is under pressure. Labour are in genuine danger of finishing fourth in "a two-party system".
While theoretically the point of the European elections is to try to ensure the European Parliament reflects the voters' preferences, many people seem to want to use it either to protest against the current Labour administration or to protest against "the system" by voting against the three major parties. (I wonder if there is a similar protest vote against the SNP Holyrood administration in Scotland or the Labour-PC administration in Cardiff?)
There is a degree of antipathy towards Europe at large, though in my view often poorly thought-out and sometimes borne of xenophobia. The Liberal Democrats are, broadly, relatively strongly in favour of European integration; the UK Independence Party, the British National Party and a number of smaller xenophobes are strongly against European integration and want to step back from protocol in place. The Labour and Conservative parties both have pro- and anti- factions and consequently have weaker views; I perceive Labour are pro-integration but not as pro- as they would like to be were it more popular, and the Conservative party are fairly explicitly against European federalism without going as far as proposing withdrawal altogether.
However, each of those parties ties up its position there with many other facets of policy. The BBC summarise the platforms here, but I could only recommend taking those as starting-points and then browsing the manifestos in depth of the parties that you might have been considering. You'll find that no party is completely unobjectionable, and no party is completely without merit. (Though several have very small lights hidden under very large bushels.)
Both the UKIP and the BNP include "stop mass immigration" in their platform, which is an automatic contention-killer for those of us for whom migrants' rights is a major point. (Yes, I did marry someone from another country because I was - and, still more than ever, remain - more attracted to her than to every single member of this country, thank you for asking.) While the BNP's manifestos have been deleted from Scribd - and if a "socially-minded" grey-hat has been responsible, that is not the public benefit that at first it might appear - the policies of "voluntary repatriation" and preference for Britons in allocation of housing and jobs are among the most distressing offered by any party. A leaflet of theirs said "It's not racist to oppose mass immigration and political correctness - it's common sense!" which follows a particular logical fallacy. While "opposing political correctness" need not be racist, when it isn't, it's very often homophobic or even anti-Semitic. Avoid.
The UKIP's policy on immigration is available, though outdated given that a points system, similar to the one they propose, has in fact been introduced. The policy of requiring adoptive citizens to be on probation for ten years, during which time they must not attract so much as a trumped-up parking ticket or face deportation, is abhorrent. The blanket statement that "The UK would withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights" is horrifying in a way that it wouldn't be if they were to say even as much as "The UK would withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, but don't worry, we'd put the ones we liked back in place".
Can't find the link after a quick search, but one of those political surveys once pointed out that as far-right as the BNP may be socially, economically they're extremely protective of their core constituents, and apparently that is not uncommon among the traditional Far Right. (Oh no, here we are.) Conversely, the UKIP do seem to be economically "every man for himself" in a way that even the Conservatives consider to be the unacceptable face of capitalism. (Scrap inheritance tax, cut corporation taxes, "introduce 'workfare' to get people back to work"...) All that and they're linked with climate change deniers as well. (I suppose every party of appreciable size has its loony wing, to use the term in its political sense, but most of the parties have the decency to try to distance themselves from the loonies.) For what it's worth, I judge those who I know to have voted UKIP or BNP harshly. (Can't say I have much time for UK First or the English Democrats either, and NO2EU - of the opposite economic persuasion - are oddly silent on immigration matters...)
Ugh. ( Among other minor parties... )
The issue of turnout is really up in the air. European elections always get relatively weak turnouts, with UK turnout being among the worst. It is unclear whether the current anti-establishment feeling will result in mass protest in the form of mass anti-establishment vote, or mass apathy. Conventional logic suggests the latter, but Political Betting reports that many of those willing to use BNP and UKIP for their protest vote are certain to do so, while the big three parties' (and Green, though surely based on a very small sample) supports may be less likely to come out. I don't think there's clear consensus on how turnout is looking based on the data so far today. I had a pet theory that people are more likely to vote when there's both a local and a European election for them to vote in, causing higher votes in some regions (where there happen to be more local elections) than others, but the data doesn't support this.
