Many a mickle maks a muckle

Recent BBC documentaries about games

2009-12-13T22:24:49Z

A very late recommendation indeed: last week, the TV channel BBC FOUR had a documentary about Kit Williams, the author of the Masquerade book that is said to have spawned the genre of the "armchair treasure hunt" thirty years ago. (I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could identify other inspirations for the genre, going back to the Gold Rush, or further.) Williams was not properly prepared - at best - for the success and impact that his book had, and took being a media property rather badly. Accordingly, ever since then he has been quiet, arguably to the point of reclusiveness, though he has painted and created artwork, mostly sold to a small network of friends and collectors within his home of Gloucestershire.

A few months ago, there was a fairly straightforward documentary of the story of Masquerade broadcast on the BBC's Radio Four and the hunt's dissatisfactory conclusion. Williams also agreed at the time to be interviewed for a TV documentary, mostly about what he has done over the thirty years since then. The climax of the documentary leads up to a one-day exhbition of some of his work, which is rather different from the way he has normally worked. The documentary had a delightful conclusion, hinted heavily by the show; if you're within the UK, BBC iPlayer has the show available online for a few more hours - quite literally, he said, unhelpfully - though it may well be repeated again at some point, or it might pop up somewhere via BitTorrent or somesuch afterwards. If it's too late, you can always read the textual spoiler instead; suffice to say, I think this gives an appropriate degree of closure to the whole story that had not existed before.

Other than for the Masquerade angle, the documentary was still well worth viewing on its own merits, even for someone who is not usually a fan of shows about art. Williams is extremely accomplished and has a real sense of fun, rightfully compared to the eccentric old uncle in every family. His demeanour and his sense of humour do make a great deal of sense in that regard, but they also put me in mind about what Vicky Coren (and Charlie Skelton) have to say about uncles in Once More, With Feeling. (I am very grateful to kay_taylor for lending me this.)

Whether it's too late or not for you to see that documentary, I can also recommend the first part of three of Games Britannia, exploring the role of games in Britain concluding with Staunton hosting the first international chess tournament in 1851. The show hints at more than it spells out; while host Ben Woolley (who I still think of in the context of The Net, BBC 2's Internet show from, quite literally, fifteen years ago) discusses the complexity of alea evangelii, which they roughly describe as having some of the gameplay of Hneftafl, or at least some member of the tafl family, they also hint of it having possibly-not-yet-quite-correctly-interpreted numerical components to the game, which reminded me ever so slightly of Rithmomachy - and yet, by the way they appear to play the game, they look like they're playing by some rather Hneftafl-like rules.

Nevertheless, another very enjoyable show - and the first part will be available on iPlayer until a week after the second and third parts have been broadcast, so you do have time to view this (unlike the Masquerade doc). I am a sucker for anything that gives voxes pop to David (Hare and Tortoise) Parlett and the aforementioned Vicky Coren, as well as for anything to do with games; thumbs up, looking forward to the rest.

Things I will flesh out some other day: the British Go Association League, played online, to be compared with and contrasted to the US Chess League; Winton Capital are my favourite algorithmic futures trading company because they sponsor the British Go Association, some junior chess events, some UK mathematics team competitions and doubtless several other interesting causes.

Game-design-related request. Can anyone recommend some modern or at least readily available music which has the property that there are a large number of bars of music in which there is a regular pattern such that one instrument plays on the first beat of the bar, a second instrument plays on the second beat of the bar, a third instrument plays on the third beat of the bar and so on? (Whichever time signature it's in.) If the pattern doesn't alternate beats between instruments but bars between instruments, that would work too. If this gets mixed up later on in the piece, so much the better - but the essential gist is that it would be fun to have some sort of game that depended upon its accompanying soundtrack by virtue of a restriction that different teams of players within the game could only act in some fashion when their team's instrument was playing. Does that make sense? If not, I'll see if I can try to explain it again in some other fashion.

If it does make sense but nobody has any such recommendations, does anyone feel like writing such a piece of music just for the purposes of interesting gameplay? :-D

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank yo

My annual chess post

2009-12-06T23:03:33Z

About once a year, I write about chess. You can see previous year's installments back on my old steam-powered LiveJournal. I've been wanting to write this for a while, ideally even as part of my wider mind sports round-up, but if I had tried to fit it all in at the time, then the article wouldn't have been posted in any sort of timely fashion.

The most recent major tournament was the Tal memorial, Tal being a reference to Mikhail, the eighth World Chess Champion from Latvia. The tournament was arguably the strongest held all year, with all ten participants ranked within the world's top thirteen (with only #1 Vesselin Topalov and Azerbaijan's top two players - #11 Teimour Redjabov and #6 Vugar Gashimov - missing. Can't remember ever hearing of Gashimov before.) Vladimir Kramnik, the fourteenth undisputed world champion, ended up at the top of the leaderboard, with three wins and six draws in what was his best result since, probably, his world championship unification victory in late 2006, ablutionary controversy and all. Second place was shared by Vassily Ivanchuk and Norwegian prodigy Magnus Carlsen, the latter particularly impressive due to starting the tournament with a run of seven draws despite a head cold and finishing with a brace of victories.

The next major tournament rolls around next week and this time an unnamed City of London private sponsor has stumped up big money to fund the London Chess Classic, not unreasonably considered the strongest tournament in the UK for 25 years. The tournament prioritises quality over quantity with just eight players, four domestic and four overseas. From abroad, we have the aforementioned past world champion Vladimir Kramnik, the presumptive future world champion Magnus Carlsen, American wonderkid Hikaru Nakamura and strong Chinese contender Ni Hua. The British representatives are England's top four: Michael Adams and Nigel Short, long the Andy Murray and Tim Henman of British chess, which is by no means uncomplimentary, Luke McShane and David Howell. McShane was an English prodigy who made it up to 42nd in the world five years ago, but the demands of university overtook him, then he got a job as a trader at Goldman Sachs and has been playing little other than the German league in recent years. David Howell made headlines by beating one-time top-ten player GM John Nunn at blitz, while aged eight back at MSO 3 in 1999, setting the world record for youngest player to defeat a GM, and has developed steadily ever since, flirting with the world's top 200.

There is a prize fund of a hundred thousand euros for the tournament, but one would expect that half the field are going to be on five-figure appearance fees as well, and probably fairly high five figures for Kramnik and Carlsen. The prize fund will mostly be paid according to placement, but very neatly with a hefty chunk to be divided as bonuses for won games and another hefty chunk paid out in brilliancy prizes. All of these should serve to spur the players to attacking games rather than short draws. There's a fair degree of history between the players; everyone has gunned for Kramnik over the years, with Kramnik's 82-game winning streak in 2000 being finished by Adams, and even Howell setting a record by earning a (courtesy?) draw in one game of a four-game blitz match and earning another "youngest ever to" record. Short and Adams have long (and, I think, amicably) scrapped for English dominance, and Nakamura recently beat Carlsen 3-1 in the final of a blitz tournament. a week or two after Carlsen had beaten twenty-one top challengers in a 42-round blitz chess World Championship to which Nakamura had not been invited.

So exciting times in the world of chess, yet the only event to make the mass media at all recently was Kasparov coming out of retirement for a twelve-game half-rapid half-blitz match against Karpov in September. Their epic matches may have been among the defining marks of sport in the first half of the '80s, but it does seem a shame that the mass media are stuck three-quarters of a generation behind the rest of us. Perhaps it's a sign that the mass media still associate chess with multi-month man-on-man epic matches, which would speak less well of FIDE's shorter matches and even knockout tournaments for their title.

Speaking of which, FIDE's World Cup is in progress, with 128 entrants winnowed down after five rounds of caissic combat to a final four: Belarus-to-Israel emigré Boris Gelfand, Carlsen counterpart Sergey Karjakin, Ruslan Ponomariov (who has history in these knockouts) and surprise package Vladimir Malakhov who has probably amassed the most impressive beatpath to date. The 128 players in Khanty-Mansiysk (bless you), Russia will share US$1.6 million - specifically, they'll get 80% of it, and the organisers will keep 20%. The World Cup winner also gets one of the eight spots in the Candidates' Tournament to determine 2011's challenger. It's needlessly complicated (college football's BCS makes sense by comparison) and FIDE keep changing the rules. No change there, then.

And yet I find it tricky to support individual chess players unless either (a) I've met them or (b) I share a nationality with them in an international competition. (Even as a child of the world with a globalist perspective, I tend to identify as British rather than English or European in such matters.) While chess is avowedly an individual game, I'm most interested in it as a team sport where a team might give me some degree of identification and thus rooting interest. Four competitions have caught my imagination over recent months - the same four as usual.

The 4 Nations Chess League, or 4NCL, is a face-to-face competition in Great Britain with 11 rounds of play over five weekends between teams of eight players. My criticisms last year primarily concerned the business model of the league. This season, prize money has been marginally increased and split between three teams per division rather than two, with sensible additional prizes to compete for among the lower-rated teams in the third division of three, undoubtedly a good move. The arguable problem with the league comes with the permission of having two teams from the same club in the same division, and the weird conclusion is one for the collection. (I know there are more collectors of weird conclusions than just me here.)

In the recently-concluded 2008-9 season, Guildford-AD&C 1, who had won the two previous seasons, won all their matches but two: one draw and one loss. Their draw was against Wood Green Hilsmark Kingfisher 1, the stacked team created by amalgamating two previously separate clubs together. WGHK (and you can't love that unwieldy name) conceded that draw and no other losses, to win the year's championship. To whom did Guildford-AD&C 1 lose? Why, Guildford-AD&C 2. Full marks to the Guildford organisation for competitiveness and for going above and beyond to prove that the intra-club match is as fiercely fought as every other match, but surely every club with two teams in the same division is getting a salutary reward of the costs of honesty; let's hope more teams don't decide that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Guildford's line-up for their last game was a very strong one, for beating WGHK would have given Guildford the title by virtue of winning more games in the identical 6-1 records, though nowhere as strong as the incredible counterpart three years previously. That was exceptional; broadly, Guildford has habitually been putting out teams at 2500, or slightly higher, for years.

Other than that, the 4NCL rolls on apace. The league has 64 teams this year, arranged in two 16s and a 32, the same as last year and only marginally down from 67 two years ago and 72 the year before that; I'm not sure how well the 16-team partially-split divisions are working in practice compared to the previous 12-team all-play-alls, though the logic is certainly sound. Last year the 4NCL introduced a prize for the best annotated game and a junior league, both of which are thoughtful innovations that have wisely been repeated this year. So evolution rather than revolution, then. Once again, I would advise them to consider adding an Internet-based league which would likely prove accessible and popular, as well as continuing the face-to-face league which meets the considerable demand out there for high-level league chess.

The European Club Cup 2009 is a similar sort of tournament, but the teams of six are drawn from leagues all across Europe. England, or the 4NCL at large, are represented by White Rose, who finished fourth in this year's 4NCL, but sadly their three GMs did not go with them and accordingly they struggled to one win and two draws against opposition towards the bottom of the schedule, with four losses seeing them finish in 46th - commensurate with their seeding position going in. English interest came from IM Lorin D'Costa, playing second board for Utrecht and taking something of a beating in a bottom-heavy team which managed to win the odd match in seven, and GM Michael Adams whose recent struggles have seen him slip to just fifth board for OSG Baden-Baden of Germany. Not too surprisingly, he faced fairly easy meat and won six of his seven games, drawing the seventh. Baden-Baden were marginally edged out by Mika Yerevan and St. Petersburg, but hammered all five other opponents in order to finish fifth in terms of match points but winning more games than any other team.

The Swiss system brought the top teams together quickly enough, and there were only six undefeated teams after three rounds, three after four and two after five - so the round six pairing of Alkaloid Skopje (from Macedonia) against Economist-SGSEU-1 Saratov of Russia - come on you Economist-SGSEU-1! - would seem to determine the championship. Top seeds Saratov were reasonably closely matched by Skopje over the top four boards, but Xiangzhi Bu edged out Gadir Guseinov on board four, another lower-end-of-the-top-100 Azerbaijani of whom I had not heard, in the only decisive game of the six. The last round saw Saratov paired against Ashdod Illit of Israel who had Vassily Ivanchuk and paragraph three's Vugar Gashimov above the strong Israeli national team; once again, Xiangzhi Bu earnt a fourth-board victory to grind out a match win and the European Championship. Mika Yerevan of Armenia came second, with teams from Ural (not just a space on the Risk board) and St. Petersburg taking third and fourth places.

This event took place two weeks before the European Team Chess Championship - a similar enterprise, but the latter is played between national teams of four rather than between clubs who may field international line-ups. England sent a line-up of Adams, McShane, Stuart Conquest, Simon Williams and Stephen Gordon; one would expect Nigel Short and David Howell to be in England's strongest team (taking us back to the London Chess Classic!) and I note that Short would probably have been ahead of Adams in the line-up for the first time since, I reckon, England's triumph in 1997 or so.

Concerning Adams, a kibitzer said "I don`t know if their ((sic)) is any connection but ever since Adams has got married his form has gone south", which is as charming as anonymous chess kibitzers tend to be. Conversely, Nigel Short has been ripping it up over the last year or so, particularly on home turf. (Paddy Power currently offer 6/4 against Short being the top UK player in the London Chess Classic, which looks tasty to me - far tastier than the 11/8 against Adams - not least as it may not take much.) See, I drew an analogy between Short and Adams in chess and Henman and Murray in tennis, because all four have had extremely illustrious careers featuring significant tournament victories - but the lazy media only pay attention to the Grand Slams in tennis and the World Championships in chess, at which our heroes have so far fallen marginally short. But I have digressed.

Short and Howell weren't taking part in the European Team Chess Championship, though, because Nigel Short was continuing his occasional super-junior mentoring role, this time overseeing Howell in the World Junior Championship in Argentina. (The 1973 event was played in Thornaby Pavillion, half an hour's walk away from here.) The existence of this under-20 championship has to be considered somewhat redundant when younger players still have been opening major open competitions for years, but it has over fifty years of history as a title and some extremely impressive predecessors. Howell was among the top seeds and living up to his high billing, until he "castled queenside" (in this context, lost three games in a row, hence a 0-0-0 on the scorechart) fairly close towards the end. That came off the back of very a rough time in InventiChess in Belgium; let's hope he's able to get back onto the horse for his sake. Again, I have digressed.

The England line-up respectably kept things close against #2-seed Azerbaijan in round two, managed to sneak a win over fourth-seeds Bulgaria in round three, then faded away somewhat over the remaining seven rounds of the tournament, with a squeaky loss to Switzerland the low point and a draw against Carlsen-less Norway not being much better. Michael Adams started with losses against Redjabov and Toaplov, neither of which is at all disgraceful, but seemed to be sleepwalking his way through until the very end. (A slightly vegetarian lack of bite against more moderate opposition is a fairly frequent sort of British chess disease, though not normally one associated with Adams.) McShane had a very respectable return to representing his country, showing fearlessness against high-rated opposition that he'll need to repeat next week.

As usual, the competition at the top end of the table was between the old Soviet Bloc, with honourable mentions for Bulgaria and Germany. Azerbaijan ended up on top, creeping by teams 2½-1½ for fun, with wins sprinkled among their hard-to-beat lower three boards conceding only a four-draw match draw to Russia and a one-point reverse to Armenia. Top seeds Russia were drawish by contrast and conceded one-win-one-loss match draws to Croatia, the Netherlands and Spain, their five-match-win, four-match-draw record only good enough for second place. Ukraine had powerful performances on the top boards; after losing the first match to Switzerland, they had relatively little competition as they made their way up the Swiss draw in later rounds and wound up exactly matching their third-placed seeding. Fourth-seed Bulgaria's loss to England was typical as they all underperformed their way to 18th place.

And finally, the United States Chess League holds the grand final match of its fifth season tomorrow. Five seasons, eh? I remember when the prospect of an Internet-based mind sports league was brand new and speculative, but the USCL team deserve great credit for sustaining their vision year after year. The fifth season represents less of an advance over the fourth season than the fourth did over the third, or so on previously, but this better represents the league having reached a state of maturity than a lack of development. A couple of years ago, USCL Commissioner Greg Shahade hinted that the expansion programme would not last forever, and season five matches season four in having fourteen teams. I think this now represents a point at which presumptive league entrants will have to put together a very compelling proposal in order to earn league admission, unless a vacancy should arise for some reason.

That said, Greg has been successful in gaining more central league sponsorship for 2009 than for any previous season, and this (in turn) has permitted teams to attract stronger line-ups than ever before, even within the confines of the league's rating cap. If anything, the rating cap is marginally tighter than ever before, because in previous seasons there was a wrinkle which lifted the cap from 2400 by ten points for each woman playing on the team. That wrinkle no longer exists within the rules, though featuring a woman within the squad does entitle a club to increase the capacity of the squad by one. (Perhaps it's more accurate to say that USCL squads are now restricted to eight men, rather than eight players, plus two alternates.) The number of women on USCL line-ups in practice has decreased as a result, which I can't see as a step forward, though the women who play are generally performing about consistently with their rating, as they did before.

Tomorrow's grand final sees the Miami Sharks, champions of the West division (for the chess world is that East-heavy that Miami is the eighth most Occidental team out of fourteen) take on the New York Knights, champions of the East division. As Miami have always been in the West, the two teams have only met twice before in four years, splitting the series equally. Miami's top board is GM Julipo Becerra, league MVP in '06 and '07 and three-time first-team all-star, but 2009 has been his toughest season to date, going down three weeks running over rounds 6 to 8. He'll be up against New York's GM Giorgi Kacheishvili, who has four good wins (two Game of the Week winners, even), two defeats and five draws in his USCL career.

On board two, New York's Pascal Charbonneau, the 2005 USCL MVP, faces Miami's Blas Lugo; Lugo is having his best USCL season to date, but Charbonneau has a remarkable eight out of nine decisive results in the USCL this season (five wins, one draw, three losses) and so a draw here would surprise. Board three has Miami's IM Alejandro Roman face New York's Matt Herman, and board four has New York's fast-improving Yaacov Norowitz take on Eric Rodriguez, who has been a reliable star at Miami's tail end so far. Chess Express Ratings predicts four decisive results split evenly; I'd personally lean towards New York. Should the match turn out a 2-2 draw, a special blitz tie-breaker goes into operation, as has been the conclusion of the three previous seasons. Greg Shahade once described this as being "a bit like the Survivor Series", and not without reason.

One feature of last season that sadly has not survived to season five is that Greg had the time last year to perform a weekly recap of several of the games taking place that week, illustrating some of the principal variations, providing a spoken annotation and commentary on the league. (For instance, this one from last year's quarter-final week. See 34:20 through with regard to the last sentence of the last para.) It's a shame that that hasn't continued and that nobody else has picked up the mantle, but they must have been an awful lot of work to make. Greg has encouraged teams to find their own bloggers; word about the league is spreading more quickly and more widely this year than previously.

