A blog about stuff. Mostly.
Lulled into a false sense of competency by a bathroom Sudoku book, I purchased Will Shortz Presents Ferocious Sudoku in an airport bookstore.
I don’t seem to be up to the task.
The fact that a crossword puzzle editor has turned himself into a pop culture celebrity gives one some faint and rather odd hope for America.
Rat Ambitious, likeable, you find it difficult to stay in one place for more than a year. Choose the Hare; avoid the Pig.
Hare You have a lot of ideas and a great enthusiasm for letting others do the actual work. You love the Pig and Rat but fear the Ram.
Ram You’re sincere and honest and hardworking. So why must you always lead with your horns and incredibly hard head? Choose the Rat or Monkey; avoid the Hare.
Monkey Greatly entertaining and clever, though a little jumpy. You have the best-decorated cubicle. The Pig can talk you off the ledge; the Ox bores you to tears.
Ox Patient, diligent and loyal. Empires are built on your back; you get paid minimum wage. Thanks!
Snake Bright and beautiful, you specialize in undermining others through comments that are just indirect enough so that if confronted, you can insist that “oh that’s not what I meant at all”. You like the Ox.
Pig Happy to root in mud all day, you know your place in the world. Choose the Monkey; you have the unique ability to cooperate with the Snake for long periods of time but if unduly provoked you eventually rise up and give it the trampling of a lifetime, which makes all the other animals very very happy.
‘K, one of the two weakest competitors is gone. This is not to say Spike can’t cook, and he certainly can cut up a dead cow, but he seemed to be relying more on guile than skill in the past few weeks.
Speaking of dead meat, Lisa is next barring a miracle. Seven times on the chopping block? Wow.
Stephanie is wonderful and yet irritating because she seems so effortless. Odds are that three women are going to the final only to be beaten by Richard, but maybe just maybe Stephanie will come out on top.
I have been eating less red meat lately but now I want a dry-aged steak.
It irritates me that I am so interested in a TV show.
In Battlebots’ heyday (i.e. when they were on television), there were some fascinating machines, and then there were the wedges.
Wedges are shaped like a cheese wedge. A wedge just moves at a high speed and tries to run up underneath its opponent, functioning as a ramp and sending the other bot flying and flipping. (Preferably onto or underneath the arena’s built-in implements of destruction.) Some wedges added weapons of their own, but they were largely ornamental. In my estimation wedges were popular because they don’t require much thought. Make wedge, drive straight at opponent. Zzzz.
At the other end of the Battlebot spectrum stood Donald Hutson. Hutson created Tazbot, which was a unique, spastic monstrosity that didn’t look like a threat to win it all, but was simply fascinating to watch in combat and much harder to beat than you might have guessed. Hutson also created the more refined Diesector, which was just the coolest superheavyweight bot. A gaping pincer maw and two arms like sledgehammers. Much operator skill required, but 1000x more entertaining than a wedge.
Morozevich is the Donald Hutson of chess.
Here’s Diesector giving a wedge what it deserves.
Morozevich is currently in Bosnia doing the same thing to a bunch of mere 2600s.
2006 Johannisberg Rheingau Riesling Kabinett from Weingut Johannishof
with
Aimee Man, Bachelor No. 2 and various soundtracks
Both are slightly less sweet than you expect.
When they were kids my mom and her sister created their own secret code language. Spoken rapidly, it’s tough to follow unless you have a lot of practice.
Theeezis eezis eezan eezexeezampeezle eezof theezee Eezaleezabeezameeza Eezeez.
My daughter is very into it and of course now speaks it way too fast for anyone to understand. I figure it’s gotta be good for her brain, even if it makes my head hurt.
I remember a training session with Mark Dvoretsky, years after [I became] an IM, where I was clearly the only person in the room who didn’t understand why White was winning in a certain position. Everybody else saw White’s structural advantage as similar to a material advantage.
- Jacob Aagard in Excelling at Technical Chess.
We aren’t bad at chess because we’re stupid; we’re bad because it’s a really hard game.
I was rather miffed by the apparent bot-marketing comments posted by ‘DiscoveryChannel’ on my quasi-Deadliest-Catch-related post titled Grinding. So, I posted an unpleasant response in the comments and also sent an unpleasant email to some obscure address (info @ whatever) I dredged up on the Discovery Channel site.
Assumed I was ranting into the wind and hearing only echoes. To my surprise, I got a nice human email response from the VP of digital media marketing at Discovery Channel. The comment wasn’t bot-generated, although she readily acknowledged that it did look that way.
So, kudos to them. They’ll figure out how to better interact with blogs and bloggers just like I’m figuring it out in my day job. A personal email when you’ve messed up is certainly a huge step in the right direction. (On a tiny scale, reminiscent of the Monroi fiasco and the kind of stuff David Churbuck and Rob O’Regan blog about all the time, so head over there if you want to see more examples, good and bad, of companies looking for their footing online.)
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