Survey: People are Stupid

And neither can CNN.

At least you can always turn to CNN for all of the most important news.



I promise I'll make a real post on this blog soon. =(

Cylons on CNN

Cylons appear to have made the news today. Guess it's just business as usual at CNN.

The US Senate...

... a bastion of positive racial stereotypes. From http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/17/business/aig.php:

"I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed," Mr. Grassley said in the interview. "But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say 'I'm sorry,' and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide."

The Saga Continues

I've got a pair of Chinese Firebelly newts, and the female has just begun laying eggs for the first time. Not sure what it is about our aquariums, but I hope it means we're doing a good job. She's been laying anywhere from 3-10 per day for the past week or so. She does this by folding a leaf over with her hind legs and making a newt-egg-taco. One. Egg. Per. Leaf. She's really finicky about this.

My new tank is still growing in, and she's been doing a real number on the plants, often crushing two leaves for ever egg she lays. I've tried fake plants, strips of plastic, and anything else that I found recommended on line, but she only likes the real deal.

Finally, I plopped some java fern in today--the stuff grows like a weed in our other tanks--and she went to town on it instead of my nice plants. So, crisis *mostly* averted. Now I just need to find someone who wants a bunch of baby newts when they hatch...

See, I'm Not Cutting My Fingers At All!

Does anyone else find Lisa Kudrow to be remarkably creepy in this commercial?

Thebes: Real Archaeology Version

Last night at Peter's birthday party, it seems Jan, Yar, Varun and I unintentionally invented an interesting variant of the board game Thebes that we have named Real Archaeology. To play this variant, simply extend the game one year beyond what is intended for the number of people you're playing with. This year is then spent doing the following:

• Digging in Egypt for 12 weeks and finding nothing but rubble.
• Digging in Crete for 12 weeks, finding nothing but a single broken plate, and getting unduly excited over it.
  
• Going around Europe competing to give talks.
• Stealing grad students that you don't intend to put to work.
• Sitting around reading a lot of books for no real reason than because you have nothing better to do with your time.

We think this must be what Real Archaeology is like.

More Games!

With the highly anticipated Ghost Patrol coming up this weekend, it was quite a pleasant surprise to get an email for a game being planned for Fall 2009. Orange Snood will be running a Muppet Movie game and will be blogging about it. I'm always interested to see how other GCs work and what their philosophies are on various elements of games. Especially after Red's posts on the NMS Forum, I'm very curious to see Orange Snood's approach to games.

Gotta Keep 'em Separated

Mommy fish and 31 of her babies have now been moved to the 20 gallon tank. This process took quite a while, and talking like Sesame Street's The Count only kept it interesting for so long (31! 31 baby fishies. AH! AH! AH!). The remaining 3 or 4 will have to wait until they're a little bigger and can't hide from my net so well.

Turns out we were lucky. According to the internets, had our female black molly been a little older, she could have had as many as 100 baby fish.

Must Be Something in the Water

I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but all of our fish decided to have babies all at once. Linnsey's tank wound up with 2 batches of whitecloud fry, and my black mollies, whom I've only had for 3 weeks, just had 10 babies while I was at work today. I was quite surprised when I came home today and checked in on my plant growth, to see a bunch of small black fishies hiding in the Riccia and Ambulia.

We've already given a few of the whiteclouds away, but if you like fish, lemme know, because I think we'll be looking for homes some of the mollies, too.

Puzzles to the Rescue

Blocks With Letters On. It's probably the only thing that kept me sane in a week of working til midnight every day. I must say, it's a surprisingly clever combination of word puzzles and spatial puzzles, both of which I really enjoy. Too bad there are only 64 levels.

So thanks, Jan, for pointing it out!

Is it wrong...

... to think "wow, Tina Fey is doing an *amazing* impression!" and then realize that you're watching the actual VP debates?

I think 10:28-10:40 of the following video explains what I wish I had been doing for the entire debate. That so many general and nonspecific comments from both sides could be considered a debate is sad. I don't think I learned anything about either ticket, except that I'm not particularly enthused about their VP picks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj0dqCB6pcI

You know it's bad when...

... people sail across the pacific to dump their trash in the Ala Wai.

Raft Made Of Junk Crosses Pacific

A sailing raft made of recycled junk carrying two men on an estimated 2,300-mile trip across the Pacific Ocean has made it to Hawaii's Ala Wai Harbor.

I think we can fill the canal with shit on our own, thankyouverymuch.

Fan Service

Many of you (for some definition or "many", "of", and "you"), my dear loyal readers, have asked me repeatedly just how sharp an X-acto knife is. Since you have all made this blog so enormously popular (for some definition of "so", "enormously" and "popular"), I feel I am forced to do your bidding (for some definition of "do", "your", and "bidding"). It is for this reason that I decided to test (for some definition of "decided", "to", and "test") an X-acto knife upon my thumb. Unfortunately, I mean the common and universally understood definitions of "upon", "my" and "thumb".