This represents the biggest challenge to the league, from two different perspectives. With a five-year history, expansion and stability, it's an enterprise that should have earnt well-deserved respect from the chess world at large, even if it is yet to spawn an imitator (...to my knowledge?) whether in the US or abroad, and the fact that it hasn't only reflects the fact that relatively few people are still talking about it. There's a school of thought that says the league will need more and more of the strongest players to be involved in order to attract further attention; it's interesting to think about what countries with lower GDPs, where chess players have a better chance of earning a living wage from their play, might do with a similar framework. An old-Soviet-Bloc or Eastern European online chess league, or an online Bundesliga, would be a very tasty prospect indeed.

The other perspective from which this is challenging reflects the personalities of those who write blogs - and, even more so, those who comment on them. Chess bloggers, and even more so chess blog commentators, often reflect less... refined viewpoints. Much of the chess blogosphere has settled upon Blogger where anonymous comments are much more frequent than they are on LiveJournal, and John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory sadly holds as true for the online game of chess as it does for Unreal Tournament 2004, or most of the rest of the blogosphere. Chess trolls tend not to be so profane, but they can be deliberately rude and frequently misogynistic. The USCL is not particularly bad in this regard compared to much of the rest of the chess blogosphere I've seen, or compared to some of the less thoughtful poker commentary I've seen, but it's still not the side that you might want sponsors to see, say.

It's also relevant here that chess tends to attract a higher proportion than the world at large of what you might call Type A personalities who are attracted to chess simply because it throws up concrete results, wins and losses, with there being rather more absolutes of right and wrong than grey scales of nuanced comment. Now there's nothing wrong with Type A personalities, not least because they get things done, and people with Type A personalities are more than welcome to comment here. People with rude personalities are not welcome here, though, and should exercise their freedom of speech in their own blog should I start deleting rude commentary with prejudice and without warning. The distinction between Type A personalities and rude personalities can sometimes appear more blurred than necessarily need be the case.

The biggest challenge that Greg Shahade faces is resolving interpersonal conflict when Type A personalities come up against each other, not least his own. This thread, from last December, is a case in point; the season has just finished, All-Star teams have been declared, some people are taking things very seriously, some anonymous voices are stirring things up and some hard questions are being asked about the direction and philosophical underpinnings of the league. The manager of the Boston club, probably the best-developed club to date, decides the differences between the way things are going and the way he'd like to see things going are large enough that he is quitting as overall manager and continuing in an assistant manager role, keeping the club going, but in a way that will engage his emotions further. I reckon that both Greg and Matt have behaved honourably here, but it's definitely a case of type A personalities clashing. This isn't the first instance of it, and neither will it be the last.

I say that confidently because it already hasn't been the last. Case in point: this post in the Chicago Blaze blog after the Blaze beat the Tennessee Tempo. Tempers get heated and another organiser calls it a day in response to blogosphere comments. Greg isn't involved in this - in fact, he does as good a job as is possible to calm things down, and the Tempo do conclude the season in good grace. My view on this, like most of the others, is a hope that the hard-working and popular Tennessee organisation can find a way to keep things going, in some way, shape or form, to everyone's satisfaction. It's also a reflection that this is another example of the boundary between fan and participant in the chess world being rather thinner than in most established sports fandoms; as a fan, your comments will be seen by the people you're talking about, and you can well hurt people's feelings. Great news for anonymous Internet fuckwads everywhere, as well as those who might care more but who do not think too hard.

There are other examples, and I don't feel the same way. For instance, long-time Seattle Sluggers blogger Bill McGeary, writing under the name ha81, signs out taking a parting shot at the USCL blogosphere and the role of trash talk therein. So far, the closest that the USCL has had to an official policy on this is a sort of acknowledgment that people who start controversy attract interest to the league, which has to be a good thing. I would conversely argue that the negative effects of people's feelings being hurt outweigh the positive effects of people being attracted to the drama - and people dropping out of the league may be an indication that the atmosphere has become a little too toxic for them in practice. The USCL is still fairly fragile and relies on a fairly small number of people to take place at all, not just the commissioning team but also the organisers; a few more arguments and a little too much rudeness may try enough people's tolerances and patience to really start to damage the league.

In conclusion, then, another great USCL season. The out-of-place recommendations I would make to Greg Shahade are (a) to explicitly reward teams for the publicity and good name that they can bring to the league, principally by bringing about wider attention in the chess media or even the mass media at large, and (b) to really start cracking down - even using threats of sponsorship sanctions - on people who bring the league into disrepute by getting teams to take responsibility for their players and fans, so that continued participation may be enjoyable all round. Oh, and (c) not to have deleted his LiveJournal. Greg posted a lovely picture of his pretty cats here, and that gave me more confidence in the league going forward than anything else, because, well, who couldn't trust a cat person, but he had to delete it... :-/ (How's the poker going, Greg? Profitably, I hope! I miss reading about it from time to time.)

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank yo

I want to be a human being, not a human doing

2009-11-15T04:32:54Z

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.

Meg had had one of her most challenging weeks at work, which didn't even let her go home on time; she arrived home while the tumble dryer was rattling away, finishing off the last load of towels. She didn't get as much quiet time as we'd have liked before we set off (in my case, once again) up to Newcastle. On this occasion we drove to Costco to buy drinks and meat; Meg is a recent convert to a brand of freezer bag which lets you pump the last air out and create a tight vacuum to prevent freezer burn. I'm not completely sure how it can work as well in practice as in theory, but Meg's impressed all the same. Accordingly, we bulk-bought meat, and have since split it up into a number of smaller packages for home freezing. We grabbed some dinner at the Costco café, though Meg got stuck in the queue for ten minutes while I stuffed my face. It started to rain hard while we were in Costco; I quickly threw things in our boot, then Meg found us a quick backstreet route to the A184 and hence to the venue.

The show took place at the Cluny - more specifically at "the Cluny2", a breakout underground venue next door. Three flights of stairs down - I was being literal - we took our seats in a darkened auditorium, set up to host about a hundred and twenty. While the show was described as having doors open at 7:30 for a show running from 8 to 10, the show started about ten minutes late and ran a little long, finally reaching a conclusion a little after 10:30. (Good value for money!) The main backdrop of the show comprised two giant projector screens, each perhaps twelve feet tall, with our host (whose name I didn't catch, though he looked like a cross between Marcus Brigstocke and Dear Economist Tim Harford) wandering between. Cameramen roamed the studio as appropriate and there were three or four other runners with microphones going in search of people with things to say. (Might a hypermobile boom mic have been better?)

We began with an airline attendant-style democracy demonstration, the highlight of which was "please ensure your computers and mobile phones are switched on". The format of the show was that the first half of the show would be dedicated to brainstorming for ideas as to what to do with the box office takings and the second half of the show would be dedicated to refining some of those ideas and selecting one of them. (The interval saw a "lobbying period", in which people could mingle with proponents of their favoured ideas - not least to try to ensure that each potential bright idea had someone who was, or some team who were, prepared to implement it should it eventually be selected.)

The voting system was interesting; each audience member was given, on arrival, an A4 sheet of sturdy paper folded into a booklet from four sides of A5, with one of those sides coloured bright green, another coloured bright yellow and a third coloured bright fuchsia. We could call for opinion polls on suggested ideas by displaying the bright yellow sheet prominently, upon which all participants were invited to show approval for an idea with their bright green side and to show disapproval for an idea with their bright fuchsia side. During votes in the second half of the show, a computer system digitised an image of the audience, interpreted solid blocks of colour as voting sheets displayed by voters and counted just how many fuchsia, yellow and green votes there were.

A representative of the Wunderbar festival was ever-present in the background, assigned the role of The Voice Of Reason. She acted as referee and moderator, ensuring that if people had happened to appear to be serious about a proposal that could not be realised in Wunderbar's name, then it would have been stricken down. She also acted as a teller for hand-counted opinion polls in the first half of the show, rather than formal votes using the computer system in the second half. She also had a Christmas jingle bell to attract attention when required, which was a particularly jolly sort of attention-grabber.

The real unsung hero of the show was the video jockey controlling the computer screens. This was a tour de force and made the show work. Most of the time the screens relayed the camera's point of view, with the camera most usually pointed at the current speaker. The computer operator would create little sticky notes on the fly with words or quotes, almost as if taking minutes at a meeting, then drag these sticky notes onto the display in real time, shown on the screens. It's a bit like an interactive "Pop-Up Video", except without the snark. Sometimes this operator would search (presumably Google Images or somesuch) for a picture or graphic illustrating a concept mentioned by an audience member, then pop up this as an icon in the corner. We generated a little train of such icons illustrating the development of the story. This wasn't limited to little pictures, though - sometimes there were web pages brought up to illustrate the discussion, sometimes we had little video clips, all sorts.

And that wasn't all. While most of the time we had this augmented-reality live video of the speaker, from time to time we would flip to another screen. One screen had a developing storyboard, I suppose you'd call it, representing the total discussion of the evening, with a complete list of the captions and images referenced that evening. Sometimes we'd flip to a completely unrelated hastily-concocted picture, saying something like "BRAINSTORMING" or "TIME IS RUNNING OUT" and just generally keeping the mood going. The really impressive part was that there was someone clearly Photoshopping in real time, with a great deal of talent for quick work. One of the ideas we had was to give the money to five-year-old schoolkids to invest in the stock market, possibly better than the professionals; within a minute of it being suggested, we had a picture of stock market traders looking frantic with a picture of a toddler overlaid. There was a lot of fast Photoshopping, and much of it was very good, and this really pushed the atmosphere forward.

And even that wasn't all! We were invited to visit a web page, if we had brought an Internet device, and contribute that way; Tweets with the #whowantstobe hash tag also were relayed to the video screens, and the show was even (theoretically?) broadcast online live so that you could participate from afar. Now that we have become Who Wants To Be? veterans, we look forward to taking advantage of this functionality next time - even if next time the show isn't in our neck of the woods. (Some form of policing this user input may eventually have to become required, or the show may end up being a target for trolls. Rickrolling Who Wants To Be? would be funny exactly once.) It was a massive technical accomplishment all round, and that was part of why people who got the references were in geek heaven in response to the high level of ambition.

That is a pretty full description of everything there was to see. We spent the first 45 minutes brainstorming ideas; the Who Wants To Be? team have video from previous games online, and it's pretty clear that there are a few familiar themes that naturally tend to emerge quickly as to how the takings should be spent. It's not uncommon that people suggest destruction, or spending it on drinks or sweets. It's usual that someone suggests that we all get refunds. It's usual that someone suggests some sort of lottery or contest to give it to an audience member. It's usual, among the artistic crowd, that there are vaguely artistic proposals. It's also usual that the penny drops and people realise that this could be a way to generate a hefty chunk of change for the good cause of their choice, and that's when people start to get impassioned, and then things start to get really interesting.

Suggestions were fired out fairly quickly in the first half; while there wasn't generally audible naysaying, unpopular ideas clearly ran out of steam by not getting traction in the discussion. If anything, despite a few repeated reminders, our audience was more reticent than it should have been at calling for opinion polls; there were a few good ideas which were positively discussed but didn't have opinion polls called for, thus withered on the vine. The only time the discussion became strained was when one person made a sustained appeal for their own charity, a thoughtful organisation with a name similar to Tourism Concern that aimed to help the people who our tourism exploited. This started a short discussion on the nature of "difficult charities".

If this show has a message other than just - "just"! - that of "being fun" and "doing good", it's a demonstration of the downsides of populism and strictly majoritarian democracy, how the tyranny of the majority so often tramples minority rights underfoot. And yet the facilitators are perfectly happy for the rules of the game to change, even within the context of the game, if that is people's will. It didn't happen this time, but it could have done. Perhaps this could be a stage for a genuinely brilliant politician to practice their public speaking and convince the masses of a controversial viewpoint. It would be really interesting, and potentially very ugly, if anyone ever tried to disenfranchise voters - but I'm glad that it didn't happen when we were there. Might the game even provide a demonstration of the forces that bring about political parties? If it were long enough, if the stakes were high enough and if the views were contentious enough, possibly. This is definitely deliberately kept at the fun end of the spectrum.

Towards the end of the first half, the nine ideas that had attracted most support in the quick opinion polls were identified by The Voice Of Reason, and we ensured that each idea had someone who was prepared to stand by it and commit to bringing it to fruition. A few popular ideas withered on the vine right there. Numbered hats were distributed to these cheerleaders. Someone asked why the number of ideas going forward should be nine, and the staff said they were happy to change it if that were the will of the people - though someone said "there has to be only nine ideas, because there's only nine hats!" A quick opinion poll didn't reveal much support for changing the number going forward from nine, though. (The Voice Of Reason suggested it might be something to do with people wanting to go home...)

Among our nine ideas advancing were a couple of proposals relating to random acts of kindness - one with a superhero representing the festival, another involving splitting the funds up so that we might all be superheroes, with a hint of the "pay it forward" concept. A few specific charities made impassioned pleas - one involving the building of an underground otter holt, and another involving some sort of machinery of variable nature (water purifier? generator? juke box?) which might be deployed when a particular audience member went for volunteer work in Zambia for a few months. Art projects included the concept of a lovely urban treehouse, the concept of a suit made of money, and the concept of surprising people with a toilet roll where the sheets of paper had been replaced by cash. (This latter suggestion was made by someone who was fairly obviously a couple of pints ahead of the rest of us, but he added a lot to the proceedings by virtue of being a funny drunk rather than an unreasonable one.)

The second half saw four formal votes, with the computer image processing brought into play on each one. The first three were semi-finals to cut the nine ideas down to three, the final picked an overall winner. This was a surprisingly involved process; when people could smell the money, the stakes got higher. There were hints of horse-trading, attempts to win support from floating voters by incorporating good sub-ideas from other projects. ("Could the treehouse incorporate a mattress? A webcam? Some otters?") The ambient soundtrack got a little more intense, making heavy - and, I'm quite sure, entirely legal - use of some of the think music from the wonderful Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? soundtrack CD. Track 62, the Tchaikovsky-esque million pound win anthem, got cued up a few times by mistake when surely it would have been the ideal way to finish the show; Track 61, the infamous million pound loss crashing fanfare, was not featured. There were occasional klaxons to push the discussion on, and a heavy clock motif, but we still ran very late because we were having so much fun that we didn't want to stop.

Cutting to the chase, our final vote was a tense one: funding for the otter holt versus funding Wunderbarman, a superhero who would go around distributing the cash in a series of small random acts of kindness versus funding a generator for Zambia. (The Wundermarman proposal eventually found a chap called Abraham in the audience who was prepared to volunteer to carry the role out, asking only for lunch. We thought he looked honest, and he had recently returned £60 that he had found in the street. It also was frequently illustrated by a brilliant, but rather grotesque, Photoshopped flabby semi-naked superhero prominently bedecked with the Wunderbar festival logo.) There were votes and there were revotes when the initial voting was close, and there were occasional impromptu (and quite possibly unconstitutional, but The Voice Of Reason dictates law) Instant Runoffs between the top two suggestions in the closest ballots. The generator for Zambia won by a couple of votes. Meg saw Abraham standing outside as we left, in good spirits, but musing "I was 2% away from being a superhero"...

It was all executed in very good spirits; there was no laughing at people's expense, and people were in constructive moods. There are lots of categories of people who would enjoy this; I fell firmly into the "can geek out over voting and voting processes" category, the "loves watching really talented people do fab things with computers very quickly" category and the "games are better than stories because they aren't scripted" category. Many of the Wunderbar festival sessions have much in common with the concept of interactive art, and this is a pretty uncomplicated application of interactivity to a lovely theatre show premise.

The premise is so simple, but it did take me quite a few paragraphs to explain all the stylistic enhancements; at one level, these are just bells and whistles, but they're such beautiful ornaments, so fundamental to the implementation of the premise and so skillfully executed in practice that the process is involving and delightful. You could stretch to a criticism that this is a triumph of style over substance, but this degree of style and good spirit alone are enough to create a brilliant night. I had a great time and will be very keen to participate again if I get the chance.

Probably a more serious criticism is that the technology was not reliable. All the seats in the auditorium had to be covered up with black cloths, for their native purple fabric was throwing the automated vote counter off. Anyone who was wearing prominently coloured clothing that might jigger the system - for instance, Meg's beautiful plain red coat - had to have that hidden. The Voice Of Reason was clad in black and prepared to offer her clothes to block those whose garments were jiggering the system up. Even after all that, I'm not sure that the vote count was necessarily all that accurate. Case in point: there was one vote which was resolved as something like 13% fuchsia, 43% yellow, 44% green, so a revote was requested with people asked not to vote fuchsia. The fuchsia proportion increased second time. Green beat yellow a second time, so it was declared victorious.

More seriously, we saw a lot of technical tests taking place in the auditorium over the half-time interval, and they seemed to be struggling to make the technology work; we could see staff members hold up cards which sometimes were resolved to blocks of colour that would be scored and sometimes weren't. (I tried a few experiments myself and couldn't reliably score a hit on the sensor.) Most seriously of all, I have a strong suspicion that there was a depth problem - people at the front of the audience took up a much greater proportion of the scanned image than people at the back, and so it was easy for their card to register as a coloured pixel, or possibly two coloured pixels, when it was rather harder for me at the back to enfranchise my vote. In the end, the staff acknowledged that the automatic counter wasn't working and they resorted to using staff as vote tellers; less technically impressive, but probably more accurate. Crucially, it didn't spoil the fun, so in a sense it didn't matter.

Another problem that we suffered was that while there may well have been a system to accept input from people who could send Tweets or visit web pages on their mobile Internet device, Meg had no reception or signal of any sort at her seat, and it really didn't help that we were a few floors underground - or possibly not underground, for the theatre is built on rather a steep hill - and sat close to a large structural pipe. I'll give the staff some credit because there were some audience members who could get their input across electronically, and I suspect there are environments where the tech works rather better in this regard than the one where the show took place.

I can't completely understand the business model that makes the show happen. If the box office takings are redistributed, who pays for the venue, the staff, the performers and the technology? Presumably there must be a festival or some sort of sponsor to take the financial hit, in return for the goodwill, publicity and general ART generated by whatever people decide to do. I note that 107 tickets were claimed to have been sold (plausible; I picked up numbers 52 and 53 for us yesterday, and there's no reason for Wunderbar to lie) but the manual card votes only attracted something like 75 or 80 votes in total over the three options. This hints at a no-show rate of about 20%, which is probably about what you might expect. Again, the no-shows don't really spoil the fun.

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!

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank yo

Sandpit: huge hit!

2009-11-14T15:12:28Z

Sandpit at the Wunderbar Festival the night before last was excellent. Hurrah! Many, many thanks to everyone involved.