Even though voting in the UK takes place today, it takes place across Europe until Sunday; while the counting will start at some point soon after the UK elections close, no results will be declared until the last paper closes on Sunday night, so the big Euro-results show (and Iain's Euro-results liveblog) will presumably happen after 9pm UK on Sunday night. (I do hope there aren't issues with votes going astray between voting and counting, or between counting and reporting.) The local results will start coming out during the day tomorrow; accordingly, there's no results show tonight. I would have missed it anyway, by virtue of needing an early night before the day shift tomorrow.
As a parlour game, below I submit my predictions of how each region will turn out. "Just a bit of fun, just a bit of fun", as is associated with political polling presenter extraordinaire Peter Snow. (Albeit under completely different circumstances.)
( My predictions. They haven't changed since last night, honest; I just didn't get the post finished in time. Honest! )
Adding this all up, I get 22 Conservative, 15 Labour, 12 UKIP, 11 LD, 5 Green, 2 SNP, 1 PC, 1 BNP, 1 DUP, 1 UUP, 1 SF. ( Read more... ) These are my conclusions. What are yours?
Now get out there and vote!
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May 26th, 2009
10:31 pm - Take the National Express when your life's in a mess
Meg's sister latemodelchild came to stay for two weeks early in May, which was a lot of fun. It also meant that I've not been at this PC, being (as it is) in the room that was Sarah's bedroom. Consequently I'm way behind on everything, as usual. (And over a week later still than when I started writing this, as you can guess.)
One amusing incident came in the packing stage, when latemodelchild (hereafter Sarah, for that is her name) had her white Apple power cord fall out of her suitcase and be tangled up on her white bedsheets. We did not discover this until we had waved her off on her train down to London, the first stage of her journey home. (( Incidentally... ))
Accordingly, we discovered Sarah was on her way to London - and, from there, the US - with only the power that was left in her computer to tide her through until she could next plug in. To make matters worse, she had some seriously long airport layovers planned, with movies to watch to pass the time. The times of her train down and of her 'plane the next day meant that buying a new adapter would be extremely unlikely, and also would require the international connection kit as well. Furthermore, surely no courier would pick up on a Sunday for delivery early on Monday morning. Given that Sarah is still new to travelling in the UK, it seemed unreasonable to make her come back for it; we would have to get the cord to her.
We briefly considered a twice-250-mile road trip, which would have been fun, in a £60-plus-of-petrol environmentally-unfriendly sort of way, but Meg had to work the next day. Taking a train without booking in advance would be catastrophic, though we might have got away with a £65 return on Grand Central. The only affordable vaguely-reliable timely option available was the National Express coach service: down in the afternoon, then the overnight coach back. ( Read more... )
At first I was looking at taking the direct service down (leaving 3:20pm, arriving 9:45pm) and taking the overnight coach back (leaving 11:30pm, arriving 5:35am) for £32 but sadly the last ticket on the journey down had gone. An even crazier Sunday-only route presented itself: Middlesbrough to Leeds (leaving 4:10pm, arriving 6:20pm), Leeds to London (leaving 7:10pm, arriving 11:20pm), then the overnight coach back (leaving 11:30pm, arriving 5:35am). This was still possible - and, actually, £3 cheaper - but it meant that I would be travelling to London for ten minutes. As layovers go, that doesn't leave much room for safety - but National Express are generally pretty conservative with their timings and traffic can be expected to be benign on a Sunday night.
You may have heard of people who participate in mileage runs; under some circumstances, flying 50,000 miles in a year on a particular airline is rewarded so much more than flying 49,999 miles that if you're even vaguely close to the 50k mark it can make sense to engage in needless flying, typically on the last few days of the relevant (non-calendar) year, to cross the barrier and gain the extra rewards. This would be my first National Express mileage run - though, sadly, without a Frequent Coach Traveller Mile in sight. (To be fair, Meg did something similar once when she left her MacBook in a London hotel, but at least she had a routing which gave her a night in London. You may also recall the saga of leaving an iPod in a safe in Spain... damn Apple equipment.)
