I only eat foods that tessellate.
This is quite possibly my favorite episode of Hey Arnold.
Haunted Train (by ArnoldPhilShortman2)
title: Diagonals: Good/Evil
medium: ms paint
date: 10/17/2005
Well, that was nuts. I don’t think I have much to say that I hadn’t already read in reviews beforehand. A great acting performance, and a great job making such a minimal premise into riveting drama.
It’s hard to believe that a movie with one main character set almost entirely set in one location whose ending is already known by the audience all along could be this suspenseful and entertaining. While the unnerving (pun intended!) climax is not for the squeamish, there is a lot more to the movie than the infamous amputation scene. It’s an intense, captivating, and ultimately uplifting movie.
This song is always awesome, but now it will be hard for me to get to sleep tonight.
(Source: youtube.com)
The truth is, the current incarnation of the GOP, frozen in its pose of perpetually indignant outrage, doesn’t want additional perspective, more data and nuance, and — Heaven forbid — dissenting voices. The impulse to marginalize, condemn, ridicule, and finally choke off dissenting voices is not only what’s behind Senator Coburn’s war on the NSF, it’s behind the GOP-sponsored culture war that has sucked much of the oxygen out of the national discourse for more than a decade now.
Republicans don’t like science and scientists because they are sources of data that are independent of GOP-approved propaganda mills like Fox News. Pesky scientists and academics are always popping up to dispute the Roger Ailes-approved buzz-quote of the day — on climate change, on health care, on the effects of poverty on the rapidly evaporating middle class, on the diversity of American families, and on the importance of funding basic research instead of commercially-driven ventures constrained by short-term considerations like ROI.
Source Code was great. It had two layers of interrelated mystery that slowly unraveled over the course of the film, but left enough unresolved and unexplained that the viewer has to do some thinking on his own afterward. It reminded me vaguely of several of things that I really like; Timeline, Memento, Inception, and Groundhog Day all came to mind, among others. It was an action mystery with some psychological heft. Well-written, well-paced, and well-acted, entertaining all around.
I went in hardly knowing anything about the movie, and it definitely pleasantly surprised me. Afterward, when I read that it was directed by the same guy who made Moon, Duncan Jones, I literally gasped and said “oh my gosh” aloud to no one in particular. I don’t know why I was so shocked, but I guess I have a new name to put with Rian Johnson and Christopher Nolan my list of must-see directors. Source Code was a little more mainstreamed than Moon, but it falls squarely into the category of sci fi that I really enjoy.
This just happened to me when I put on real pants a few minutes ago. Yes, I didn’t get dressed until after 7 pm IT’S SATURDAY STOP JUDGING ME.
First, a brief public service announcement: Words With Friends is NOT the same thing as Scrabble. The bonus squares on the boards are arranged differently. The tiles have different values. The frequency of each letter is different. The bonus for using all your letters is different. This is not the same game.
I’ve come to terms with the popularity of WWF, but Scrabble’s scoring and board arrangement are superior, as is the 50 point bingo bonus. Words With Friends is a cheap and convenient knock-off, but it’s close enough to the original that the average philistine either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
That being said, I begrudgingly play WWF on my Android phone because there isn’t a Scrabble app. The WWF interface is simple and convenient, although it is missing some features that Scrabblers would consider necessary. You can see why people with no particular attachment to Scrabble would like WWF. Its ease of play and the fact that it’s free give it a big advantage over Scrabble, which has a clunkier interface and a price high enough to dissuade passive players from downloading ($10 for iPhone).
It makes me mad that Hasbro (the owner of Scrabble in the U.S.) has been so slow to digitize the game. It took years before you could find an official Facebook app, and despite the fact that they eventually released the iPhone app, there is still no sign of one for Android.
Right now, Scrabble’s biggest advantage is brand recognition. With the growing popularity and ubiquity of WWF, that advantage is dwindling fast. Unless Hasbro can get its act together soon, I think Scrabble may have a dangerous competitor moving forward.
This looks like it would be awesome, but also terrifying, to experience.
Curl Curl Lagoon Standing Wave (by bellboys30)
First, the statement of the strategy (via J! Archive):
n. in Final Jeopardy! wagering strategy, the scenario in which the 1st-place player’s score is equal to twice the difference between the scores of the 2nd- and 3rd-place players. Under this scenario, the 1st-place player should bet $0, because the 2nd-place contestant has reason to only bet to tie, since the bet to keep 3rd locked out is identical to the bet that would tie the leader if 2nd is correct.
Alright, so the “Faith Love” strategy applies if the 1st-place player’s score is equal to twice the difference between the scores of the 2nd- and 3rd-place players. Note that this situation can only occur such that the 2nd-place player has more than double the 3rd place player’s score and has more than half the 1st place player’s score.**
Strategy for 1st place depends on assuming 2nd place uses optimal strategy, so let’s first look at 2nd place’s optimal strategy:
Essentially, in Final Jeopardy, the 2nd place person has two goals:
1) pass the 1st place person
2) not get passed by the 3rd place person
In this case, if 2nd place wagers enough to pass 1st, then he opens himself up to getting jumped from behind by 3rd if he gets it wrong, thus putting goal #2 in jeopardy (no pun intended).
However, if 2nd place wagers a small enough amount that 3rd can’t pass him even if he (2nd) gets Final wrong, then his wager is, by virtue of the nature of the situation, too small to pass 1st; he doesn’t even give himself a chance to achieve goal #1.
However, wagering just high enough to equal 1st place’s current score also happens to be just small enough that if he’s wrong, the best 3rd can do is tie 2nd place.
Thus, 2nd’s optimal strategy is to wager the difference between him and 1st.
So, assuming 1st knows 2nd’s optimal strategy, 1st wants at all costs to avoid getting passed by 2nd. So all 1st has to do is wager nothing, so that even if he gets Final wrong and 2nd gets Final right, then they tie and both advance.
This assumes a few things:
- everybody uses optimal strat. This might not be the case, since they have limited time to decide on a wager and these strategies are obviously hard to derive.
- the players don’t care about how much money they get, as long as they finish in 1st (or a tie for 1st). This might not be the case, since 1st place gets to keep whatever amount they finish with, while 2nd and 3rd only get $2000 and @1000, respectively. So there’s a much bigger monetary incentive for getting 1st over 2nd than there is for getting 2nd over 3rd.
- everyone has equal likelihood of getting Final correct. Obviously, if you’re a Biblical scholar and the category is “The Bible,” then you might want to adjust your wagering strategy accordingly.
So while this is the optimal strategy in a vacuum, it’s pretty clear that for practical purposes you don’t necessarily want to follow it. It does make for a pretty interesting game theory study, though.
—
*This started out as a series of FB comments from my previous post but it grew to post-worthy length.
**Why is that so? Well, let c be the 3rd place score and d be the difference between 3rd and 2nd. So the scores are:
- 3rd place: c
- 2nd place: c + d
- 1st place: 2d
By virtue of their placing order, we know that 2d > c + d > c. It’s pretty clear that 2nd place has more than half the 1st place player’s score. Subtract d from the left and middle parts of the inequality and you’ll notice that d > c. Add c to both sides, and that means c + d > 2c, so 2nd is more than double 3rd.
One specific strategy (Faith Love) had me all confused until I got out a pen and figured out why it was a worthwhile strategy. Then I started reading about other Final Jeopardy strategies, which were equally interesting, like in this Slate article.
There is also this Final Jeopardy wagering calculator on the J! Archive website, which is itself totally awesome.
[EDIT: I went ahead and wrote up an analysis of the Faith Love strategy]