I primarily come from a tradition of board game conventions, with influences from puzzles, role-playing (both tabletop and live action), laser games, postal games, game shows and more over the years. However, last night I was drawing upon my board game convention background and looked at Sandpit through a board game convention lens. It succeeded admirably: it was as good as a happy evening at an unusually imaginative board game convention, organised by people who had happened not to have been exposed to the world of board games conventions and their games. This was just what I wanted, because it was something I hadn't had the chance to enjoy for far too long. However, that description alone sells the event rather short; there were so many interesting and kinetic games on offer that I could have played (had I been in the mood to stretch my comfort zone) but didn't, that other people would have done, which means that there are lots of people who would have loved the event as much as I did, from a different perspective, without ever having any interest in attending a board games event.

The venue was a floor on the independent Tyneside Cinema very near the centre of Newcastle-on-Tyne, with the majority of games taking place in a spacious bar, but with some games that required quiet breaking out into their own rooms. Some games, which I didn't play on this occasion, even took place in the streets around the cinema, amid persistent rain of varying intensity. The session was advertised as taking place from 6:30 to 10:30; there were nine scheduled games, mostly with three time slots of three parallel games permitting people to choose one per slot, but a room full of ad hoc "pick up and play" games where people could use the props and equipment in the bar area for impromptu games with whoever was available between scheduled games. Two other games, Trap Street and The Man Who Was Thursday, went on in the background, taking up sporadic minutes as time permitted.

I arrived a quarter-hour early and picked up stickers to book my places in three games; this sticker system ensured that you didn't get twenty players all claiming that they were going to take part in one particular game that only had space for seven players. We also were handed out very neat little rulebooks (by Kevan) with the rules for the suggested "Pick Up And Play" games: The Hat Game (a bit Celebrities, a bit Taboo), 1000 Blank White Cards (though sadly there was no such deck and blanks available!), Kevan's deconstructed Mao, conversational parlour games Alphabet Minute and Monologues, Werewolf (with a seer and a healer), Paper Telephone (close to Eat Poop You Cat or SKUMP - I wrote down in my long list of ideas "play this via LJ" about five years ago, and have not yet got around to it, but it would still stand up in court), Foldover (communal story-telling with a nod to Consequences), Dadaist Pursuit (see below), literary pastiche contest The Book Game (similar to a family of 'zine games of the form Preposterous Poetry, etc.) and last but certainly not least the charming but highly abstract HipBone Game which I'd encountered years ago and vaguely stuck on my "to play eventually" list.

There were about half a dozen staff floating around; some had general organisational roles, but several were principally intending to facilitate (i.e., moderate, or just plain "run") particular games. When their game wasn't in progress, they helped to get pick-up games going in the bar area among people who were looking lost, which I frequently did. Sitting down at a likely-looking table, a very quick round of Paper Telephone started, with two out of four players independently choosing to start their sheets from "A rolling stone gathers no moss". It was fun, but I was playing with two people who knew each other, and when the facilitator disappeared after the first round, they decided they were more interested in talking with colleagues than in playing with me, so the game was a short one. A slightly disappointing conclusion.

It felt to me like there was an awful lot of talkin' going on and a disappointingly low level of playin', and it was fairly clear that most people had come in groups who knew each other already, maybe just as few as couples, rather than being individual floaters. This is always a tricky problem to solve, especially at an environment which may be as unfamiliar as this proved to many of its inhabitants. To be fair, this is at least as much of a problem at board game events as it was here - normally, it's not a problem for me at board game events because I happen to know people there already - and I don't think there is any established best practice that Sandpit was missing. Bringing the facilitators to the people to start the games is probably the right approach, but there might be even more people doing it - or perhaps my priorities are so pro-games that they really are different from most attendees, I'm not sure.

Before too much longer, I saw a facilitator teaching people Dadaist Pursuit; there was an empty chair at the table and I was welcome to join in. Everyone takes a stack of Generic Trivia Game question cards (here, as it happened, Irish Trivial Pursuit) and, when it's their turn to lead the round, reads out a question of their choice from the card atop their stack. Players then in turn read out an answer of their choice from the card atop their stack, knowing that it is vanishingly unlikely that any of the answers will be correct. The questioner then awards the question card to whoever supplied their favourite answer, as a point. It's very much in the Apples To Apples family, which represents excellent bloodstock. Arguably it's not as cohesive a game as A2A, though there are always hits and misses; it probably looks less imposing to the first-timer just because Trivial Pursuit cards may be familiar in a way that A2A cards are not. This was fun and we played for fifteen minutes until three players went off for Scoop!; the remaining five of us played for another half-hour until our games were due to start at 7:30.

Scoop! sounds fascinating; it's one of the rare games that isn't yet documented at Ludocity, having been developed incrementally as part of the Playmakers project. All I know about it is the brief description of "A game of brightly coloured cameras and team loyalties - join a news team and hunt out stories, but make sure your rivals don't catch you slacking off..."; every game was very helpfully described with a series of keywords, and the presence of the running keyword was enough to signal that it wasn't one for me.

I will say, though, that it puts me in mind of a generic laser game, except that each team has one gun - the lens of their camera - rather than each player having their own gun. Laser games are notoriously resource-heavy, cameras are approaching the status of standard kit. Does Scoop! have anything to learn from the world of laser games? Perhaps I'd know if I had played it... Likewise, another game I turned down was Night of the Vampire, based solely on its keywords of walking, deduction and teamwork. It sounded to me a little like a mobile version of Werewolf - a game already on my dance card for later, so one which could be skipped. (Actually, a player describes it elsewhere, and my guess was miles off the mark. It's almost more Pac-Man than anything else, which is clearly no bad thing.)

Instead, I went for Standoff, a game in which a team have to repeatedly decide how to split a divisible prize between them. Players can point (unloaded, in this instance) water pistols at each other; upon firing said pistol, the target may be eliminated from that round's prize division. (A simple "reaction time" card-based driver resolves contests.) Nothing terribly original - I'm sure there's a proprietary game along very similar lines, but that's not to say either game is at all bad, or to fling around accusations of plagiarism other than the general saw of great minds thinking alike. (At worst, it fits into a family, traceable from the brilliant I'm The Boss! to postal silliness The Bonking Game.) Half a dozen rounds, round five scored double, round six scored triple, which may be a bit too end-heavy. Fun, very nicely facilitated - I suspect this really does need a GM to work - and certainly didn't overstay its welcome at under a half-hour. With seven players sitting 3-1-3 around a table, I suspect being the 1 is bad. That's my excuse for doing so badly, at least.

There wasn't much of a gap between this ending and the next slot; I turned down Semaphoria (sorry, Holly; this was my #2 choice for the entire night but it clashed with my #1 choice) and the walking, talking, improvisation and creativity game Park Bench. The rules to the latter are not online as far as I can see, and I think it may have been a local invention, credited to Louise de Froment and the Improv Group. I do recall reading at the start of September that Sandpit were calling for local creations and would fund one to be played here, but the timescale was pretty tight and I couldn't come up with anything within the window. Sadly my creative well has been running pretty dry for quite a long time, which is part of the reason for my long-term downswing.

Instead, I picked Ponzi!, a trading game in which players represent non-specific funds. Each player starts with ten chips of one colour and can trade them with each other at various points throughout the game, not least incentivised by the fact that upon six occasions the facilitator - in the guise of The Market - will offer a lop-sided trade in the players' favour, so that anyone who can offer a specific (but, in this case, randomly generated) combination of chips would be able to swap them for more, sourced from the outside world. (For instance, one red and one black could be swapped for three blue and a green.) The catch is that two of the traders, at the start of the game, are informed by Werewolf-like card distribution that they are fraudulent and chips of their starting colour are eventually worthless.

The skill is to try to identify the worthless colours, try to swap worthless chips for worthy ones and try to take advantage of the favourable market deals. If you are fraudulent, I suspect it's wise not to get rid of your chips too quickly else people may catch on as to why you aren't trying too hard to keep them. We played without audience analysts and stock tips, but it was fun that the Will of the Market really was a bingo machine. It was a lot of fun, but again felt rather familiar, though definitely not in a bad way; I lap up trading games for breakfast, and this was admirably pure and a valuable addition at the theatrical end of the family. Came joint 4th/5th out of six, though, when I heavily invested in the final trade for what turned out to be a worthless colour. So did almost[?] everyone else, so I wasn't the only sucker. Perhaps it's a pretty good clue when someone doesn't accept a lop-sided deal which pays out a particular colour - though remembering who started with which colour is a task.

Oddity: one of the other players told me "You're like someone out of Peep Show!" when we were playing this game. (I was playing rather hard and trading with relatively high frequency, starting with an opening symmetry-busting gambit of one of their chips for one of my chips plus one of my Fruit Pastilles.) Hard to know how to take that, other than that it couldn't really be good news. I asked "Am I Mark? Am I Jeremy?" and took it as a relatively lucky escape when it turned out that I had reminded her of The Johnson. Nobody comes out of that show with much credit, except probably for poor darling Dobby, but in this case I'll take it as a pretty good sort of back-handed compliment under the circumstances.

The third slot saw HipSync, Moveyhouse and good old Werewolf, of which I chose the latter. Ten players: three werewolves, one seer, one healer, five villagers. I drew the seer and couldn't get anything going; the first person I saw was a (suspiciously-acting) villager, the second was the villager who got lynched that night. I was the only person who had played before and none of the villagers had much clue about how to start a defence; when I had reason to claim to reveal my role and named the three werewolves in defence of someone I knew to be a villager, the three werewolves and a villager voted to lynch her rather than to accept my recommendation and have a healer-protected seer call the shots, taking out the werewolves one by one. (At least until the werewolves caught the healer, after which point the plan would unravel...)

A clear win for the werewolves, alas. The facilitator was very good, a guy named Toby Osmond. By coincidence he was the facilitator for all three games I played, and one of the principal facilitators for the pick-up-and-play games. Honestly, I just hope he didn't think I was sticking to him like a limpet by the end of things. I made a passing comment that three werewolves in ten seemed like quite a few; he said that it was pretty standard among Sandpit facilitators, though he always found that the werewolves tended to win 90% of the games he played and yet one of the other Sandpit facilitators, playing by the same rules, had an 80% success rate for the villagers. Now there's a data point, but possibly one that represents a small sample size more than anything else.

We only played one round of Werewolf before people's coaches started to turn back into pumpkins, so I returned to the main room and managed to get into a late round of HipSync. The principle of this one is simple and delightful: players are given .mp3 players cued with a series of songs. For each place in the series, there are a total of three different songs over all the .mp3 players (so everyone has A, B or C, followed by D, E or F, followed by G, H or I and so on). Everyone listens to their song and dances accordingly; the aim is to recognise other people who were dancing to the same track as you and join them in a group. It's really just a game to get people dancing exaggeratedly to music that only they can hear, which is silly and inherently fun.

One of the most insidious criticisms you can give of a game is that "it doesn't work" and then leave it at that. The principle of HipSync is admirable, and the mechanics are sound. Without wishing to blame the perfectly lovely facilitator, this particular interpretation of the HipSync principle needs to be facilitated just right in order to work; seems like a simple task, but the task of getting ten people to start their .mp3 players from track one, not on shuffle, at exactly the same time is a non-trivial one. We aborted our first play a few songs in because people weren't matching up; we restarted and I wasn't matching up. (My guess is that second time I wasn't starting from track 1 like everyone else, though the facilitator assured me I was.) It was still a lot of fun, even if not really a competitive game as originally devised. (We were also not told about the "no lip-synching" rule and didn't have plastic lips to enforce it; not knowing it, I felt it natural to lip-synch.)

This was interesting because it was beset by hardware problems. All the scheduled games I played that night would stand up on their own merits as boxed proprietary game releases that player groups could run by themselves, though having a facilitator - particularly ones as good as we had - added considerably to the experience. Again, this comment is not generally applicable to Sandpit games, many of which are physical experiences that need facilitators and considerable preparation, and are aimed at people who aren't board game fans. This better reflects my selection of games rather than anything else.

HipSync is begging for a proprietary release, with cheap specific music players more accurately dedicated to its own functionality to ensure these glitches cannot occur and possibly even procedurally generated music. Honestly, as odd as it seems to say it, perhaps clunky old tape-based Walkpersons (two controls: rewind, play) might even be better in this regard than powerful .mp3 players with a much broader functionality. The other hardware quibble that I'd have with this interpretation of HipSync is that the ear buds were poor; they weren't very comfortable and they kept flying out of my ears. Getting people to use their own preferred headphones is probably a non-starter, but some more comfortable, more capable ear buds would probably assist over the course of a game's lifetime of plays.

Numbers were really starting to thin out at this point, but I still had the time to get in a round of the Hat Game in which we attempted to discern Harry Potter from Professor Dumbledore and Cheryl Cole from Amy Winehouse, among others. A higher-brow participant suggested Mozart as a personality to describe, and the person who struggled to describe him, under the restrictions imposed on him by the game, eventually came up with an effective clue: "He was deaf." Three people got it at once from that, and the original submitter's face dropped. Seems that "deaf classical composer" resolves to Mozart these days, rather than to Beethoven; perhaps that's the way urban legends start - it may not have been a factually accurate clue, but it was immediately effective at conveying its intended meaning. For what it's worth, I don't claim that I would have got a 50:50 question about which of the two was deaf correct.

The last few players melted away at this point, though I took a few minutes to fill in a feedback form. I had two negative criticisms of the event, which I think are pretty objective. The biggest one was that the bar area had music that was loud enough to be detrimental to the ease of playing conversational games, and despite people asking for it to be turned down a few times, it was a problem to some extent all night. Now I'm not particularly great with distinguishing voices over loud music at the best of times, and I suspect I may be worse than most in this regard, but I am pretty strongly convinced that quieter music would have improved things for a few without spoiling people's fun. Again, this isn't a Sandpit-specific problem - there have been board game conventions with 200 people playing games in a large dining hall where it's been a problem for me to some extent.

The other negative criticism is that I think the event would have benefitted from participants wearing name badges. This is so standard among board game conventions that I can only suppose the concept has been discussed and rejected for some reason; I know name badges are a pretty contentious, audience-splitting matter, but I'd have thought they would be even more valuable in the conversational, social games we were playing than in many board games where players can effectively be referred to by colours, or by other adjectives pertaining to their position within the game. If traditional name badges are considered a bit square and conference-y, there has to be a way to do them more creatively: you could have them as "Hello, please call me" rather than "Hello, my name is" - and if people declare they want to be referred to as Sir, or Princess Pamplemousse, or Naughty Lola, that's part of the fun. (Yes? No?)

Those were the only serious negative criticisms; the rest of my feedback form was full of thanks and the gushing praise that the event absolutely merited. That said, it may have been unwise, or at least not very cool, to blatantly fanboy out and put words to the effect of "OMG YOU PEOPLE ARE SO COOL WHY MUST YOU LIVE IN LONDON I WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH ALL OF YOU" on my form. (I exaggerate, but only barely.) As I saw in someone's forum signature, "If you admire someone, tell 'em; people seldom get the roses while they can smell 'em". Candour is good, but I may have crossed the line to "cry for help from a sad, lonely, frustrated gamer" - which, to be fair, is about spot on. Still, part of loving is making yourself vulnerable. I do hope that I stayed on the right side of the narrow divide between "enthusiastic fan who has been admiring what has been going on from afar and blogging about it for ages" and "creepy", but fear it may not have done.

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'!

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank yo

One Man Mindzine

2009-11-07T13:09:21Z

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 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.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank yo

United we stand

2009-10-21T22:36:46Z

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.

1. More high-quality, real football. The UFL is trying to enhance the established pro football landscape by basing itself mostly in underserved pro football markets like Las Vegas, Orlando and New York. (Specifically, that's New York City as opposed to New Jersey, mostly.) It's also playing most of its games on Thursdays and Fridays to avoid the majority of the NFL games being played on Saturdays and the majority of college games being played on Sundays. It isn't trying to compete by being the best football you'll see all week, but it won't be too far off, and it will generally be the best football available on the days it plays.

2. The NFL. The NFL is the most conservative of the major US sporting leagues in its operations, but also probably the most effective at squashing other pro outdoor play in the sport. (Baseball has its farm system and hockey has something similar, the NBA has its D-League and independent competition, and the NFL has no pro rival.) The NFL wouldn't support NFL Europe, even as it flourished in its later years; the extent of outreach is the NFL International Series. It's a staid product and worthy of competition; its competitors over the years shot themselves in their feet in various ways, which the UFL is so far avoiding.

3. High-quality players. About half of the players in the UFL have NFL experience, and the rest are close in calibre. Many (a quarter?) were drafted in the first three rounds. Some of the most celebrated standouts include Dexter Jackson, the MVP of Super Bowl 37; Simeon Rice and Todd Sauerbrun, each with three Pro Bowl appearances and the former with a Super Bowl ring to boot; Jermaine Wiggins, a Super Bowl winner who Georgia fans may recall, and so on. The quarterbacks are familiar, too - the Bills' J.P. Losman, the Jaguars' Quinn Gray and Brooks Bollinger who had a stint with the Jets - but another UFL QB, Shane Boyd, has already impressed and is an example of the lesser-known, sadly-ignored talent that the UFL has been able to develop.

4. Well-known coaches. Jim Fassel took the Giants to the Super Bowl and now oversees Las Vegas. Dennis Green and Jim Haslett have both taken their teams to NFC post-seasons and are looking to bring success to the UFL's California and Florida outfits. Ted Cottrell hasn't been a NFL head coach yet, but has an excellent record as a Defensive Co-ordinator. The coaching line-ups are well-qualified and experienced throughout, and detailed in full elsewhere.

5. No gimmicks. Some of you may recall a certain one-season wonder of a football league from 2001 which lost credibility through its part ownership and set non-NFL pro football back several years. While the XFL improved considerably in quality over the course of its season and suffered unduly from bad luck (for instance, one of the two games in the first week was a blowout and the other was competitive - guess which one people used to form their first impressions?), it struggled under the shackles of the McMahon WWE association. The UFL has football people through and through and deliberately plays an authentic game.

6. Small rule enhancements. The UFL isn't going to make ridiculous calls about inappropriate celebrations, as has ruined at least one or two football games so far this year; the overtime system ensures both teams get at least one possession, so it isn't decided by who wins the coin toss; a replay official (and a replay official alone) oversees all the reviews, which speeds the game up; the NFL's kludge-y "tuck" rule has been replaced by something simpler and more logical, the UFL's intentional grounding rule makes more sense and so on. It doesn't feel different at all and the hits are just as hard as anywhere else.

7. Reasonable ticket prices. NFL and college football tickets (at least, if you support a popular college team...) are often very hard to come by and attract extremely high prices. The UFL has set its stall out that its ticket prices will be very reasonable - the average is about $20 per ticket, and most grounds range from something like $10 to something like $50. It's fair to say that attendances for the first few games have not been massive, and discounts may sporadically be available; for instance, when the New York Sentinels host a game at the Mets' Citi Field, Mets ticket holders have picked up discounts. Certainly it'll be very hard to find that quality of football at a comparable price.

8. A whole new season. So the college season is half-way through, the NFL season is a third of the way through and there are likely to be quite a few people reading this whose teams have not impressed. (*raises hand grumpily*) It's not cheating to pick a UFL team and start supporting them as well. I would point to the Florida Tuskers containing, for instance, a reasonable representation of talent from Georgia's very own Dawgs, even if it may be anathema in some cases to root for a team whose name contains the word Florida.