( Trip report. ) It was only really the last leg which is making me say, if not quite "never again", "not by choice, please, for a while". And everybody sings ba ba ba da...
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May 7th, 2009
11:23 pm - Poetry
"Coo er gosh, look at him posting about poetry."
"Ever since he got his fancy new Dreamwidth, he's changed, you know."
"Yeah. He wouldn't have posted about poetry on his old LiveJournal."
Crikey. You tell me if I'm being pretentious, and I'll summarise a discussion we had on the last night shift about farting, or something.
So last week a new Poet Laureate was, I suppose, laurelled. The incumbent, Carol Ann Duffy, is (according to the BBC) the first Scot and the first woman to hold the position in its 341-year history. It is unclear to what extent there has been prejudice in the past regarding selection. The BBC suggest that she was considered and rejected the last time the position was available in 1999 not due to her nationality or her gender but due to her previous partner. I haven't seen any suggestions that the selection this time was anything other than meritocratic, which is long overdue as well as the way it should be. Good luck to her; while writing royal poetry is a tradition rather than a requirement of the Poet Laureate position, I think I'd rather have had the events in the lives of the Windsor family of 1999-2009 to write about than the events of 2009-2019.
She is not the poet about whom I write today, though. The BBC also responded to the announcement by getting seven other poets to commit a little poetry upon the occasion; sometimes a very little. Now I have to admit, probably with less guilt than I should, that my taste in poetry - such as it is - is rudimentary at best, the like of Edmund Lear's nonsense poetry and such. I can't say that I had encountered the work of Carol Ann Duffy (and I wonder whether the middle name is a given name like that of Jamie Lee Curtis or a surname like that of Ian Duncan Smith?) beforehand, to my knowledge; I only recognised one of the seven other poets, Lemn Sissay, and that was from seeing the side of the Hardy's Well pub on the Curry Mile in Manchester.
However, out of the seven poets' work on the page, the two poems that spoke to me most were the two from Anneliese Emmans Dean, who is a poet, composer, wildlife photographer and performer from York. Now two poems do not a "favourite poet" make, but they're a fine start. The standard philistine line at this point would be to disclaim my knowledge of art followed by "but I know what I like", but that's being lazy at best. I don't claim that this will be any more than the most superficial or rudimentary sort of analysis, but writing about things I like is fun, and writing about things I like outside my usual genres... makes a change.
The short piece is a goof on one of the translations of the Prayer of St. Francis, which will resonate with many of my generation not only as a famous prayer but also as a hymn from school. The notion that a Poet Laureate might celebrate a royal wedding with a limerick is delightfully silly, and concluding a relatively reverent tribute with a throw-away killer line as a parenthetical remark tickles my funny bone.
( It's the longer piece, On The Role Of The Next Century's Poet Laureate, that really did it for me. Longish, plus analysis, but worth it. )It's a fast poem. It's a fun poem. I love it, and I don't generally sit down to take the time to react to poetry, but it's hard not to be grabbed by this. While I wish Carol Ann Duffy a prosperous reign as Poet Laureate - and has anyone said whether or not this will be a finite ten-year appointment like Andrew Motion's? - I'll be keeping my eyes open for more here. If I can't have someone on my Friends list become the next Poet Laureate (and, for instance, myfirstkitchen - in another ten years, why not?) then Anneliese Emmans Dean is, at this early stage, first choice in my putative Fantasy Poets League team.
Unrelatedly, Meg's sister latemodelchild has come to visit for a couple of weeks! I'm really glad she could make it here, we're all having lots of fun - including our lovely, silly cats! - and I think my sister-in-law is really enjoying the trip too, but a knock-on effect of space concerns is that I regard myself as "not online much" for at least the next week and a half.
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Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/impressed.gif) impressed
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April 25th, 2009
06:45 am - Bonus!
More frequent, shorter posts, you say? How about trying to keep to one topic per post and splitting things off which don't really need to be lumped together?
