Lots of pleasant Christmas greetings going around, which is nice, including many from old co-workers and team members at MSO Worldwide (who, with one exception -
amuzulo - don't know this exist). At our height, we had lofty ambitions; here's a strictly theoretical thought-exercise I once set myself.Suppose we had five (or fifty or five hundred) million pounds to spend on bringing Mind Sports Olympiad events to the whole of the United Kingdom one year and it is felt best to do this by a nationwide tour of fifty towns and cities around the country. Ideally we want everyone to know about the single event closest to them; hopefully we can encourage the most enthusiastic to play in more than one event and so crown regional champions based on the results from several different close events. Which fifty towns and cities would you choose?
SCOTLAND (7)
Inverness
Aberdeen
Glasgow
Dundee
Edinburgh
Dumfries / Ayr
Kyle of Localsh / Fort William
NORTHERN IRELAND AND ISLE OF MAN (2)
Belfast
Douglas
WALES (4)
Cardiff
Swansea
Aberystwyth
Bangor
NORTH EAST (5)
Newcastle / Gateshead
Middlesbrough / Stockton
Scarborough
Leeds / Bradford
Hull
NORTH WEST (4)
Carlisle
Lancaster
Manchester
Liverpool
MIDLANDS (6)
Stoke
Sheffield
Nottingham / Derby
Wolverhampton / Birmingham
Coventry
Leicester
EAST CENTRAL (6)
Northampton
Lincoln
Cambridge / Peterborough
Norwich
Ipswich
Luton
WEST CENTRAL (6)
Cheltenham
Hereford
Bristol
Reading
Oxford
Swindon
SOUTH EAST (5)
Chelmsford / Southend
London
Croydon
Brighton / Eastbourne
Ashford / Canterbury
SOUTH WEST (5)
Penzance
Plymouth
Exeter / Taunton
Poole / Bournemouth
Southampton / Portsmouth
At some point I will illustrate these on a map for the non-British. I am not trying to reflect equal population per location, otherwise London would get several dots of its own at the expense of Scotland; the goal is more to try to give 98% of the population an easy journey to at least one event. Can you think of a better distribution of fifty major towns, split into ten or twelve (not the annoying Governmental eleven) regions, around the UK-and-Isle-of-Man map?