9. National recognition. The UFL has managed to sign national TV deals with both Versus and HDNet even for their first season; an impressive feat to have every game televised, even if both channels might be considered mid-majors. The TV line-ups are full of established football talent - no Jim Rosses here - and the league has achieved a full slate of sponsors under difficult economic conditions. The league is catching the eye of the football industry; the business model, planning for a slow start and sustained growth, has been favourably commented upon. It took the NFL an awfully long time to catch more people's imagination than college football, and there are still parts of the US where it hasn't.

10. Following it from the start. Probably the most exciting thing about the league has been watching it develop and grow over the weeks and months; even though it has so far played only two rounds of games, you can already start to see the ways in which it is improving upon its initial shortcomings. The biggest challenge to date has been marketing and getting its name out there, though it is making progress on a local level. Challenging the NFL is the tallest order in US sports organisation, but the market is as big as it gets. The UFL has the funding and management talent for the long haul; take an interest now and you'll have been there before it got famous!

For much more detail about the league, the best places to look are the official web site, well-informed and lively fan site UFL Access (where, if I'm honest, I've been spending most of my online time recently) and Orlando blog Tusker House. The most comprehensive document about the league is probably the media guide; if you can handle a 87 MB .pdf file, download it from this web page.

Exciting times, and what a start!

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank yo

The Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz: the results

2009-09-07T17:38:20Z

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, 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.)

There were 22 lyrics in the game, each of which was potentially answered by each of 29 players, 18 of whom used the LiveJournal poll, 10 of whom used the Dreamwidth poll and one of whom used neither. The average lyric was solved correctly slightly under 36% of the time, despite my drive towards easy lyrics. Remember, you earnt points for solving lyrics correctly, points for submitting a lyric that was solved by as close to two-thirds of players as possible (in this case, 2/3 of 29 players, so ideally 19 players) and points for having other players name your lyric as their favourite. In order:

1. that lightning storm, that tidal wave, this avalanche, I'm not afraid was "Imitation of Life" by R.E.M. submitted by ashkitty. 5 players solved it correctly, 24 players did not. Comments included this one took me ages, singing it in my head, and I know the song well! and Oh, um, that song by REM that I really really love, but I can't think of the title and I consider myself honour-bound not to grab my best-of CD and look it up... 4 players named it as their favourite: zoomy_zoomydid, huskyteer, lambertman and addedentry. This song was unique in that two of the players naming it as a favourite couldn't remember what it was called.

2. Nobody's gonna go to school today/she's gonna make them stay at home was I Don't Like Mondays submitted by bopeepsheep. 17 players solved it correctly, 12 players did not, so very close to the perfect 2/3 for full points. We didn't require players to name an artist, because cover versions in lyrics quizzes start conflicts of the sort barred by the Geneva Convention, but this was variously credited to The Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof (logically) and Jon Bon Jovi. No players named it as their favourite.

3. He's a liar and I'm not sure about you. was Kirsty MacColl - There's A Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis submitted by pinkfinity. 10 players solved it correctly, 19 players did not. One player responded There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis(h) and I'm suddenly very curious to know whether someone has come up with a fannish version. A popular song; 3 players named it as their favourite: beingjdc, klepsydra and oenomel.

4. Waiting for the moon to come and light me up inside // I am waiting for the telephone to tell me I'm alive was "Daylight Fading" from Recovering the Satellites by Counting Crows submitted by shewalksonroses. One player solved it correctly, 28 players did not. No players named it as their favourite.

5. But then she went to Cleveland with some guy named Leland that she met at the bank. was Bowling for Soup, "Ohio (Come Back To Texas)" submitted by klepsydra. One player solved it correctly, 28 players did not. 2 players named it as their favourite: shewalksonroses and pseudonomas. A comment was Even though I don't know the song, I *want* to know the song now, because that is an awesomely random sentence. Link, please?

6. I was born to love her / And I will never be free / You'll always be a part of me was "Always Something There to Remind Me" by Naked Eyes submitted by brakusjs. 7 players solved it correctly, 22 players did not. One player responded My head says "Don't leave me this way", but it isn't (indeed not) and another tried 24 hours from Tulsa, which has forever been ruined for me by a TV commercial years ago. and I'm suddenly very curious to know whether someone has come up with a fannish version. No players named it as their favourite.

7. Faith has been broken, tears must be cried, Lets do some living after we die was Wild Horses, The Rolling Stones. submitted by frayer. 2 players solved it correctly, 27 players did not. No players named it as their favourite.

8. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide. No escape from reality. was Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen) (and, indeed, pretty much everyone else in the world) submitted by bateleur. 27 players solved it correctly, 2 players did not. One of those players was me with my deliberately all-incorrect entry, about which I did warn you, and I ain't sayin' who the other player was. 2 players named it as their favourite: citizenpsmith and leiabelle.

There now follows an obligatory pause for some headbanging. It's a good poll that has reason to make you headbang.

9. The image has gone, only you and I, it mean's nothing to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! was Ultravox - Vienna submitted by slashkilter. 13 players solved it correctly, 16 players did not. No players named it as their favourite. Oh, shaddupayaface. (He said, cutting to the punchline of the only piece of trivia that UK people know about this song, not actually inviting people to shaddupa their faces.)

10. Let's play Twister, let's play Risk. was 'Man On The Moon' - R.E.M. submitted by huskyteer. 18 players solved it correctly, 11 players did not, so almost bang on the perfect 2/3 for full points. It would have been closer still but for this comment: Erm... it's one of the tracks on REM's "Automatic for the People" and I can't recall the title! 4 players named it as their favourite: bateleur, venta, undyingking and, er, chris. Yeah, spot the gamers hooked by the bait of a game-related lyric. To be fair, knowing your audience and picking a song accordingly is an entirely valid tactic and one which has earned a bagful of points on this occasion.

11. It took time to understand the man was I Know Him So Well - Elaine Paige and Barbara Dixon submitted by emmazon. 9 players solved it correctly, 20 players did not. pinkfinity named it as her favourite and also noted it was originally sung by Elaine Paige & Barbara Dickson. No known relation.

12. He'll be the man who's already working, spreading a memory all through the sky was In Liverpool - Suzanne vega submitted by veronikamg. One player solved it correctly, 28 players did not. tablesaw named it as his favourite.

13. Why do birds suddenly appear / Every time you are near was Close to You submitted by quintus_marcius. 24 players solved it correctly, 5 players did not - over 2/3 of players got it correct, but still decent scoring. For me, the definitive version will always be that immortalised by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Daniels and a cast of dozens of "colourful characters". baxwest named it as his favourite.

14. Ever since I can remember you've been hanging round this joint was "Dead Ringer for Love" (Meat Loaf) (he supports Hartlepool United, you know) submitted by citizenpsmith. 9 players solved it correctly, 20 players did not. One player said: Dead Ringer For Love? No, that's not it, dang, which one was it? and backed into the correct answer. No players named it as their favourite, though it's a guilty pleasure of mine. Actually, between the lot of you, you've managed to get three of the thirteen songs I named there into this lyrics quiz. You are good to me.

15. You better hang on tooth and nail was "New York Minute," Don Henley submitted by 2ndavemusic. 6 players solved it correctly, 23 players did not. No players named it as their favourite, though my wife did note that she loves this song, which is good to know.

16. Said she, "Able am I, son." was I Palindrome I submitted by tablesaw. 4 players solved it correctly, 25 players did not. athenienne named it as her favourite. bopeepsheep noted that she had been listening to it just ten minutes before taking the quiz.

17. You’ve got your career, spent the best part of last year apart. was Christmas Time (Don't Let The Bells End) submitted by oenomel. 2 players solved it correctly, 27 players did not. No players named it as their favourite.

18. guardian angels sang this strain was Rule Britannia submitted by pseudonomas. 5 players solved it correctly, 24 players did not. One player quibbled: That's not really a lyric now, is it... and diddled himself out of a point. No players named it as their favourite.

19. Last night I dreamt of San Pedro, Just like I'd never gone, I knew the song. was La Isla Bonita - Madonna submitted by venta. 15 players solved it correctly, 14 players did not; "just over half" is close enough to 2/3 to earn a hefty score. Two players named the song as Spanish Lullaby, but that's a lyric rather than a title. 2 players named it as their favourite: bopeepsheep and emmazon.

20. When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me was Let It Be (The Beatles) submitted by undyingking. 25 players solved it correctly, 4 players did not. There was a tendency for those who played in venta's game to go really, really easy, to a slight excess. No players named it as their favourite.

21. Time goes by so slowly / And time can do so much was "Unchained Melody", The Righteous Brothers submitted by addedentry. 19 players solved it correctly, 10 players did not, which is about as close to exactly 2/3 of players getting it correct as you can get. quintus_marcius named it as his favourite.

22. I'm not gonna spend my life being a color was Black or White submitted by me as my own little Michael Jackson tribute. 9 players solved it correctly, 20 players did not. No players named it as their favourite, though it's my favourite of his work.

And that concludes the scoring from the Friends list jury. One interesting conclusion we can draw is a list of (some of) the most famous songs in the world, at least among the self-selecting audience who played in this music quiz:

27/29 - Bohemian Rhapsody
25/29 - Let It Be
24/29 - Close To You
19/29 - Unchained Melody
18/29 - Man On The Moon
17/29 - I Don't Like Mondays
15/29 - La Isla Bonita
13/29 - Vienna

though whether any other audiences would react the same way is another matter. It's also worth noting that, en masse, we like R.E.M., being the only band represented twice and their two songs tying for "most frequently nominated as favourite". And so to the final scores. Here are the top half of finishers:

36 pts. - bopeepsheep (19/22 solving, 17 setting) (top solver, third best setter)
30 pts. - addedentry (10/22 solving, 19 setting, 1 favourite) (best setter)
29 pts. - huskyteer (7/22 solving, 18 setting, 4 favourites) (second best setter)
28 pts. - venta (11/22 solving, 15 setting, 2 favourites)
24 pts. - pinkfinity (11/22 solving, 10 setting, 3 favourites)
22 pts. - emmazon (12/22 solving, 9 setting, 1 favourite) (third best solver)
19 pts. - undyingking (11/22 solving, 8 setting)
16 pts. - quintus_marcius (5/22 solving, 10 setting, 1 favourite)
14 pts. - brakusjs (7/22 solving, 7 setting)
14 pts. - klepsydra (11/22 solving, 1 setting, 2 favourites)
14 pts. - shewalksonroses (13/22 solving, 1 setting) (second best solver)
13 pts. - slashkilter (0 solving, 13 setting) (best setter not to solve)
13 pts. - citizenpsmith (4/22 solving, 9 setting)
12 pts. - oenomel (10/22 solving, 2 setting)
12 pts. - tablesaw (7/22 solving, 4 setting, 1 favourite)
11 pts. - pseudonomas (6/22 solving, 5 setting)
11 pts. - athenienne (11/22 solving, 0 setting) (best solver not to set)

with the remaining seventeen players scoring as follows: 10, 9, 9, 8, 8, 8, 7, 7, 7 (low score among those both setting and solving), 6, 6 ,4, 3, 3 (low score among those setting but not solving), 2, 2 (low score among those solving but not setting) and -991. If you wish to know where you finished among the bottom half of the field, drop me either a comment or an e-mail and I shall reply in kind.

The last-place finisher was me; I scored 0/22 for solving, 9 for setting and -1,000 for running the game. I have deducted an appropriate points from my score for taking so long to produce the results but also for managing to completely lose one lyric submitted by e-mail altogether. Sorry about that, Iain. There are other games I'd like to run on Dreamwidth (and I have free invite codes available if you'd like them!) but should probably wait until I would be capable of providing a somewhat more capable and less shoddy refereeing service.

Many congratulations to bopeepsheep for an awesome score with near-perfect performances at both solving and setting!

Players' comments on the game would be highly welcome. The level of difficulty of the lyrics was still rather higher than I would like. There are a number of tweaks that could easily be implemented in order to add some easier lyrics to the quiz, but I was deliberately trying to keep the complexity very low in an attempt to try to boost participation. One possible tweak, as someone else has suggested, would be to invite players to submit more than one lyric and adjust the target percentages to incentivise some really easy lyrics. However, 22 lyrics is quite a few already, and may be sufficiently many to turn some would-be solvers off from participation. It may well be that a second game would see players calibrate the difficulty of their lyrics rather closer to the mark.

There are plenty of possible tweaks on the scoring side: one concept I like would be to give each player three Little Helpers, who will automatically answer the lyric they set either correctly or incorrectly in an attempt to push the proportion of correct answers as close to 2/3 as possible. In this case, any lyric answered correctly by 19/29 would get three bonus correct answers and end up at 22/32, which would lead to the best setting score possible; any lyric answered correctly by 20/29 would get two bonus correct answers and one bonus wrong answer to also end up at 22/32; any lyric answered correctly by 21/29 would get one bonus correct answer and two bonus wrong answers to also end up at 22/32; any lyric answered correctly by 22/29 or more would get three bonus wrong answers to push them in the direction of the perfect 22/32. Is this so complicated as to be off-putting, though?

If anyone enjoyed the game sufficiently that they want to run it themselves, feel free. Share, adapt, improve and enjoy.

I hope you enjoyed the game, apologise for the late results and thank you all for playing!

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you!

The Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz: part two

2009-08-21T18:24:17Z

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.

View Poll: Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz: answers, accurate and otherwise

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting. Thank you!

The Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz

2009-08-19T21:42:54Z

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.

View Poll: Distributed Easy Lyrics Quiz: lyric me, do!

Full version of the rules: In the first stage of the game, you should submit a song lyric and name its source. It is in your interest to name the source correctly, because you stand to benefit from having your song correctly identified. You do not need to specify the artist, because of the UN Security Council Resolution on the issue of cover versions in lyrics quizzes. We're also not going to be terribly pedantic about spelling and punctuation of titles. Please submit your lyric and source through the Dreamwidth poll if you have a choice, but the LiveJournal poll would be my second preference and e-mail is available as a third preference. I may cap the quiz at thirty lyrics. In the second stage of the game, you should identify as many lyrics as you can and it is in your interest to identify them correctly. Again, use the DW poll if you can, then the LJ poll, then e-mail. One entry per player, please, even if you have both LJ and DW accounts or multiple accounts.

Scoring comes in three categories. In the identification category, you score one point for each lyric you identify correctly. In the setting category, you score whichever is less of either one point per player who correctly identifies your lyric or two points per player who does not correctly identify your lyric. (As an example, if there are 12 players, if 3 of them solve your lyric correctly and thus 9 do not, you score 3 points because three is less than twice nine; if 6 of them solve your lyric correctly and 6 do not, you score 6 points; ifa perfect 8 of them solve your lyric correctly and 4 do not, you score 8 points by either consideration; if 9 of them solve your lyric correctly and 3 do not, you only score 6 points because twice 3 is less than 9; if all 12 of them solve your lyric correctly and nobody solves it incorrectly, you score 0 points.) In the quality category, you score one point for each player who names your lyric as their favourite, though you lose all your points and more for being a silly goose and naming your own lyric as your favourite.

Style guide: This is intended to be an easy lyrics quiz, simply because hard lyrics quizzes are less fun for more people, and the scoring system will hopefully make it worth your while to submit an easy lyric - though not one so easy that everyone knows it! Judging two-thirds is the tricky part - and, hopefully, the fun part. Normally lyrics quiz participants are pretty self-selecting, but I'm hoping that me touting EASY EASY EASY about will help more modest participants dip their feet into the water. The tricky thing is that the range of potential competitors is considerable; my Friends list is global, though mostly has people with English as a first language. Some are young, others are less young; some identify as women, others identify as men; some are geeky, others are not quite sure what they're doing here.

In the second stage of the game, you can deliberately answer your own lyric incorrectly if you like, though it's probably unwise. I will announce who submitted which lyric and how many got each lyric correct, but not who got what correct. However, I will report each person's nomination for favourite lyric submitted, because that's fun. I will issue a full list of participants along with their scores for the top half of finishers, and a list of participants with only a general indication of scores for the lower half of finishers, so don't worry about entering and doing badly. I will be playing - but, because you've told me all the answers, as a courtesy I will deliberately answer everything incorrectly and thus save everyone else from coming last.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting. Thank you!

Usain Bolt may prove to be as legendary as Muhammad Ali

2009-08-16T22:02:46Z

As I have grown up and learnt more about sport, I have enjoyed learning more about Muhammad Ali, former heavyweight boxing champion of the world. I have enjoyed hearing about how he transcended sport to become a rightful contender for the entirely figurative title of most famous human in the world of his day. I enjoyed hearing tales of him from my father, and when people argued in his favour as being the greatest sportsman of the twentieth century, I could appreciate why people were talking about him in that context. There are many people for whom he is the most significant sportsman within their living memory; even if he isn't for me, I can understand why some people think that way.

In the final of the 100 metre sprint in the World Athletics Championship today, Usain Bolt of Jamaica won, setting a new world record of 9.58 seconds. The second place finisher, Tyson Gay, took 9.71 seconds, which was faster than any man on the planet except Bolt had previously run. Asafa Powell finished third in a comparatively leisurely 9.84 seconds. Watching Bolt run made me pant with admiration and delight. You may recall his victory in the 100 metre sprint at the Olympic Games last year, when he broke his own world record by running 9.69 seconds, and he clearly had relaxed before the end of the race. How quickly could he have gone if he hadn't relaxed? Well, quite possibly 9.58 seconds.

I think it is appreciably likely that Usain Bolt will hold the 100 metre sprint world record for the rest of my life. He may well break this 9.58 second record yet, and has hinted he may be capable of running it in under nine and a half seconds. Perhaps I will have the pleasure, in time, of explaining to a young sports fan the significance of Bolt's achievements and how spectacular it was to watch his dominant performance. (New legislation coming in next year meaning that even a single false start means instant disqualification probably helps current running records' chances of survival, as sprinters can be expected to take fewer chances with the B of the bang.)

Lest we forget, breaking ten seconds is a world-class performance that only a few dozen have achieved. It's a beautiful barrier to break just for its economy of expression - a more significant barrier than even the four-minute mile. The record progression for the 100 metre sprint requires interpretation, with its sidenotes of altitude-set records and the like. It's also relevant to note that a couple of other runners have dipped under the 9.7 second barrier, but only with the assistance of exceptionally - and hence illegally - favourable winds. The track may have even been a fast one, but for Bolt to be the fastest runner ever by a margin of 0.13 seconds represents dominance that may prove dynastic.