Bonus 1) Unrelated to football: Sky Arts are broadcasting Celebrity Grand Slam this week, every day until Sunday. If poker on TV is established, why not bridge? As much as rubber bridge may be played at the highest level for stakes which might make poker players pay attention, and as much as some lovely and fun people play the game, I think it fairly inherently has an all-business sobriety to it that freeform ramblin' gamblin' poker does not and the show plays with a fairly staight bat even when the players goof and gaffe. The decision to have celebrities rather than experts play is an entirely reasonable one, not least because all the players stick to one fairly simple bidding system rather than irregular monstrosities with strong, forcing passes and the like. The play heavily concentrates on the bidding rather than the cardplay, which seems strange to me, and even based on what I remember about bridge duplicate scoring I can't work out quite how their four-pair duplicate scoring works. Hat tip to Bother's Bar.
Bonus 2) The CiSRA puzzle competition has its first round of puzzles online already, with rounds two to five released daily from Monday 27th onwards. The hunt is for teams of up to four and is entirely online, very similar in pattern to the University of Melbourne's maths society's hunt, with hints released to earlier puzzles every day. It's a sound format and exactly the sort of thing that means there exists a puzzle hunt season, of sorts, for people not lucky enough to live in the very few puzzle-geek-heavy towns.
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April 24th, 2009
05:54 pm - Football news
All right, I've accumulated a number of links over the past months which I haven't got around to posting. At first I thought "well, I'll be able to clear them all in a single long post". In the spirit of trying to make more frequent, shorter posts, here is discussion of just three, all concerning association football.
1) Arguably, pound-for-pound, the most interesting league in English(-ish) association football this year is the Blue Square Conference South, one of two parallel divisions that form the sixth tier of football, so five promotions away from the Premiership. Its all-but-certain champions are AFC Wimbledon, formed in 2002 when Wimbledon FC relocated 56 miles north to Milton Keynes. AFC Wimbledon started their existence by being accepted into one of fourteen(-ish) parallel ninth divisions, the Combined Counties League Premier, and look set for their fourth promtion in seven seasons. A sense of natural justice will arise only when AFC Wimbledon earn another promotion or two after that, meet the Milton Keynes Dons, whom Wimbledon FC have become, and finally vanquish them.
The other unduly interesting team in the Conference South this year is Team Bath FC, anomalous within the football system for being "a fully-fledged football club within the environment of the University of Bath, allowing players to combine full-time training with a university course". They play at Twerton Park, a ground owned by Conference South comrades Bath City, their natural local rivals. The rivalry is unfriendly in some places; some accuse Team Bath of unduly lenient academic standards, effectively spending considerable amounts of the University's funding in order to get extremely marginal students onto degree courses purely for to strengthen their football team.
At this point I would say "remind you of anyone?" with not so much a specific target as an entire tradition in mind, However, not least because Team Bath FC's success has been relatively modest and has not become a particular draw for the university, the University objected to putting so many of their resources into the football club that the football club's participation within the football pyramid is being concluded. Iain interprets the situation as: "Apparently, it's no longer permissible for clubs in Division VI to share their grounds with someone else"; Team Bath FC claim that the Conference administrators have declared them ineligible for further promotion and that is being used as an excuse to resign their participation. It's possible that the University have simply decided not to renew their lease of Twerton Park as a money-saving measure; Bath City are apparently set to lose considerably from the conclusion of Team Bath FC's rent payments for the facilities, and a merger between the two teams was apparently even discussed. The University of Bath will continue to enter a football team into inter-university competitions, though not the wider football pyramid as present.
2) The Times report that bookmaker Paddy Power apparently lost over £500,000 as a result of the recent 4-4 draw between Liverpool and Arsenal. Most major UK bookmakers let you bet on the correct score for each match; only about a dozen or so different results happen more than 1% of the time (with about half being one of 0-0, 1-0, 0-1 or 1-1) and so most bookmakers will offer 100-1 against any score you name outside that dozen. Paddy Power, as so often is the case, are the anomaly and often quote odds for 4-4 draws and hammerings of up to 10-0, quoting odds of up to 500/1. The 4-4 Chelsea-Liverpool draw in the Champions' League a week or so ago had apparently caused them to have to pay out £225,000, and the Times claim that 537 punters placed a total of £1,027 worth of bets on the scoreline repeating itself, causing a payout of £514,527. Paddy Power have a titular fictional character who occasionally blogs and claims one gambler managed to bet £25 on the first 4-4 draw and then another £44 on the second 4-4 draw, the latter bet apparently returning £22k to one punter, who can't have been doing badly if he was able to throw £44 around on 4-4 in the first place.
