Poker Tournament Format 
We just ate at the casino buffet (yum) and I asked about their Texas Hold 'em tourny format. The normal tournament is held every morning at 10:00 AM. It is a $20 for $1500 in chips - no rebuys. Here's the kicker though. The blinds start at $10 - $20 and double every 10 minutes! That's pretty fast so I assume you can't just sit around. I'm going to program this into DD Tournament Poker and practice. I won't be playing until after we come back from vacation in a few weeks but I definitely going to try it. $20 is pretty reasonable for a morning of entertainment. If I win anything it's gravy.
Oooh, I just checked the -DD site and the new version drops tomorrow. I get a free upgrade and it has a lot of bnew features including internet play.
Space Shuttle: Why
Why is the big question asked in A Rocket to Nowhere
| For all the talk of safety improvements, there really isn't a way to make the Shuttle much safer. The changes made with so much fanfare after the Columbia loss have been marginal, serving to prevent the psychologically untenable situation of watching damage occur at launch and being unable to do anything about it before re-entry, many days later. Actual safety improvements to the Shuttle - putting the orbiter on top of the launch stack, installing a crew escape system - would be so hideously expensive that they have been consistently vetoed. |
| With 28 launches to go, probability tells us that the chance of losing another orbiter before the program's scheduled retirement is about 50-50. But past experience suggests that NASA will continue flying these things until one of them blows up again (note that suspicious four-year gap in manned flight capability right around the time the Shuttle is supposed to retire). This seems like as good a time as any to ask: why are we doing this? |
Well, the space station is a reason
| In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong. |
| This closed cycle is so perfect that the last NASA administrator even cancelled the only mission in which there was a compelling need for a manned space flight - the Hubble telescope repair and upgrade - on the grounds that it would be too dangerous to fly the Shuttle away from the ISS, thereby detaching the program from its last connection to reason and leaving it free to float off into its current absurdist theater of backflips, gap fillers, Canadarms and heroic expeditions to the bottom of the spacecraft. |
After two disasters the shuttle should have not flown again. I just hope that the people in orbit make it home without incident.
Surgery: DS
On The Guardian's GamesBlog Keith Stuart posted on games making good use of the Nintendo DS touch screen. He mentioned a game I had not heard of, Trauma Centre: Under The Knife:
| But this is the masterpiece Trauma Centre: Under The Knife. Here you play a doctor performing a series of ever more complex operations, with the stylus taking on the role of your trusty scalpel. One day you're removing a tumour, the next you're bandaging something up - all presented as a series of puzzle-filled challenges. As these screenshots reveal, the other characters spend a lot of their time barking instructions at you. There's a great one with the nurse just screaming "Wha-what? How could something like this happen?!" Wonderful. |
Is this coming out in the US? If so, I'm on it. Back in college we played this old-school Mac Plus surgery game that was a lot of fun.
Update: Yes, the release date here is 10/11/05. Here is the GameSpot page.
Phenom
The Seattle Mariners top pitching prospect, 19-year-old Felix Hernandez, is about to make his Major League debut against the Tigers - the first teenageer to start since Todd Van Poppel in 1991. I'll be listening on KOMO and you can follow along on the ESPN GameCast.
Strike 1!...94 then 97 MPH - ohh a hit on a 96 MPH fastball.
Wow - a rough first inning, bases loaded and no outs. But a 3-2-3 double play and a strike out of future hall-of-famer Ivan Rodriguez and Felix gets out with only one run...OK enough running commentary :-)
Comments?
I'm attempting to set up Haloscan comments to my OPML blog using the instructions from Tom Simpson's Instant Outline. Here we go!
Looks like it's working. I have to add the Haloscan to each post. It would be nice if it were automatic but this works.
Grandmaster Gives the Smackdown to 1100+
Chess Grandmaster Susan Polgar played a 17 hour chess marathon and crushed all kinds of recoreds - and people.
| Most games played at once. Polgar, 36, had 326 simultaneous games going on Monday afternoon. Of those, she won 309, drew 14 and lost three. |
| Consecutive games played. When the chess marathon ended at 3 a.m. Tuesday, Polgar had played 1,131 consecutive games, said Barbara DeMaro, managing director of U.S. Chess Trust, an event sponsor. |
| Highest number of wins in a marathon of this sort. |
| Highest percentage of wins -- 96.93 percent. |
1096 out of 1131...not bad! She walked 9 miles during the marathon.
Via Kotaku
A Tour of the Wingnutosphere
This is a handy reference to our friends on the right :-).
Via Eschaton.