If the second best hundred metre time in the world is 9.71 seconds - 0.13 seconds behind 9.58 seconds - then it may be instructive to step back further increments of 0.13 seconds for comparison. Nobody legally ran 9.84 seconds until Donovan Bailey in 1996, thirteen years ago. Going back another 0.13 seconds, nobody legally ran 9.97, except at altitude, until Carl Lewis in 1983. (Another 13 years back, more or less.) Going back another 0.13 seconds takes us into the days before automatic timing, but I think we're looking at probably the 1960s. With this in mind, I do not expect anyone other than Usain Bolt to run as fast as 9.58 seconds for another - say - thirteen years, and Bolt may yet put his own record further beyond doubt.

Compare this with the 200 metre record of 19.72 seconds set by Pietro Mennea in 1979. Michael Johnson shaded past it in June 1996, then shattered it with a 19.32 later that year. That's another example of a dynastic, 17-year world record, that was shattered by a margin considered inconceivable. Usain Bolt snicked a couple of hundreds off it last year. It's also fun to note that Michael Johnson has been acting as a commentator for the BBC, and the BBC also had a camera trained on him watching Bolt race. His fixed, slack-jawed, disbelieving face will stick in my mind almost as long as Bolt's incredible victory; the whole ten minutes is one of my broadcasting highlights of the year so far.

It's tempting to wonder about Usain Bolt's future. He may well improve upon his own records yet; after all, he's still just 22 years old, and was clearly thinking about the clock rather than about his race for the last few metres. There is no official world record for the 150 metre race, though Bolt clocked (though who knows how accurately?) 14.35 seconds for it earlier this year, which is a good 4% faster than even these legends. Bolt might be able to run faster 200 metre sprints yet; if the 200 metre record is typically better than half the 100 metre record - though, Wikipedia notes, this is now not the case, so a 100 metre sprinter really has been the fastest man on earth - then there may be further for it to fall. I want to see Bolt run 200 metres, and 150 metres, and 300 metres, and 250 metres, and 400 metres just because, and 60 metres even though his start is not his best attribute...

It's also tempting to try to wonder about how the record might, eventually, be broken by someone else. The saddest of all ways for the Bolt era to end would be a discovery that his praeternatural performances have come from use of performance enhancers; as horrible as it was - for the novelty - when Ben Johnson was found positive, Bolt might theoretically be a bigger nail in the track coffin still. It's theoretically possible that the drug makers are outwitting the drug detectors in the arms race and the performance might yet be rescinded, but it's an allegation that nobody is at all seriously making, least of all me. I certainly don't want it to be true.

It's also possible that there might be technological improvements that improve the state of the art of sprinting. There are such things as fast tracks, but I note that Asafa Powell once tied his world record about thirty miles from here, at the Gateshead International Stadium whose track is far from the state of the art. Perhaps there might be aerodynamic improvements in the style of swimming technology, but this seems unlikely. Perhaps nanotechnology will improve our bodies and musculature yet, though it'll cause some awfully interesting ethical debates if ever it proves possible. (Compare with issues relating to Oscar Pistorius, in passing.)

Probably the most likely reason for Bolt no longer to hold the world record would be a commercial one; should the governing body of athletics decide it needs a reason to derecognise old world records and encourage interest in athletics by establishing new ones, it will certainly do so, though it's probably harder to justify messing with the 100 metre world record than it is to justify messing with the javelin world record. As much as the IAAF once decided to require world records to be timed to two decimal places, perhaps it might yet decide to require new world records to be timed to three decimal places. Perhaps Bolt's record was timed to three decimal places after all; we shall see. (Compare with the controversies over some of the women's world records.)

If none of these prove the case, and I rather hope they do not, then the way to break Bolt's world record is simply to find someone bigger and better still. At a metre and ninety-six - or 6'5" to you and me, for I still think of people's heights in feet and inches, despite being strongly pro-metrication otherwise - Bolt has successfully challenged the orthodoxy that tall people are not natural sprinters by virtue of the remarkable length of his stride. Perhaps the very tall might be able to bring a similar rate of strides per second to Bolt to an even longer stride in the future, and perhaps our next 100 metre record holder will be 6'7" tall. Or 6'9". Or 7'2". (Donald Dinnie was apparently a champion sprinter in the 19th century, while also being a strength athlete - though only just over six feet tall.) I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more huge runners and fewer huge basketball centers.

It remains to be seen just how dominant Bolt will be over time; I look forward to following the rest of an already globally outstanding career immensely. Tiger, Roger, Ole Einar and Lance: worry.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting. Thank you!

Brainstorming a hypothetical UK puzzle convention

2009-07-30T22:38:18Z

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?

Disclaimer: nothing here is anything other than the very earliest, roughest form of speculation.

Potential attendees:
* crossword fans (possibly the Listener / Magpie crowd?)
* sudoku solvers
* WPC types
* ARG players and/or organisers
* armchair treasure hunters
* puzzle event attendees
* chess puzzle fans
* puzzle authors
* puzzle software authors
* maze designers and/or solvers
* other puzzle professionals
* maybe geocachers/letterboxers/etc.
* maybe magic fans (and I'm thinking lower-case, rather than :the Gathering)
* MENSA puzzle SIG people, on the assumption that such a thing exists
* general smart types: quizzers, IQ test folk, mental skills fraternity at large
* people who attend puzzle events worldwide
* are there other subgenres I'm missing here...?

Potential competitions:
* crosswords (does the Times still have a regular contest?)
* sudoku (might we be able to produce a more tempting event to hold a contest at? I may have connections here)
* chess problems (does a tournament for this still exist?)
* qualification and/or practice for world puzzle and/or sudoku championships
* competitions in other abstract puzzles (kenken etc.) especially with sponsorship
* extravaganzas / puzzle hunts
* formats derived from puzzle-friendly game shows
* design contests
* what other contests do existing puzzle events feature...?

Potential venues:
* universities
* hotels
* holiday camps
* other conference venues...?

Schedule items:
* masterclasses
* people promoting their specialities to try to get crossover interest from fans of other subgenres
* demonstrations of unusual subgenres
* product launches
* possible sharing of material from other puzzle events, though only if permitted by those other events
* speakers
* guests of honour
* exhibitions of collections (e.g.)
* what else...?

Potential side trips:
* mazes
* follies
* puzzle-centric locations (Bletchley Park...?)
* museums and/or other collections
* where else...?

Potential funding sources:
* magazine and/or book publishers, if we have a very, very compelling product
* professionals for networking, " " " " " " " "
* media partners, " " " " " " " "
* knowledge economy sponsors
* puzzle manufacturers for product launches
* Cultural Olympiad funding
* patrons
* charity status and then Gift Aid
* charging attendees enough to cover costs (ouch)
* who else...?

What am I missing? How does this sound to people? Is there anyone reading this with enough time, resources and expertise to devote to leading the project? I'd be interested and have some experience, but some parts interest me more than others.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting. Thank you!

Can I stay with you in London for games this weekend, please?

2009-07-29T22:56:34Z

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?

I have a very soft spot for games where changing the game's rules is a constituent part of play: four Nomics, all loved (though two love-hated) and lost, spring to mind. Likewise, while I sometimes refer to the Chairman's Game as being on the intersection between a game and a hazing ritual, the "you don't know the ruleset at the start" hazing ritual aspect of the enterprise is my least favourite part. When there is no formal (though, unspoken, there remain societal and behaviour-normal) limit to the boundary of what might be included in the game, then these other games are merely compelling structures around which to weave other forms of play. I prefer instances of both games towards the less competitive end of the spectrum, though tastes vary. Indeed, part of my fascination with puzzle hunts is that they form another such structure and the best can feature some exceptionally imaginative and unusual content.

I have told the tale of Somewhat Demiurgic Drinking Perudo previously - though I had forgotten I had done so! - and thus a link will save me repeating myself, other than to say it was the intersection of Perudo (a proprietary version of Liar's Dice), a rule-changing mechanic and drinking forfeits. As a teetotaller, and as someone with a lower opinion of schadenfreude than most people's already pretty low standards, you can correctly imagine that I am naturally ill-disposed towards drinking games. That first game of Somewhat Demiurgic Drinking Perudo freed the barriers, slightly, of what might be considered acceptable within the context of the game, and the whole enterprise remained within the barriers of good taste just enough to feel spontaneous, fresh and memorable.

We've tried to repeat the glory of that first great game over the years and the result always has been an imitation of the original; while some of the game's artefacts survive as lore among the group - for instance, to play Ironman Liar's Dice is to play without looking at your own dice, and to play Super Ironman Liar's Dice is to show your dice to others but not look at them yourself - I think the framework doesn't lend itself as well as that of the Chairman's Game. The logical sequels would be to play Somewhat Demiurgic Non-Drinking Perudo, which would seem unnecessarily tame in comparison, or Drinking The Chairman's Game, which is surely a recipe for disaster as the original game has enough tension already. (I can see jvvw's viewpoint that the ideal state for the latter being after one unit - i.e., a small drink.)

Still in context, I do remember one gathering of the Usual Suspects chez xorsyst where half a dozen of us went and kicked a ball around a park in the middle of the night, simply as spontaneous play in the same fashion. Our play didn't quite catch fire - not literally, though a fireball might at least have cut through the November midnight cold - but the spirit of it was there. Now I'm writing these couple of paras as a dog-whistle message with an audience of possibly two or three in mind, but all the reports I'm getting point to the Hide and Seek Weekender being an environment where sorts of play and fun like those - but, crucially, not those - might well naturally and organically evolve. Worth a try to see if magic might be cast, at least.

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.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting. Thank you!

Old school

2009-07-03T00:29:30Z

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. The new roof over the Centre Court is an instant smash hit, so to speak, and already has demonstrated its worth in preventing a Bad Light Stopped Play incident, even if not yet a Rain Stopped Play incident. It's also a pretty solution, as well as a practical one, and I think a counterpart roof over at least No. 1 Court is more likely than not within the next ten years. The new No. 2 Court has also got off to a fine start; while it is physically just a roofless bowl, it is an aesthetically pleasing one, and the camera angles with the outside of Centre Court in the background make us feel at home straight away.

I look forward to the redevelopment of the old No. 2 Court into a new No. 3 Court, though the suggested three-year timescale strikes me as rather leisurely. It seems strange that the old No. 2 Court had a reported 2,990 capacity and the new No. 3 Court will be cut down to just 2,000. If this is the result of turning a set of stands into a bowl, it's got to be considered a step up. Commercially, the impact of the new No. 2 Court is immediately very beneficial in terms of ticket revenue; I stand to be corrected, but previously I remember Wimbledon selling (in previous years) specific Centre Court tickets, specific No. 1 Court tickets and general grounds admission tickets. This year, a new tranche has been added in terms of selling specific Court No. 2 tickets - and a good number of them, too, for those who want to see nearly-the-best-of-the-best tennis. It's plausible that specific Court No. 3 tickets might follow in future years. The value of the general grounds admission drops slightly each time, but it's still an attractive proposition.

In some regards, the new No. 2 Court is overdue. Compare Wimbledon's facilities to those of the other Grand Slams, all of which have at least three show courts. Melbourne Park, which hosts the Australian Open, has the 15,000 capacity Rod Laver Arena, the 10,500 capacity Hisense Arena and the 6,000 capacity Margaret Court Arena. The French Open's Roland Garros stadium has the 15,000 capacity Philippe Chatrier Court, the 10,000 capacity Suzanne Lenglen Court and a rather good (3,500 capacity?) No. 1 Court as well. (One source suggests there may be a new 15,000 capacity centre court coming, though it's unclear whether it would be an addition or an expansion.) The US Open's National Tennis Center, to excerpt the name, has the 24,000 capacity Arthur Ashe stadium, the 10,000 capacity Louis Armstrong stadium, the 6,000 capacity Grandstand Stadium, as well as three side courts with capacity into four figures. Wimbledon really lagged behind in terms of having two big courts and not much else; No. 2 Court is a step forward, and No. 3 Court will hopefully be another in time.

The best thing about the Wimbledon facilities is that they all look pretty on TV. Centre Court will never compare to the Ashe stadium, but Centre Court looks nicely designed on TV, whereas Ashe stadium just sprawls and sprawls. I claim I'm not being jingoistic here; the new Wembley stadium - while it looks great from the outside - has an inside that suffers in exactly the same way. It's not a size issue, it's a design one; Barcelona's Camp Nou is bigger than Wembley but looks really put-together in a way that Wembley does not, and the San Siro is formidable and brilliant while being not much smaller. Now it may well be that Wembley's much-vaunted "no bad seats" policy is a natural consequence of the degree to which it sprawls, and stadiums which might look better from the inside, to my eyes, turn out to have problems. It's a balancing act, but more people will see the inside of the stadium on TV than ever will see it in person.

It's also tempting to wonder what might follow for Wimbledon after a new No. 3 Court. After all, the All England Club claims to have six show courts: Centre, No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 (the old No. 2), No. 4 (the old No. 3) and, er, No. 18. Could some day these all be bowls with their own ticketing arrangements? (Is there enough interesting tennis to justify it? That's why junior tournaments, invitational senior tournaments and the like have been added to the programme, after all.) Only the first four of those feature Hawkeye, for instance, so it's worth wondering if there could be the scope to promote another court or two into a bowl. Such a move would start to impinge on the number of side courts, which might have an impact on the quantity of tennis that could be played, but this might not be insurmountable.

A slightly old aerial view suggests that options might include adapting the non-grass courts at the south end (extremely unlikely, as these are converted into marquees for retail with considerable commercial value), the grass courts to the north of Court No. 1 (isn't this where players warm up?) or Aorangi Terrace (also known as Henman Hill or Murray Mount; about as iconic as No. 1 Court these days). There do seem to be other green spaces around, but I suspect these may be used as car parks during the Championships. It's all a very tight fit. I suppose the most plausible solution could be to dislocate more of the support buildings and infrastructure outside the regular confines of the territory to create room for another new facility. Potentially a move to further encourage public transport use might free up car parking space, but with car park tickets sold at £25 per car per day, parking is a strong revenue stream already.

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. The school admitted its first pupils in 1978; I attended from 1986 to 1992. This timeline mentions new buildings going up in 1988 and 1992, both of which were exciting and new during my time there, but whose predecessor woodland I can still remember. I've only ever visited the premises once since university (earlier this year, taking Meg to a craft fair there) and haven't had the chance to look around the major new science and technology centre opened in 1996, and I have no clue whereabouts the Music School opened in 1997 even is situated on the grounds.

The plans involve the demolition of the old maths wing and the old dining hall - which, itself, proved insufficiently large and required a semi-permanent marquee as an annex. This space will be used to host a 750-capacity auditorium, with other land being used for a new block including a small hall, a dance studio and ten classrooms. The building in 1992 included what seemed at the time to be a vast new theatre, where the school would assemble en masse for whole-school announcements; while it still seems so new to me, it is going to be repurposed for three more new classrooms and a new dining hall to replace the demolished old one. This is hard to believe, considering how exciting and new the theatre was. On the other hand, it will have served its job for close to twenty years, almost half the life of the school; there will have been two cohorts (and more!) going through a first-year to upper-sixth existence knowing nothing other than the existence of the theatre. Job done, but it's a surprise to someone used to thinking in scholastic terms that the theatre's life cycle is not just finite but relatively short.

All told, fifteen new classrooms will be built, "for mathematics, languages, and business and religious studies". The need to replace the mathematics wing is clear; it is not clear whether computing remains a subsection or not. Business studies and economics only ever had half a home previously; Latin, Greek and Classical Studies were originally taught in the same corridor as modern languages, but when some new modern language classrooms were built at the same time as the sports hall (the 1992 building!) art kicked out the old modern language facility and it's completely unclear where the classics ended up. (I saw hints that the attic may even have come into use - though whether this is for music, classics or something else is unclear. I had a covert poke around the Friarage when the craft fair was in progress, which brought a few memories back, but left a few questions open.) The Independent Schools' Inspectorate report hints at migration that has taken place relatively recently.

It's unclear how the school sees its future. Each year had around sixty students in my day; by the time I left, year sizes had grown to around eighty and may now be closer to ninety. The school was all-male from 11 to 16 when I attended, but since then has become co-educational throughout. (Possibly still more than 2:1 male, though.) Building an auditorium to seat 750 may suggest that they don't expect to expand above a hundred or so per year in the near future. The open question: will the fifteen new classrooms be enough? I suspect the science and technology facilities may start to struggle to meet demand, but there may be more to the situation that I do not currently know.

School fees were high, but barely manageable with the assistance of a scholarship, for our one-public-sector-professional-parent family when I attended. They rose by just a little over inflation (technically, the RPI measure) while I was there. Since then, I reckon they've increased by inflation and another 50% over the last sixteen years or so. As the school's reputation has grown, and as they have taken girls alongside boys, they have been able to set the bar in terms of parental funding higher still, and I believe their catchment area has increased over time. Sadly, there is not even a hint of the magic phrase "needs-blind", which is surely the ideal way forward. Even with the scholarships and bursaries that are advertised, should we ever want to send offspring there - and the whole fee-paying school issue is not one we have discussed - I think we would have to look for some unadvertised, anti-meritocratic, artificially socially immobile legacy assistance to send a second generation of Dickson there. A shame.

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.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (identified, if you'd be so kind) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

Puzzles, poker and pain

2009-06-19T22:19:46Z

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. Here is an Excel question. Suppose I have a table like so:

Day	Rain	Temp
Mon	14	8
Tue	19	10
Wed	12	10
Thu	22	13
Fri	11	12

and I'm looking to try to find the average Temp on days when there was more than 13 units of Rain. How would you do this? My approach, which doesn't seem to work (in Excel 2000 on a PC), is to create another column at the right-hand end where the cell is empty if there was no more than 13 units of Rain or contains the Temp value if there were more than 13 units of rain, like so:

Day	Rain	Temp	AltTemp
Mon	14	8	8
Tue	19	10	10
Wed	12	10	(empty cell)
Thu	22	13	13
Fri	11	12	(empty cell)

...whereby taking an average of the new right-hand column will give me the answer I need. Furthermore, should the rain value on Tuesday turn out to have been 9 instead of 19, changing the 19 to 9 should change the AltTemp from 10 to (empty cell), and so the average AltTemp should change from being calculated based on three figures to being based on only two.

Trouble is, I can't come up with a function I want to get this. I have tried something like =IF(B2>13,C2,#N/A) or =IF(B2>13,C2,#NULL!) - and so on for the remaining rows - but the average of a series which includes some numbers and some #N/As (or some #NULL!s) is #N/A, where I just want to skip over the cells with the #N/As in when performing the average. Can't help feeling this is going to be a really easy question for someone who knows better than me, but I've been working on this on the night shifts so haven't had anyone to ask and I haven't been able to work it out from the help. Accordingly, is it clear what I want - and, if so, how do I do it, please?

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (identified, if you'd be so kind) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

A little light transport blogging

2009-06-14T19:08:01Z

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; some time ago, I mentioned the wonderful London Connections blog, which was for a while the most interesting blog on the subject of developments in London transport infrastructure. While it was sadly brought to a conclusion last August, some of the most frequent contributors have banded together to produce London Reconnections, which is at least as good. London Connections' own former editor comments to London Reconnections from time to time, which is high praise indeed. Can't say I'm wildly thrilled about the opaque use of pseudonyms, but that's a small criticism of an excellent read. Similarly, the news page of the unofficial Croydon Tramlink site has been updated once since the very sad early passing of Stephen Parascandolo.