It's surprisingly difficult to work out what the odds of a 4-4 draw "should" be. The The Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation has a mighty archive, but I haven't been able to find a distribution chart for results across all competitive games. The similarly wonderful Statto.com (Statto! Statto! Statto!) provide limited score distributions broken down by league and by season, but don't break down the realtive likelihood of the less likely results and don't seem to give amalgamated all-football results. The closest I've been able to find is this database from which I could extract 21,538 results from international football matches from 1920 to 2001. Of those 21,538 games, only 26 were 4-4, so (making wild assumptions about distribution) 500/1 is not a generous price for Paddy Power to offer in the long run, albeit one with whopping variance that has caught them out this time. They have since tightened their 4-4 odds in for some games to a particularly chiselly 350/1 or so.
Paddy Power will be delighted for the publicity as much as anything else. They have a history of shamefully ingenerous 115%-125% books (compare with betting on the flip of a coin and charging £5 if you lose but only paying out £4 if you win) but remarkably generous publicity stunts, like paying out on bets that Stoke would be relegated after one game (noting that Stoke are now eight points clear in 12th place) and paying out on bets that Man U would win the FA Cup back in February (noting that Everton knocked them out in the semi-final last week). This means that some PP bets have got to be +EV, if you can work out which ones and avoid betting on the vast majority which aren't.
It's always tempting to wonder if there's any possibility of match-fixing to take advantage of these generous odds, but it sems unlikely; PP restrict themselves to 100/1 against on correct score bets in matches outside the top couple of divisions, because surely match-fixing at the highest level would cause ridiculous amounts of stink were it to be discovered. It's also true that the Liverpool-Arsenal game had a ninth goal deep into injury time, but it was disallowed for offside. Can't imagine Paddy Power having had nearly as much on 5-4 either way as on the 4-4 draw!
3) The chairman of Bolton is touting a plan to extend the Premier League from 20 teams to two 18-team divisions, absorbing Rangers and Celtic from Scotland and presumably 14 other yo-yo "too big to go down" teams from the Championship. This is a blatant grab at redistributing TV rights money in a way that will suit some teams better than others and its success or failure (for it apparently needs 14 out of 20 Premiership chairmen to agree) will depend on sufficiently many teams considering the plan to be in their interest. It's a bit like the puzzle about dividing gold among pirates. Actually, it's a lot like that puzzle, if not strictly economically equivalent.
Discussions about football reorganisation rumble on all the time, and I can't help wondering whether the notion of a two-division Premier League (which you'd think would be called the Premier League and, by logical extension, the Deuxiem League) is in vogue at least in part due to ongoing discussions over a parallel development in Scotland. Scotland like rejumbling and restructuring their leagues more than most nations; perhaps England is just feeling left out. (Incidentally, I've long wanted a football management game which simulated this aspect of sports business development, by virtue of the competitions in the game evolving over time. Haven't had one yet, though.)
BBC writer Chick Young gives a fairly standard defence of the argument against the Old Firm leaving, which makes a lot of sense. My view is that it's just a matter of time, though whether it's to an English Premiership, some sort of pan-European league or a putative Atlantic League remains to be seen. I'll only start to take such discussions of potential moves at all seriously if I hear that broadcasters are planning to make the move worth people's while, simply because TV rights are such a large proportion of the football business these days. One to look at seriously only about 6-12 months before the TV rights deals come up for grabs, or if there's a serious shift in power with pay-TV giants across Europe preparing to co-operate to make football dance to their tune even more than at present.
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