On a scale of 1 (does not cut my thumb at all) to 10 (cuts the tip off my thumb), I would rate the X-acto knife's sharpness as 5 (cuts the tip of my thumb half way off). At the given depth, I'd estimate that if the cut had gone twice as far laterally, I'd be posting something philisophical asking whether it can still be called the tip if it's laying on the floor (see Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought).

Incidenatlly, when I say that coed astronomy pours it's blood, sweat, and tears into the Iron Puzzler BANG (and all the games we run), I don't mean that metaphorically. If your start clue has red stains on it, you'll know where they're from.

Well, ok, I threw out the piece of card stock I was currently working on, and the rest were protected in envelopes (unlike my carpet), so there was blood, sweat, and tears involved, but it's just the pouring that was metaphorical.

Historical Trivia

A coworker recently wrote an iGoogle gadget that uses News Archive data to display random historical events. Sort of a "This Day in History" thing with much more data and much less editing. So if like me, you happen to be in the intersection of the subset of people who use iGoogle and the subset of people who like random trivia, you might check it out:

Go to Hell, Cokie Roberts

Apparently, I'm an exotic foreigner. And by that, I don't mean tha I'm seeing Double Vision or that I'm Cold as Ice. I mean this:



"I know Hawai'i is a state, but..."? Seriously? Go to hell, Cokie Roberts.

Ghost Patrol -- We're In!

With 47 applications for 20 slots, I feel quite privileged that coed astronomy made it in. We put a ton of effort into our app, and while I thought it turned out well, it's difficult to really judge one's own work. Our video is funny to us because we know what we were going for, but you never know if it'll fall flat with a real audience.

There's been much discussion on the_game mailing list about how to handle the popularity that games have been facing lately. The two main suggestions--encourage the running of more games by weighing GC work heavily in the app process, and run games over two weekends--really fall flat for me. The first seems somewhat infeasible to me, and the second really cheapens the parts of the game that I like.

BANG died because everyone who wanted to run one did. Despite a tremendous growth in popularity, the number of people who wanted to run BANGs simply did not scale linearly with the number of people interested in playing in them. I fear it is the same or worse with big games. Planning a game usually takes a year or more, and most of the people "hardcore" enough to do that have already been playing in games. Trying to force people to run games will only result in a bunch of crappy games. You have to be really dedicated and interested to stick it out.

Where I think we can pick up new teams who would run games is the fresh-out-of-college/grad student crowd. coed astronomy and XX-Rated both fell into this category when we started. Both teams were willing to run both BANGs and big games, and the likely reason we weren't on this bandwagon a lot earlier was that we were undergraduates/not in the bay area/too busy with school/etc. To give props to a friend, Jesse Young's team CRANEA is one of the teams I'd put into this category. It's unfortunate they didn't make it into Ghost Patrol because I think it just prolongs the time before Jesse inevitably runs some sort of game (be it BANG, a day game, a puzzle hunt, or whatever).

The problem with simply running more games is that every team wants to play in every game. And to do that, you need to accept more teams or run each game twice. Neither is particularly appealing to me. A lot of the charm and the magic of the game for me comes from the clues and clue sites that place the biggest restrictions on the number of people. The entirety of Hogwarts (my favorite game of all time, even though I only playtested it) would never have worked with 30+ teams. And frankly, I don't know many people who have the stamina to run an all-weekend game more than once.

So what do we do about this? I don't really know, and that's why I tried to kick off discussion on the mailing list. The real innovation in the game happens when people run one, however, so I hope to be pleasantly surprised sometime next summer when some team steps up with a game format which attempts to solve these problems. Even in the short few years that coed astronomy has been around, we've seen some pretty big changes in how games are run, so I'm quite hopeful for the future. =)

Ghost Patrol App

Well, coed astronomy has applied to Ghost Patrol. I was going to wait until we knew whether or not we got in to post a link to our app, but everyone's been discussing app videos on the_game mailing list anyway. So here it is:

http://www.coedastronomy.org/GhostPatrol/

I'm sure you can guess which segment is mine. Bonus points if you can tell me where each of the sounds comes from.

Narita: 2, Dale: 0

It's been confirmed, Narita airport got me sick both coming and going. Thanks, Japan.

Greetings from Bali

The honeymoon is totally awesome, but cheap interwebs and power adapters are hard to find. I'll post much more once I'm back in the states.

Scuba Certification

Just in time for our honeymoon, Linnsey and I just completed our 4 open water certification dives this past weekend for our scuba certification! It was freezing and there was terrible visibility, but we still had a lot of fun. Knowing that conditions in Bali would be vastly better was a pretty good incentive to get to Monterey by 6:45am each day and into that frigid water.

The highlight of the dives for me was seeing a cormorant skim the bottom at 25 feet in search of fish. Since seeing this in the BBC's Planet Earth documentary, I've thought this was the coolest thing ever (they can fly, and they can swim!), and I've wanted to see it in person. I tried to point it out to Linnsey, but she didn't look in time. Hopefully we'll get to see it again.