In other London news, there is suggestion that countdown clock-style timers may be introduced at some pedestrian crossings. I've been really impressed by these when I've seen them in other cities: Singapore, Indianapolis, Boston. Suggestions that the British timers might feature analogue clock-hands sweeping out a gradually illuminating right-hand semi-circle, replacing the standard "beep-beep-beep-beep" with a "donk-a-dink-a-dink diddle-diddle-diddly-bom (poom!)" are sadly fanciful.

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.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (hopefully identified!) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

What are you playing at?

2009-06-12T14:47:20Z

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. One of the UFL's emphases is on condensing their product into a three-hour slot for TV. Similarly, Twenty20 cricket is an overtly TV-driven product. (Apparently the Indian Premier League features a 7½-minute "tactical break" for commercials half-way through each innings, the equivalent - I suppose - of breaks at the end of the first and third quarters...) TV audiences' expectations provide a bigger incentive than ever for sports to reformat themselves in a TV-friendly fashion. Athletics - track and field, if you will - is particularly interesting in this regard. There are, arguably, 24 classical events in athletics; with one exception, the men's athletics program has consisted of those 24 events at each Summer Olympics of the past fifty years. Three sprints, two middle-distance, one steeplechase, three long-distance, two hurdles, two relays, two walks, four jumps, four throws and a combined event. The women's program is almost an exact counterpart, with the baffling (and unwarranted) omission of the longer walk.

However, a full athletics program is more than most viewers seem to want. The European Cup events provided, and the European Team Championships (even more so) will provide, two four-hour chunks of athletics. Forty scored contests will be held: both men and women will do the classical twenty-four, minus the two walks, the decathlon, the marathon and with the 10,000m race slashed to just 3,000m. It takes a real long-distance fan to watch the whole of the 5,000m, so the final attempts in the long-jump contests are programmed against it, as well as intermediate "devil take the hindmost" eliminations providing interest during the race. I'm looking forward to that in a couple of weekends' time, but two four-hour sessions are still a lot to watch. My wife may agree with me on this one. :-)

Accordingly, there are some other attempts to condense athletics into TV-friendly formats. The IAAF are championing the "Diamond League" series of one-evening athletic events, each of which has to provide "a 2 hours live TV feed". The way they're doing this is to cut the programme down to just sixteen events, with half competed in by men and the other half by women. (Alternate meetings in the league switch the two around.) Take the European Cup's twenty events, lose the relays (shame!), lose the 3,000m and - most controversially - lose the hammer throw. The IAAF's sample timetable still looks three hours long, so presumably the two-hour live show they're talking about will feature as-live recorded highlights from the jumps and throws edited in among the races.

Shorter still is UK Athletics' "Super 8" format. Eight teams, two hours, twenty-two events: men and women each do two sprints, two middle-distance, the short hurdles, three jumps, two throws and a medley relay. (Standard medley relay fallacy: how good your short-distance runners are isn't nearly as important as how good your long-distance one is.) The first event using the formula took place in mid-week and the format seemed fundamentally sound, even if counter-programming it against England v. Andorra at football may have got it off to a bad start, and the competition uniform may have caused sponsorship woes ruling some of the top competitors out very late. Domestic athletics team competitions are sadly low-profile in this country; this professional made-for-TV format may not thrill the purists who prefer fuller-featured contests run as amateur competitions, but I know I like the sound of it!

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (hopefully identified!) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

Today's thoughts

2009-06-07T13:37:23Z

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?

This entry was originally posted at my Dreamwidth journal. Please comment there using OpenID, or an (ideally, identified) anonymous post. Thank you!

Who goes? Europe decides!

2009-06-04T14:30:12Z

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, which is one of the most-read UK political weblogs all around. It's excellent for data and analysis, though remember that bookmakers tend to set their odds to guarantee themselves a profit regardless of the outcome rather than to reflect their actual expectations of the outcome of the events who they monitor. Sometimes the comments get pretty murky, too.

Secondly, UK Polling Report, who seem to position themselves as the closest thing we have to a UK FiveThirtyEight, which would be a glorious thing. Site editor Anthony Wells wrote a glorious counterfactual, but the FiveThirtyEight team's baseball stats background leads them to a lot of original thought and methodology making Anthony a follower rather than an innovator.

Thirdly, a much underrated commentator 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. Iain is a thorough researcher, an insightful thinker and an all-round good egg. His politics tag includes an admirable proposed reform policy for UK politics at large, a lovely analysis of today's local elections (quack!) and a seven-part history of the European Parliament. Stretching for a criticism, Iain subscribes to the tradition of naming things the way he thinks they should be named, a practice that stretches from Private Eye to Tuesday Morning Quarterback. Iain's work is even more worth taking seriously than either of those; the in-jokes are fun, but I still miss many of the references.

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, I do like Condorcet counted systems, though I wouldn't recommend using one here; I am aware of their disadvantages, but reckon that every system has its disadvantages and the advantages of Condorcet are easily sufficient to outweigh its associated disadvantages (e.g. the enabling of "burying") in a lot of cases. Not this one, though.

Incidentally, as much as I admire STV and would have preferred it to be used in Great Britain - much as it will be in Northern Ireland - on this occasion, I don't completely buy arguments concerning the effectiveness or otherwise of polling systems based on "wasted vote" criticisms. Specifically, I can see how reassignment of preferences "stops votes being wasted", I just don't think that "stopping votes being wasted" is all that important when determining the desirability or otherwise of a voting system. Yes, open lists are clearly preferable to closed ones. beingjdc has - as well as this very interesting and relatively plausible potential future history - identified a possible pathological case with the system used this time, but (again) I don't consider that a killer blow against the d'Hondt system's credibility as it's possible to construct pathological cases to criticise each system. I prefer to look at them as all good in different ways, rather than all flawed.

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, Libertas are a pan-EU party who want EU reform, which sounds good, though they aren't very specific about what they want to introduce, just what they want to remove. I suppose this makes them the least objectionable of the small-governmenters, but not knowing what you're voting for is dangerous. There is a Christian-branded party, espousing "the good old-fashioned hate-y sort of love", which will probably pick up 1%-2% across the board (cf the 2008 London Assembly elections). Similarly, the far left are as split as usual (Socialist Labour, Socialist UK and I think NO2EU are pretty left-y as well) and can expect to pick up 1%-2%... between them.

More interestingly, "Jury Team" is an umbrella label for anti-party-politics independents. This is the sort of thing I would have been all over as an energetic young man and they've acquitted themselves rather well in my Friends' dealings with them. The concept of a slate of independents doesn't really work, though, no matter how good the independents are; this is an Independent Party, not an independence from parties. There are additionally one-issue parties for pensioners, peace, animal rights, Cornish independence and, er, pretending to be Roman. Salve! Now Valete!

I don't mean to be quite so dismissive of these small parties, no matter where they stand. As much as I am gloomy about the prospect of some fringe views getting state funding, if sufficiently many people hold those views, it seems a failing of the system if they are not represented. I tend to believe that the way to deal with odious beliefs is to tackle the beliefs and the thinking behind them, not to reform the voting system to stamp them out, even at the less-than-a-few-percent of support level. As a digression, emphasising in advance that here I'm specifically not referring to today's European election, here is an unpopular opinion.

I have a lot of sympathy for a nationally proportionally representative government rather than a regionally proportionally representative one. If some fringe views have a small proportion of the support nationally, might they be worth representation in the same small proportion of a fully elected revising chamber, in the style of the House of Lords? This would result in a lot of fringe views being represented, even fringe views I oppose extremely strongly, but I would argue this is ideal for a revising chamber even if not for a representing one. It's not as if some of the existing Lords don't have some pretty fringe views already, even if they sit under a conventional party (or cross-bench) affiliation.

The counter-argument against this that it would defeat the "you elect a local MP" level is a strong argument against this being used to elect local MPs, but there is no established link - and, I would argue, no need to establish a link - between a local constituency and their elected Lord, who would never be answerable to some hypothetical local constituency in practice. A nationally proportionally representative system would eliminate constituencies of locality and form effective constituencies of opinion. If the Archbishop of Canterbury wants a seat in the Lords, let him stand for a Christian party and see if he gets elected. (A putative STV election paper would be a bit of a big old bugger, mind you...)

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.)

In England, I have broadly assumed a 7% share of the vote outside the big six, maybe a little more in London. (In 2004, there was a 5.9% share outside the big six, but Martin Bell took 6% in East of England, Respect got about 5% in London and the Liberals did well for a minor in NW England. I'm not sure any of the Independents will be big hitters this year, even Katie Off The Apprentice in the south-west.) Working roughly downwards through England, then further afield, as is my English wont:

North East England: 24% Labour, 20% Conservative, 17% Lib Dem, 15% UKIP, 10% Green, 7% BNP. With three seats, this probably goes Labour, Conservative, LD, but I think there's a reasonable chance that UKIP could beat LD to third spot. Lab 1 Con 1 LD 1
North West England: 25% Conservative, 19% Labour, 14% Lib Dem, 13% UKIP, 12% BNP, 10% Green. Gulp - this is the big one. If the BNP do relatively well and the UKIP do badly relatively anywhere, I think it'll be here. With eight seats I think it gets pretty sketchy pretty quickly. The first five seats will probably go, roughly, Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con; the last three are up for grabs. UKIP or LD getting a second seem unlikely, but all six getting at least one could be on the cards. Lab 2 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 1 Green 1 BNP 1
Yorkshire and the Humber: 23% Conservative, 19% Labour, 17% UKIP, 16% Lib Dem, 9% Green, 9% BNP. With six seats and all four big parties at least semi-competitive, I think the first five are going to follow the national trend and go Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con with the sixth up for grabs. Lab 2 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 1
East Midlands: 26% Conservative, 20% UKIP, 16% Labour, 14% Lib Dem, 9% BNP, 8% Green. Again, the first five are going to follow the national trend and go Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con - just not in that order. Lab 1 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 1
West Midlands: 26% Conservative, 17% Labour, 15% Lib Dem, 15% UKIP, 11% Green, 9% BNP. With six seats elected now and a seventh to be elected if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified, I think we start off with the usual Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con shuffle for the first five and the sixth is very close. Lab 1 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 1 Green 1 and, you know, it's a knife-edge between the BNP, Conservative 3 and Labour 2 for the putative seventh seat.
East of England: 29% Conservative, 21% UKIP, 14% Lib Dem, 13% Labour, 10% Green, 6% BNP. Seven seats. Sing along with the first five - Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con, though Labour may come fourth, and UKIP look good to get seat number six. The Greens could sneak number seven; at least, they shouldn't be far behind Conservative 3. Lab 1 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 2 Green 1 though maybe a Green here is a stretch...
London: 24% Conservative, 18% Labour, 15% Lib Dem, 14% UKIP, 10% Green, 8% BNP. Another eight-seater. The first five follow national lines in some order. Green Jean Lambert should defend her seat - I have her sixth - and the last two seats are anybody's. Lab 2 Con 3 LD 1 UKIP 1 Green 1
South East England: 31% Conservative, 20% UKIP, 15% Lib Dem, 11% Green, 11% Labour, 5% BNP. The Greens might even beat Labour into fifth hear with Caroline Lucas, the Green leader, standing strongly. I have the seats going in a funny dance: Con, UKIP, Con, LD, then a Labour-Green intermezzo in some order, then another stanza of Con, UKIP, Con, LD. With ten seats, this prediction is flaky. Lab 1 Con 4 LD 2 UKIP 2 Green 1
South West England: ...and Gibraltar. 27% Conservative, 22% UKIP, 18% Lib Dem, 12% Labour, 9% Green, 5% BNP. Likely Labour fourth here. With six seats Labour will have to book it to make it to the Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con standard five, probably in fifth place, with the sixth and last seat hard to call. I reckon it's UKIP 2, but Con 3, Lib Dem 2 and Green all have hopes. Lab 1 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 2 but I would be delighted to be wrong and for the Greens to win a seat here.
Scotland: 30% SNP, 20% Labour, 16% Conservative, 14% Lib Dem, 8% Green, 5% UKIP, 4% BNP. The SNP scoop up the non-Big Three non-Green vote here. With six to go, this is interesting. I think it goes SNP, Labour, Con, SNP, LD, Labour, but SNP 3 have a hoping of beating Labour 2, maybe even LD one. Lab 2 Con 1 LD 1 SNP 2
Wales: 24% Labour, 23% PC, 14% Conservative, 13% UKIP, 10% Lib Dem, 5% Green, 4% BNP. This one's tricky, even with as few as four seats. Labour and PC for the first two, then it gets harder. The Conservatives have a good shot at number 3, number 4 is close between UKIP, the Lib Dems and second seats for either Labour or PC. I call this one UKIP, but it could go anywhere. Lab 1 Con 1 UKIP 1 PC 1
Northern Ireland: no clue, so I shall follow the consensus-ish of (in some order) Sinn Fein, Ulster Unionists and Conservatives, Democratic Unionists.

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. Now let me tell you that I've not seen anybody seriously suggest that the Greens are likely to get four seats, let alone five, so you should interpret these as having been influenced by a heavy dose of wishful thinking and just-breaking-right anti-big-three protest voting. Should that happen, it would seem very strange for UKIP not to get more than 12 seats. In truth, the markets favour Labour to finish behind both UKIP and the Lib Dems in terms of seats; I have Labour outseating UKIP by three on a lower share of the national vote, by virtue of Labour consistently picking up in Scotland, Wales and the North-East of England where UKIP may be squeezed out. A Green jump from two seats to five would be a big old swing, but it's predicated on a national vote share jump from 6% last time to only 10%-ish this time.

Honestly, I'm not convinced by my conclusions, but I've shown my working, so it's all at least plausible. I can't help feeling that given that the two parties for which I have the most affinity, the Liberal Democrats and Greens, seem to do rather well, I may have put my own prejudices and biases in to a greater extent than predicted. We shall see. These are my conclusions. What are yours?

Now get out there and vote!

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (hopefully identified!) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

Take the National Express when your life's in a mess

2009-05-26T21:31:29Z

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, this was not as easy as it could have been; upon reaching the station, train operator Grand Central still had a poster up suggesting that the morning's service would have partially been replaced by a coach, which we had missed. Their web site did not confirm this, and presumably the web site was more up-to-date, but it would have been nice to see some sort of retraction of the incorrect poster rather than just leaving the matter dangling.)

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. I've taken the coach to London or back plenty of times - enough to know it's a far from first choice option. This may seem unimaginable to US readers, but National Express is not a patch on the long Greyhound journeys I've taken; Greyhound buses have loads of width to them, comfortable suspension and a combination of engine noise plus road tone that proves far more calm and soothing than ever can be the case on the National Express. "It's the National Express, not the Orient Express", as a driver once said.

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.)

The Middlesbrough-to-Leeds coach was operated on a National Express bus (as you'll see, many aren't) with number GN19. Upon arrival at Middlesbrough it was possibly 15% full, and upon departure it was maybe 35% full - lots of double seats left vacant. I sat on the right in the second back row, opposite the back-left toilet and next to an emergency exit window; it's a surprise to write this, but the leg room was excellent - by far the best I can remember having on a National Express coach, and I'd estimate the seat pitch at around 38"-40". On the downside, I couldn't make the seat recline, and wasn't sure if that was just due to being in an exit row seat. Sitting opposite the toilet presented no problems at all; I'm not sure it was used at all on the leg. The journey was fine but slow, passing through Thirsk and York on the way - both places we had, frustratingly, recently been! I ate one of the three sandwiches I had prepared for the journey and couldn't help but nap.

There was a 50 minute layover at Leeds coach station. It's probably the least worst coach station I've used in this country - but beats scant opposition, with London Victoria habitually overcrowded and Birmingham Digbeth a pit of despair. (Currently closed for refurbishment; let's hope the new version, debuting late this year, is much happier.) Leeds coach station adjoins the bus depot; both are light, bright and airy, and a sit-in branch of Greggs the baker (*angelic noise*) was in late stages of construction. Boarding for the 19:10 to London started about 15-20 minutes early. I was using the m-ticket option with ticket details sent (precariously, I thought) through SMS to a mobile phone with no paper trail; this worked well, though I didn't trust it completely as I'm forever jiggling the phone, resetting it and losing saved texts.

The Leeds-to-London non-stop service was operated by a Haywards Travel coach. This had adequate legroom (seat pitch 32"-ish?) and the seats did recline; the toilet was situated middle right and again I sat opposite it. The coach had a TV front and centrally, betraying its holiday origins, but (unsurprisingly) this wasn't used on the journey. Occupancy was about 60%; only a few people who wanted double seats to themselves had to share. The non-stop journey was easy, though the toilet had an extremely weak flush and started to smell by the end. I may have napped very slightly, but listened to three old Fighting Talk podcasts. We arrived (as predicted!) ahead of schedule, shortly after 11 o'clock, and by 11:10pm I had caught up with Sarah (who was, indeed, effusively grateful!) and her host Ellen on a traffic island in the middle of Buckingham Palace Road, opposite Victoria Coach Station. The handover was successful and they safely saw me onto the overnight coach.

The London-to-Middlesbrough service was much less fun. It was operated by a National Express coach, number VE20, but legroom was barely adequate (seat pitch 29"-ish?), occupancy was about 60% and so - as one of the last to board - I ended up with an aisle seat next to an occupied window seat, in front of someone with no chance to recline. It wasn't at all pleasant. The journey back called at Golders Green and Milton Keynes, with the usual Milton Keynes coachway also closed for reconstruction - demolition with extreme prejudiced use of dynamite, hopefully - and the temporary replacement apparently on the other side of the maze. I eventually dropped off after a couple of hours, having discovered that I had to sit up pretty straight to fall asleep, and maybe caught two or two and a half hours of naps in fits and starts before dawn. As usual, the service stopped at Woodall services for 40 minutes, during which time every light in the coach was illuminated hatefully brightly.

We arrived in Middlesbrough a few minutes early; I was able to catch the first bus of the day back to Thornaby and had only a very short walk home before snuggling up to Meg and enjoying my extended break between shifts. All told: a successful trip, if not particularly pleasant.

Changing at Leeds and having a non-stop service from Leeds was the slow way to do it, but is possibly even preferable to the direct route with a pause at Woodall. 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...

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (hopefully identified!) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

Poetry

2009-05-07T22:26:24Z

"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. I'm not sure if there are reproduction restrictions that I'm breaching here, but (just for the purposes of quoting the BBC web site) I think this can be considered personal, non-commercial use.

On The Role Of The Next Century's Poet Laureate

Poetry!
Opium of the masses
Feed their habit
Feed their habit
Poetry
For the working classes
Let 'em have it
Let 'em have it
Poetry
Raise your champagne glasses
Chitter chat it
Chitter chat it
Poetry
For the lads and lasses
Twitter chav it
Twitter chav it
Poetry
With OAP bus passes
Zimmer jab it
Zimmer jab it
Poetry!
Opium of the masses
Live it, gab it
Give it, fab it
Pitter-pat it
Tit-for-tat it
Skit it, scat it
Brit it, bat it!

There's much to admire and enjoy about this, in a way that I can't remember enjoying a poem for years, if ever. Probably the most immediately grabbing feature is the wonderfully strong sense of rhythm. It drives me back to trying to remember which way round dactyls, spondees and trochees were when we learnt about different forms of classical meter at school years ago, but it's a poem that deserves to be annotated with crochets, quavers and the occasional dotted note. It would be hard to read this poem out stridently without it turning into at least a chant, if not quite a song. It's the most spondeetious development since Lenny Henry played Othello.

Visually, rather than reading it in your head, the economy of the poem is extremely striking. I would say "each line has only four syllables" but it's probably more accurate to say "each line has only two feet"... and that, in turn, is only true if you syncopate each Poetry line with the first foot of the next line, to regularise the meter further. The economy of punctuation is also striking with a minimum of commas and exclamation marks used sparingly enough to give them the emphasis they deserve.

These combine to contribute towards a tremendous sense of modernity, as befits a forward-looking poem anticipating the future. The selection of verbs is far more cutting-edge than I (from a position of ignorance) associate with poetry; I associate the "fab it" reference with digital fabricators, I'd never yet seen a reference to Twitter in a poem and the whole piece - though, happily, it doesn't attempt to cram itself into 140 characters - would probably work sent as a series of SMS texts. It's quick enough that you could happily read it in a tube train and get a smile on your face.

Lastly, there's a gorgeous selection of images hinted at by the verbs. While the poem presupposes a society in which poetry is perhaps more widely accepted and adored than might be the case, it clearly evokes a wide range of people who enjoy the para-religion of poetry in its various guises. The line "Twitter chav it" is particularly intriguing; while I don't think it's intended to imply that people who use Twitter are, in the modern British argot, chavs, it conveys a sense of people deliberately condensing their communication into passionate and not necessarily grammatical chunks. For what it's worth, the Tweets I follow are invariably thoughtful; returning to the poem, "Myspace chav it" or "Facebook chav it" don't nearly as precisely convey a sense of rapid-fire communication in a line of poetry, even though it may more precisely convey rapid-fire communication in the way I perceive they are used in practice.

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.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (hopefully identified!) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

Football news

2009-04-24T16:55:13Z

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.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (hopefully identified!) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

Why I love Dreamwidth even before I have an account there, and why you might not

2009-04-17T18:19:59Z

Blogging about blogging is the lowest form, as ever, but consider this a heads-up that I consider the omens point to Dreamwidth being a great, possibly the best, place to post for the next few years. Nothing lasts forever online, though the Long Now Foundation acts as if it is and Weaver's Week is well over eight, so about quarter of an Internet century old. That said, Dreamwidth looks like it has the sort of momentum in its development and in its nascent culture that it may be as exciting to be a Dreamwidth member as it ever was to be a LiveJournal member, even at LiveJournal's peak. In short, I consider Dreamwidth to be cool in a way that I haven't felt for any other communication platform for the last few years.

Some of you have been reading about Dreamwidth ten times a day on your Flist already and others may not be familiar. The idea behind Dreamwidth is that some of the people who worked LJ once upon a time are producing their own LJ-like web site that, in theory, will benefit from LJ's strengths but will avoid the errors that made LJ suck. It is based on the LJ code but makes the changes that should have been made but never were because they would have broken too many other things. It's not a project arising out of a grudge against LJ management, though frankly that would have been motivation enough. It's not a fandom project, though it will be fandom-friendly. (And, er, non-fandom-friendly, for people who aren't fans of anything.) Most importantly, there will be people working on it, both the owners and volunteers, aiming to make the project better (for their definition of better, which can broadly be considered "more capable" and "more usable") rather than more profitable. The site is currently undergoing closed beta testing, though open beta testing is expected to start around April 30th.

There is a school of thought that the adoption of Dreamwidth will mean "just one more tab to keep open", and I can sympathise. In recent discussions, people have suggested they want to have a single place where they can keep track of everything, and that's not so unreasonable a request - after all, it's how many of us have been trying to use LJ for years. Indeed, I myself have argued (paras 8-10) that there's a social benefit to everyone sticking together on the one service rather than scattering to the four winds, back when GreatestJournal (or was it InsaneJournal, or uJournal, or Blurty, or...) was offering icons up the wazoo. I still do believe that. It's just that these days, I am so dissatisfied with LiveJournal's operation and so enchanted with Dreamwidth's promise that I will do what I can for the discussion I want to follow to all be happening over there rather than over here. The benefits of supporting the DW movement do seem to me to outweigh the costs of splitting the discussion.

It's also relevant that most of us are now used to spreading ourselves over many sites in a way that we weren't, even just a few Internet years ago. I have accounts on InsaneJournal and IziBlog just to see Flocked posts from some of my Friends over there. I have an account on Facebook where I interact with relatives, co-workers and a few classmates. (I have an account on Friends Reunited, the UK cultural equivalent to Classmates.com, which I never use.) I have an account on LinkedIn in the vague hope that that counts as networking. Heck, I've even signed up to Twitter just because so many of you are on it. (After a few months, I've finally sort of got the point of Twitter. I have long insisted that "Microcontent is rubbish", and it is. More specifically, Twitter is for small talk, which is pretty much by definition inherently rubbish, but good for strengthening relationships. As I'm notoriously rubbish at small talk, I ought to start Tweeting just for fun and practice.)

So with this in mind, as soon as I can - and hopefully no later than when open beta starts, currently planned for 30th April - I am going to sign up for a Dreamwidth account and start regarding that as "home". I'm not going to stop reading you all over here, and I'm not going to stop posting things over here, particularly when I want to post content under Friends lock but want my Friends over here to see it. In fact, from the perspective of users over here who aren't over there, it'll hardly look like anything has changed. Culturally, though, I expect to regard Dreamwidth as my new Internet home and LiveJournal as just a mirror of it. Certainly I expect to give Dreamwidth the love that I had for LiveJournal in my first couple of years here, which has long since been frittered away.

This is all subject to change if something else proves to suit me better, of course, or if Dreamwidth proves sufficiently awful in an unpredictable fashion. An obvious problem is that Friends-locked posts will unfortunately work particularly badly when I Friends-lock in two different places and inadvertently split the discussion. This may be less problematic than only posting it to one of the two and requiring those on one to use the other. (Seeing my Flocked posts appear on both services is going to be annoying for some of you, I'm afraid, much like when we see people Tweet with a #fb tag and then see the Tweet pop up on Facebook as well. There's no good solution to this, other than my moving across to one or the other completely.)

All that on top of the fun of the username landgrab, of course, and watch me moan because I haven't upgraded my online home to prime username real estate yet. Sometimes people on my Friends list announce they have codes up for grabs, but these go in the wink of an eye rather than in "forty winks" - you really have not to snooze for more than ten minutes or so before you lose. Incidentally, denise currently subscribes to every new personal account during the closed beta period, so her profile lets you keep count of how many personal accounts there are (2,227 as I type, but who knows how many more by the time I post?) as well as all the usernames that have gone. That could be an opportunity for someone devious if they can work out how to use it.

Setting up at a new service will also give me a chance to reassess what I want my journal to do for me; I'm going to bring my userinfo up to date, it being a couple of years stale by now, and my interests no longer need be an attempt to get to exactly 150 forming a full A-to-Z. Hopefully I can get rid of some of my more encumbering notions of blogging as performance art and teach myself that it's OK to post shorter and more frequently. Hey, I've found my one true love through LiveJournal; I don't need (and certainly don't want) to have to go through that again. DW seems to me like a good opportunity for a fresh start and a chance to reinforce the relationships I have - and, no, this isn't a euphemism for defriending or deprioritising friendships with people who don't move.

Technically, currently the biggest advantage of DW is a feature I am unlikely to use in practice, the splitting of the concept of "friend" into "subscribe" (the "appears on your Flist" functionality of Friendship) and "access" (the "sees your Flocked posts" functionality of Friendship). I tend to think that people on LJ recognise that declarations of Friendship are not guarantees of full use of both aspects of the Friend functionality outside filters, and I'm sure that people will quickly make the same realisation on DW; we're going to filter as much as ever, whether or not we choose to use the functionality to make it explicit. (However, not at first; DW doesn't have filtering capability to begin with. It's high on the priority list, though.)

With all this in mind, bear in mind that I love DW to pieces. In the spirit of fairness - quite probably, fairness to excess, by presenting devil's advocacy that I think may overrepresent the opinion of a small minority - I'm going to admit that I don't think DW is perfect and I don't think DW is for everyone. Here are some of the reasons why DW may not be for everyone, but why these objections are not sufficient to put me off.

Before I start, it's relevant to distinguish between the Dreamwidth site and the Dreamwidth movement here, much as it is relevant to distinguish between the LiveJournal site and the LiveJournal codebase. The LiveJournal site runs on a mixture of free / open-sourced code and non-free code, with several different other sites running the free code - plus, usually, as little non-free code as they can get away with, or extra non-free code to make their site a more inviting proposition. The Dreamwidth movement has published a set of Guiding Principles, announcing a commitment to releasing code as open source. "We are committed to making it easy for others to install and maintain their own instances of our server code." Accordingly, I can think of some reasons why some of you might prefer to use another implementation of the Dreamwidth server code, once the DW server code is released.

The skeptical among you might now be reminded of the old LiveJournal Social Contract, which these days has turned into a redirector to a page with core values and technical goals. It's up to you how important a change at LJ this represents. A true pessimist might be similarly skeptical about Dreamwidth's ability to live by its Guiding Principles in the long term - or even feel that the establishment of such principles is necessarily setting the movement up for a fall. Anything is possible; when I say "nothing lasts forever online" above, it's somewhere between plausible and inevitable that Dreamwidth could jump the shark somewhere along the line due to bad fortune or bad decisions. However, I reckon that my near-seven-year LJ run is as long at one location as I might dare to hope for even with a wonderful enterprise. (I kept up physical diaries for about seven years, too, as it happens.) Remind me of this in the space year 02016!

It would be possible to object to the Dreamwidth site on the grounds that it is being operated by a US for-profit company owned by the two technical principals of the site, synecdochic and xb95. There are at least two potential criticisms here.

I think the choice to bind the Dreamwidth site by US law is more dictated by the fact that its two principals are based in the US than anything else. It seems likely that someone could use the Dreamwidth code to start another site in a different country whose legal system might suit you better, and this may be a better fit for your needs. I suspect that some of the DW code will have been written in an attempt to meet the requirements of US law - most specifically, the existence of COPPA meaning that web sites must treat their members under the age of 13 in different ways. Perhaps a Dreamwidth-affiliated site hosted in another country would have to partially rewrite the code to strip out irrelevant COPPA protection and to obey local laws, such as EU data protection legislation. If this is sufficiently important to you, you may find yourself unable to support the Dreamwidth site while still supporting the Dreamwidth movement.

Some might object to the Dreamwidth site on the grounds that it has been designed to operate as a for-profit corporation. This is, essentially, the first issue addressed in Dreamwidth's Business FAQ document. I'll leave it to you to decide how convincing the reasons they give are. I'm not sufficiently expert to know whether there are alternative ways that the enterprise might have been designed within US law which might have resulted in a non-profit or a co-operative while avoiding the 501(c)(3) problems. The company is clear about what it intends to do with its profit, and also clear about the process if the two principals get sick of running the site; a lesson learnt, among other things, from the last days of brad at LJ.

It also helps convince me that the heart of the business is in a place that I like, for-profit or otherwise (though it might not convince you) that synecdochic has written about her background and her intentions for Dreamwidth's place in life. Beside that, even if DW had been set up as a not-for-profit, that doesn't mean that the principals couldn't have acted for their own benefit rather than that of the site - for instance, by paying themselves unduly high wages. The site's commitment to open operations should make such abuses clear and thus almost vanishingly unlikely.

There are a large category of people who will practically not be able to use the Dreamwidth site, whether they approve of it or not: those who do not speak English. LiveJournal has always placed considerable emphasis on the variety of languages in which the site can be used; this has resulted, among other things, in the site becoming one of the foremost, if not the foremost, Russian-language blogging platforms. However, the site's attitude to translation works better in some cases than others; as new pieces of text are added to the site in the native English language, they may not necessarily be added to other languages for some time, if at all. There are some occasions where phrases may be combined in ways that make sense in English grammar, but may not work so well in other languages. Lastly, LJ tags are designed to make sense and be easily memorable abbreviations in the English language, whichever language you may be working in. It works well enough in some languages for the site to be popular in some countries, but it's clearly not perfect.

The Dreamwidth movement takes an alternative approach to this. The Dreamwidth site will only ever be in the English language. However, the site's commitment to open source means that it ought to be relatively easy for (almost?) the entire code to be run by someone else in another language, who may well want to sort out all the translation issues into a single language at a single stroke. Accordingly, over time, we might expect there to be a Russian-language implementation of the Dreamwidth code, a French-language parallel Dreamwidth site, a German-language one and so on and so on, as well as likely several parallel English-language implementations of the code. Again, this has the drawback of splitting locked discussions among many destinations.

The Dreamwidth movement aims to solve this by a notion sometimes referred to as "federation", whereby users who have accounts on multiple Dreamwidth or LJ codebase sites ought to be able to see posts that they can see under Friends-lock on one site at all sites in the federation - and all this without compromising the security of the Friends-locked posts to the outside world. This has got to be the true killer feature for Dreamwidth, if they can make it work well, for those of us who might not want to have to track several different sites. It's also a heck of a technical challenge, and currently it's unsolved - it's just ("just"!) bug #710 on the Dreamwidth Bugzilla. However, it's listed as a bug that is blocking the open beta, so presumably a cunning plan is in place. The whole operation does rely on OpenID to some extent, which some have argued against, though I'm not sure how current the OpenID criticisms are.

As a thought experiment: could someone start a rogue site using the Dreamwidth code, attract users to it who start federating Friends-locked posts from other sites to this rogue site and then start publishing the Friends-locked posts in public? Surely it's possible, but presumably it's no more of a concern that a site that might make Friends-locked posts that are posted there public.

Iain once posted five tests, as was in vogue at the time, of ways in which he might have liked LiveJournal to develop. I'm fairly sure that some of the above properties of the Dreamwidth site will act as a disincentive towards his participation, but he may have more time for the movement at large. The concept of federation, if well implemented, should go some way towards easing his concerns regarding the legal basis of the site and his concerns regarding the single geographical basis for the servers. It's also been publicised that another feature stopping open beta is the revamping of the journal style system so that people might change their styles by use of the web standard CSS system rather than LiveJournal's rather opaque and proprietary S2.

There is something of a common theme to some of the above: there are lots of developments that are currently blocking open beta, but not in place. You can see the bug counts on a frequent basis, but the race against time is a difficult one. Even when the site enters open beta, ready for prime time or not, there are a long list of plans for features to be implemented. There's so much that's to be done and yet so much not yet done.

But there's so much that has been done; see the bug counts, and see these fascinating descriptions of how much can be done in just one week. See how many people are working on the project! See how many people are volunteering on the project already, and how many more are signed up to volunteer once further infrastructure is in place. The staff page shows that many of these have some fairly ideal credentials, too.

This shows that the project has momentum and talent and dedication and love behind it. Dreamwidth is making so much progress that it's hard not to love it. This is as fascinating and exciting as projects of this type come. That's why it's just damn cool, as far as I'm concerned, and that's why I want to associate myself with it, in whatever way, shape or form. To an extent, I'm not even sure how much I care to what extent the Dreamwidth project meets all its goals, so long as the momentum remains so strong and the project develops in delightful ways, even if they aren't necessarily the delightful ways I'd have thought or requested. It's a delightful case of open source volunteerism against the establishment that LJ has become.

Part of this inevitably reflects a degree of cult of personality; something doesn't become cool unless there are cool people working there. One more reason why you might not love the Dreamwidth project is if you have something against its principals, but I absolutely do not.

It's true, and it may be relevant to some people, that synecdochic (in another guise) ran LJ Abuse for some years, at a time when they did some questionable things. To some people, that may be a strike against her ability to run another similar site. While I don't necessarily agree with all the things that happened, I think it would be blinkered to hold these past events against her; while the "I was only obeying orders" defence is stronger in some circumstances than others, I think that running the site and setting its policy is as good a chance for her to show how she'd like to run a site, given the relative lack of constraints at DW that were in place at LJ. If you must, judge her on how she runs things by choice, rather than how she ran things by compulsion. Her reflections on her time in charge of LJ Abuse and how DW abuse might be different are a revealing starting-point, and I like what I see.

It's an oversimplification to say that I think Dreamwidth is cool because I think synecdochic is cool, but it would be wrong to say that that isn't part of it. I get the impression that she'll co-run the site with insight, love and an ingrained streak of wisdom that other people just won't have. azurelunatic has this fascinating post about the trials and tribulations faced by LJ over its years, and what sort of things that LJ users might want from someone running a site. She is a tremendous communicator and fiercely charismatic. Furthermore, she has major, major kudos just reflected from being held high in the opinions of some of those whose opinions I trust.

Voting for a place to focus your social networking is like voting for a political party. Anyone can promise anything, but at the end of the day, probably the most important factor is how people react to the developments which could not have been predicted. Due to their backgrounds and the way they present themselves in the rest of their lives, I'm far happier to put my trust in the Dreamwidth principals, their hopes and their vision than I am anywhere else. In short, I vote Dreamwidth. You might not; there are some of you who, I suspect, will only really ever be happy to vote for themselves - or, depending on how you interpret the paradigm, not vote at all. Placing your trust in an organisation with something as emotive and significant as an online home is an issue that many are struggling with; the_shoshanna has this post, well worth reading, about how she came to the decision for herself. Nothing is certain, but I'm convinced that Dreamwidth is as good a bet as anywhere.

That said, it's important to recognise that synecdochic is a fairly frail flower, who - mixing metaphors like a cocktail - piles her plate exceptionally high despite a relatively short supply of spoons. While there's sense to the cliché that "the only way to get something done is to make sure that a busy person does it", I'm glad that it's not just all her; xb95 also looks like an exceptionally competent brain and thus a very strong bet, and the strength of the rest of the volunteer team cannot be underestimated. (The fact that the two disagree on so much, and yet seem to be so good at co-operating to form a consensus from different starting-points, is another major reason for confidence in the site management.) I'm very glad indeed that the "sale of the site" policy has been codified in the Operating Procedures, and it more or less clears my qualms about what might happen in the case of a brad-style burnout. However, LJ lasted a long time and developed a long, long way before the burnout, so I'm hopeful for a good run.

And yet there was a point when I seriously thought that DW wasn't going to make it. Case in point: look at the archives of the dw-discuss mailing list, or - at least - the volume of discussion from month to month. DW was touted as "coming Summer 2008!"; when September rolled around and discussion on the list dried up, I thought it was a still birth. Seems that LiveJournal, Inc. firing people at the start of 2009 - barely legally, but with a horrible lack of class - was just the spark that the project needed. That sort of downtime reminds me that nothing is guaranteed, and every web site out of your control is always, in part, going to be a gamble. You know what? I don't mind that. In fact, it's part of the fun!

The excitement I find in Dreamwidth is watching the development of the functionality and the culture, whose priority I perceive to be more about having a service that the developers themselves want to use and less about making money. Remind you of anything? Could my strong feelings just be nostalgia for the brad days of LiveJournal? Perhaps; after all, the Golden Age of anything is "just before you discovered it"...

Sidenote: the current raw LJ stats make interesting reading, with the newbyday figures being as strong as they have ever been. I don't think LiveJournal's going anywhere, days after its tenth birthday. However, look at the bottom of the stats page and the graph of age distribution. Can't help feeling that an awful lot of those "29-year-olds" aren't going to be legitimate somehow, and I wonder just how many of the new users might be similarly spam-scented.

Long-shot Prediction Game: the results

2009-04-15T11:11:22Z

A shamefully long time ago, I proposed a multi-stage prediction competition pertaining to twelve moderately unlikely events which might or might not happen, with a focus on the last five months of 2008 and the first month of 2009. Now we're well into 2009, the long-complete competition is starting to get rather rancid. Let me put it out of its misery before the stench of pallor completely stinks the place out.

First, we determine which - if any - of the twelve long-shots did come to fruition, like so. Again, I wll point to Iain's commentary on the matter. Returning to the original ordering, the twelve propositions were originally quoted as follows:

* Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher.

This did not happen. I don't believe that any of Brent crude, New York light sweet crude or West Texas Intermediate crude traded at above $148/barrel. It's cute to note that this was a case where a long shot came to fruition, but the long shot was in the opposite tail of the curve to the one about which I enquired.

* BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750.

This did happen, dropping to lower than 4500 in October and as low as 4095.23 early last month. I don't claim this to be as reliable a barometer of the global economy as I might have liked it to be, but I'm not sure there are significantly better ones that could be tracked over the course of the year.

* John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats in the 2008 US Presidential election.

This did not happen. There were no faithless electors and, as expected, John McCain won only 173 seats. (Well, votes; "seats" represents UK parliamentary vocabulary carried over in error.)

* Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister of the UK, Labour Party leader or both.

This did not happen. At times it seemed plausible, though.

* The USA to win at least one more gold medal than any other single country at the Beijing Olympics.

This did not happen. The USA won 36 gold medals, China won 51. (Now if I had specified medals of any colour, the USA would have outperformed all others, but I did not.)

* The New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII, expected to take place on or around February 1, 2009.

This did not happen. The New England Patriots did not even make the play-offs, though as they had a better record than any other team not to make the play-offs, they might reasonably place themselves thirteenth at worst. Debates as to whether the 11-5 Patriots might be a more appropriate play-off team than, say, the 8-8 Chargers are possible.

* Microsoft to make a takeover bid for (or merger bid with) Yahoo that Yahoo's board of directors accept or recommend acceptance.

This did not happen. However, it's a story that still commands discussion and may be just a matter of time.

* Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher.

This did not happen. I declared three sources to be acceptable; the W3 counter reported 32.07% in September aggregating figures for versions 3.*, 2.* and 1.5 (so 1.5 to 1.5.0.12), but I don't think it would be reasonable to estimate usage of browsers from the 1.0 branch and from pre-1.0 branches to exceed 33% as required. TheCounter reported usage figures around 20% and Net Applications had figures around the same mark. Firefox usage increase seems to be decelerating, at least partially due to acceleration of usage of Safari and Chrome, and partially because MSIE 7 really isn't so bad any more.

* The Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie, i.e. Harry Potter 6, to gross at least $285,000,000 at the US box office by (and including) the weekend concluding Sunday February 1st, 2009.

This did not happen, because the release of the movie was postponed. Alas! Should the delayed release make it to US$285 million - plausible, because the upcoming July release might suit its brand of Fine Holiday Fun well - then a grumble would be entirely justifiable, though unsuccessful.

* One or more of Prince William, Prince Harry, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie to marry publicly.

This did not happen. A new hat was not required.

* USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran.

This did not happen. Handy word, "overt". (I am not claiming that there were any covert ones, though...)

* There will be no more than two major hurricanes (category 3+) in the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season.

This did not happen, sadly: Bertha was category three and Gustav, Ike, Omar and Paloma all were category four.

Thus, in conclusion, one (1) of the twelve long-shots happened. The prediction part of the game ran over two rounds: the first round saw people estimate the number of items which would happen over the time period, and the second round saw people effectively wager points on each of the twelve propositions at community-defined, and community-refined, odds. So now let's find out who won!

In the first round, players participated in two ways: firstly by estimating the number of events that would happen and secondly by suggesting which would be the most likely and least likely to occur.

The number of events that actually happened was one. Of the twenty entries to the first round, nineteen estimated the number of long-shots that would take place, with the estimates ranging from two to eight. "Well done, everybody!", as Chris Tarrant says, regardless of how well or badly the just-asked audience have actually done. The two players who nominated two events score nine points, the seven players who nominated three events score eight points and so on. Three bonus points are awarded to each of the nine players saying that the stock market drop was among the four most likely to happen; two penalty points are deducted from the single player saying that the stock market drop was among the four least likely to happen.

These bonus points make the difference, as of the two players who said that two long-shots would happen, one would nominate the stock market drop as among the most likely, scoring +3 points, and the other would nominate the stock market drop as among the least likely, scoring -2 points and eliminating herself from contention. Sorry, huskyteer; with a score of 12 points, the winner of the first round is Iain, who once wrote at daweaver. Well done, Iain!

In joint second place, with eleven points (eight for a nomination of three events plus three for proposing the stock market drop) were bateleur, quintus_marcius and jaydlewis. In joint fifth place, on ten points (seven for nominating four events plus three for the stock drop) were enfarcer, sir_quirky_k and malachan. Scores were as low as five, four and technically zero.

In the second round, players chose for each of the twelve propositions whether they would prefer to earn a large score in the unlikely case of the long-shot occurring or a small score in the likely case of the long-shot not occurring. Accordingly, the twelve propositions are scored like so:

I choose to earn 53 points if "USA to win most gold medals in Beijing" happens, instead of earning 47 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 47 points.

I choose to earn 55 points if "HP 6 to gross at least $285 million at the US box office" happens, instead of earning 45 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 45 points.

I choose to earn 57 points if "BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750" happens, instead of earning 43 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score 57 points, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score zero.

I choose to earn 59 points if "Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher" happens, instead of earning 41 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 41 points.

I choose to earn 65 points if "Microsoft to takeover Yahoo" happens, instead of earning 35 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 35 points.

I choose to earn 68 points if "USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran" happens, instead of earning 32 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 32 points.

I choose to earn 71 points if "Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister, Labour leader or both" happens, instead of earning 29 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 29 points.

I choose to earn 73 points if "Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher" happens, instead of earning 27 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 27 points.

I choose to earn 75 points if "Named British Prince or Princess to marry publicly" happens, instead of earning 25 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 25 points.

I choose to earn 78 points if "No more than 2 major hurricanes in 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season" happens, instead of earning 22 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 22 points.

I choose to earn 79 points if "New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII" happens, instead of earning 21 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 21 points.

I choose to earn 82 points if "John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats" happens, instead of earning 18 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 18 points.

Accordingly a perfect score would have been available by only predicting the stock market drop long-shot and by refusing all the others. It would have scored 47+45+57+41+35+32+29+27+25+22+21+18=399. The highest score actually attained was 356, with the 43 points short of perfection due to incorrectly accepting the long-shots for hurricanes and the Patriots, and the winning player was quintus_marcius. Well done, David! David led almost from the start, though as he notes, he's played plenty of prediction games in the past, most frequently organised by gayparee, with no little success. This maiden victory is long overdue!

The minor placings are taken up by devjoe, scoring 297, missingdonut with 295, jaydlewis on 286, hedwig_snowy and his 266 then canadianpuzzler, at one point my own choice to win the whole thing, accruing 257 points. Scores were as low as 196, 193 and 162. I have a luridly coloured (but of course!) spreadsheet available with full scoring details.

I will note that I unofficially registered my predictions, which would have been good for 303 and thus sufficient for second place. However, the Rest Of The World who chose to oppose all twelve long-shots (for is making an entry selecting none of the choices different to not making an entry at all?) would have scored a moderately mighty 342. Possibly this does not reflect terribly well on all our performances, my own firmly included.

Thank you all for playing and apologies for the delayed results. I hope you enjoyed the game!

Reflecting on the game, I think my long-shots were slightly longer than I would have liked; they were intended to be about 20%-25% likely, thus making a result of only one turning out slightly disappointing, though probably not outside of tolerance. (If none of the twelve had happened, I would have been embarrassed.) Some long-shots were close - the Firefox one and, I still contend, the Microsoft-Yahoo! one being reasonably near misses - while others (oil prices, McCain seats) were spectacular misses. I rather enjoy that one of the long-shots was a miss for a reason very different to the ones we might have expected, but it's a shame it was the one regarding Half-Blood Prince after its postponement. It might have been interesting to run a two-tailed long-shot prediction game were you are able to predict long-shot low values as well as long-shot high ones, but I was deliberately trying to keep the complexity of the game low to attract players.

The concept of a long-shot prediction game still appeals to me, at least, simply because unlikely predictions are more interesting than easy-to-make ones. It would be very interesting to play a game that set out to reward those who could accurately distinguish a 10% long-shot from a 1% long-shot, but such a game would fairly necessarily be likely to be relatively complex - or, at least, rely on multiple trials of the long-shots in question, which is a facility that may not be available. It would be an attractive property to reward players' creativity in devising the long-shots, not least because they may well be more accurate at determining the length of a long-shot than I am. daweaver, as was, tried this in his 2006 prediction competition, which was closer to the mark, but I'm not sure it was quite there somehow. (Not least because I'm not sure what I'm looking for!)

Your thoughts and reflections would be welcome. I think I'll give this a rest for the remainder of the year and very probably next year as well, not least because I never really came up with a satisfactory name for the whole operation, though I may well participate in prediction games that any of you might run and would be delighted to learn of them. Besides, there are other - potentially more interesting - games I'd like to run online instead.

Rock'n'roll

2009-04-01T07:52:53Z

Today seems like as good a day as any to post about a subject on which I post remarkably little: rock music. I post very little because I know very little. This is not one of my specialist subjects; if anything, it represents a considerable gap in my pop cultural knowledge, no pun intended.

Most of what I do know comes from listening to The Arrow, one of a small number of rock channels available to us on digital radio. I thought there were only two - The Arrow and Planet Rock - but a slightly fuller search reveals Rock Radio is a wannabe-national network with an affiliate here in the North-East. The venerable magazine Kerrang! has its own station as well, come to think of it.

There may well be scads of other stations available as audio channels on digital television, plus plenty of channels available over the Internet, of course, but in practice I don't go out and think "oh, I feel like listening to some rock music" - it's more likely to be the case that it's something on in the background on a night shift at work, with The Arrow being a fairly uncontroversial middle ground default option that we'd frequently listen to overnight back at the power station. (It was also a station that we could receive reasonably clearly, which was a rarer commodity than you might imagine. I can't immediately conclude whether being in the middle of tonnes of metal and industry would have been a help or a hindrance in this regard.)

Accordingly, here are thirteen songs that get played on The Arrow every once in a while, that I have worked out that I like. Now I know people can get almost territorial about their music, or about their music genres, so I'm not going to claim that these are classic songs, or even that these necessarily are rock music. (I'm not even sure that these are necessarily my favourite songs - for instance, I need to think about songs on a CD Meg kindly made for me, and whether they count as rock or not.) However, The Arrow played 'em, and I liked 'em. In no particular order:

Van Halen, "Jump" reminds me of this classic Flash movie about old arcade games. The big guitar solo is a highlight of both song and movie. The song's video can't be nearly as much to my taste as this.
Supertramp, "Dreamer" often had a line or two of the chorus sung at the power station. An in-joke about steam turbines then followed. Even without that, it's still pleasantly ethereal.
Meat Loaf, "Dead Ringer for Love" may strike the balance between grandiosity and tolerability best among ver Loaf's fairly ridiculous canon. For the longest time I thought the song concerned a dancing kangaroo, too. Sadly not.
Red Hot Chilli Peppers, "The Zephyr Song" has rather fewer laughs to it than the others, but also some lovely vocal harmonies. Can't work out why it's about a zephyr and not a zither, though.
REM, "Man On The Moon" is probably the only one of these to have featured in a gayparee lyric quiz. This scores tonnes of points for its subject matter and its sense of fun.
Doobie Brothers, "Listen to the Music" - now I'm sure I was first introduced to this song by some sort of dance remix in, probably, the early '90s, and I'd love to hear that again if ever I could find it. The original is cute in its way, though.
Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody", inevitably, again taking great benefit from its associations with a memorable film scene. It's fun to improvise lyrics to, very badly, as well.
Foo Fighters, "Learn to Fly" is probably the best rock song I can think of to listen to on a transatlantic flight. I did this on several occasions when Meg and I were long-distance.
Europe, "The Final Countdown" has a spectacular and very silly guitar section. I think this caught the imagination, at the time, of lots of very young people when it first came out, and I am no exception.
The Who, "You Better You Bet" sounds like it ought to be by Meat Loaf to me, but in a good way. Maybe Meat Loaf on a very good day.
Focus, "Sylvia" is a rare instrumental that got played on The Arrow and provided a really lovely change of pace. Given that The Arrow has no DJs announcing the songs and we can't get to the web site, finding out what this song actually was presented a real challenge.
Ram Jam, "Black Betty" is politically very incorrect, I suspect, but I heard it first as an instrumental used for a chart countdown. (Some of you may know where.) Considering that I regard myself as liking guitars less than many, there are quite a few songs on here because of their guitar parts.
The J. Gelis Band, (Angel in a) "Centerfold" is just plain silly fun for its singalong na-na-na line, plus has a self-indulgent false finish. One! More! Time!

I think I've demonstrated why I don't post about rock music very much.

The Damned United

2009-02-09T22:36:41Z

Young man! There are many things I want to do before I start writing a LJ entry about something new, but sometimes you just have to reorder your priorities and strike while the iron is hot.

Arguably the most interesting thing to happen in English-language sport today (Felipe Sco-who?) is the announcement of firm detail from the fledgling United Football League, an initially US-based competition in professional American Football. Skip the official site, though, and get all your information from UFL Access, a well-informed and very well-written fan site with a vibrant web forum. I'm not normally a big web forum person, but have enjoyed this one.

The inaugural "premiere season" of the UFL is rather smaller in scale than people were hoping. Initial plans for eight (or later six) franchises, each owned externally, have been put off until 2010, with the investors they have attracted concentrating their efforts on a short season with home-and-away fixtures between four teams and an eventual play-off. The official press release names the four teams as Las Vegas/Los Angeles, New York/Hartford, Orlando and San Francisco/Sacramento; it seems likely that the split-site teams will play two of their home matches in one location and a third in another. Adding further cities still is not impossible, though the number of 2009 teams shall be four. (Five is right out.) In 2010, there should - could? - be sufficient investment to revert to the original plans for external ownership, one city per franchise and so on.

I posted about the UFL three posts (and three months, sigh) ago. It continues to fascinate me mostly at the level of geeking out about sports organisation, plus new ventures are always fascinating, plus taking swings at the NFL is always admirably ambitious, even if this one turns out to be a swing and a miss. Whether the UFL makes it or not, it will resolve the question "Can you found and fund a sports organisation in the style of many 21st-century technology companies?" The people on board have significant Wall Street and Silicon Valley experience, plus there are enough smart cookies on the football side to avoid inauthenticity. Oh, and the leader of the new investment group is the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the USA's House of Representatives.

The UFL faces many difficult challenges. While arguably the time to strike a new venture is now while so few of them are breaking ground, investment has been scarce and starting from a four-team basis will make the uphill struggle even longer, littered with corpses of other pro football ventures after the NFL extracted the juiciest parts. It should be a very entertaining ride, nevertheless, even if the web forum is as much of an attraction as the entity itself. (For much of late '07 and early '08, I was struggling and failing to write an article for here claiming that the proposed AAFL had hit written all over it and being negative about the UFL's chances...) The lead writer, Nation Hahn, is very good at what he does; probably the best starting-point is his two-part primer (part one, part two) of the UFL's first 21 months. His personal blog is fine, too.

Being sappy and egotistical, I wish him well at least in part because I recognise some of myself in him - or, more precisely, choose to project some of myself onto him. Let me tell you about my wonderful first job. I was a self-employed teleworking contractor working on the now virtually defunct web site of the Mind Sports Olympiad, and at the Mind Sports Olympiad events themselves. The concept was to establish an event, and a movement, that would do for mental sports like chess, bridge, poker, backgammon, go and so on what the Olympic Games does for physical ones. Compare with the more recent World Mind Sports Games. The Mind Sports Olympiad events in the UK are sputtering on annually, but have really been tailing off over the last few years; the smaller Cambridge events are rolling on and we have allies who do similar things, sometimes with our brand, in the Czech Republic and elsewhere.

The event was only a week or two per year, though. The vast majority of the upkeep of the web site pertained to the Mindzine, with news from all the aforementioned mental activities and anything else we could just about shoehorn in. We were very good at what we did, the team was lovely (I particularly happily enjoy remembering working with sir_gareth, amuzulo, godlovesevery1 and many others; ericklendl wrote a fine series for us once) and the work was fun. There were just two severe problems. One: surprisingly, painfully, unintuitively few people were interested in mind sports plural; there are more chess players or go players or poker players than generally-interested dilettantes who span the field. (I still don't want to believe this is necessarily correct.) Two: we didn't have a revenue stream.

This second problem was a rather severe one, and many investors ended up losing chunky sums that they had put into it. Many of the web site workers, myself firmly included, ended up not being paid for the last several months of work and there just wasn't anything left to sue. It was strange, it was irrational, it was built upon a big idea and it was pretty much the way things "worked" in the first .com bubble. Failures are useful feedback, though it's never clear whether a failure was due to an inherently bad idea or due to a bad execution of a potentially good idea. Having some self-employment experience on my CV probably didn't hurt me in terms of getting my later job, even though the transfer of skills was not an obvious one and nobody seemed particularly interested in the nature of self-employment.

And from here, it's not such a stretch to draw comparisons to the UFL. I dearly hope it makes it in a way that the MSO did not; it's a similar swing at a massive target, and there seem to be a lot of excellent talent, resources and good thinking behind it. Much as the MSO was a wonderful ride at the time, I have great confidence that the UFL will offer a fine ride, probably a much finer one, and think that UFL Access in particular will provide a grandstand seat from which to enjoy the ride.