Whirling Sucking Quagmire of Despair

Neville Chamberlain? Was he the goofy Gryffindor kid, or that big basketball player? It starts getting good at about 1:58.



Sadly, the idiot still has a radio show. Kudos to Chris Matthews for getting it right this time.

Another 9th place finish for a Hopkinton team. They went 5-1 with the only loss (by just 26) coming to the eventual champions. In addition, last year's 9th-place team, finishing 18th this year after a tough Q-stick in game 5 and a bagging in game 6, showed lots of class in defeat. My 3rd team, expecting very little of themselves, still went 3-3 for a placing just above 50th.

As the coach of 3 teams, I got 3 bags of Coach Loot. That's 3 Franklins, one of which my 10-year-old has latched onto in a very good way. If you want one of the others, just offer me 20% off retail! :-)

Happy Mother's Day to all who qualify!

How did I post about BAT without extending huge congratulations to the top winner, millcake16?? Fantastic job, Joey!!

Final results: 8-7 +196. I'm disappointed, given my 7-4 start, but I found lots of new words (HEMAGOG, CUTDOWNS, AUSFORMS, the homeless PEEBEEN [spelling corrected, thanks, Cesar!!], a nice ENERVAT(E) play where the first three letters each hooked a 2- or 3-letter word. I learned a brand-new way to lose: plan a perfect out-in-2... with two letters left in the bag.

Congrats to my simian daughter, wisemonkey, for an awesome performance! Thanks for all of my other Scrabble friends for making tournaments so much fun!!

Challenge Table

	Valid, challenged	Phoney, unchallenged	Phoney, challenged
My Plays	HEMAGOG	overadds* bagless*	(none)
Their Plays	WAIRED*	(none)	swiney* wilty*

This chart was generated by cross-tables.com

( Read more... )

I have periodically been interested in stepping outside of my normal flashcard-based study methods to just "read through the dictionary once". However, my eyes glaze over when I look at any paper list longer than about 4 words, and I absorb nothing. Yet I've seen most words in my flashcard list 5 or more times. So where's the middle ground?

The answer is in SuperMemo's "drill" function. I have been taking groups of 500 eights and marking them all as "drill" words. To remove an item from the drill, I simply have to recall it from alphagram... but just ONCE, ever.

I've been putting in these lists of 500 almost daily for almost a week, and I've seen--and solved--2,000 eights that I wouldn't otherwise have gotten to. If I get the letters in a game, I will miss MANY of these new words... but I'll also (knock wood) avoid challenging them if played against me. MOPBOARD. SUBULATE. VIBRISSA. (ugh, already they don't look that familiar!)

Most of my study stems from fear that I'll make a bad challenge, not primarily a desire to score points myself. I just don't like the unsettling feeling of not knowing about this word or that.

I would really love to have seen all the eights at least once before the NSC, and I guess I have an excellent shot if I keep up with this method. They won't be nearly as well ingrained as my normal flashcards, but I think it's time to run things depth-first for a while.

Dog, this is boring. You're a saint for getting this far.

... I used to keep a list of all the books I read. For posterity, here they are from 2001 to 2003:

( 2001 (partial) )

( 2002 )

( 2003 )

I didn't track much from 2004 on.

Olivia helps her partner Sam see a play at last Saturday's School Scrabble Tournament. Despite being in grades 5 and 4, respectively, they placed 5th of 19 in a field open to 8th-graders. Coach Seth's middle school teams finished 2nd and 3rd.

http://cross-tables.com/annolistself.php

Shows 'em all for now.

Hello, all! Now that the cross-tables.com database is no longer dog-slow, I'm actually energized to think about features again.

Today, I want ideas only from a certain category; tell me where a PIE CHART or a VENN DIAGRAM would be helpful on the site.

Thanks in advance! As always, I apologize that I can implement only a small fraction of the great ideas that folks will suggest.

Taking pre-orders. Leave your size and quantity desired in a comment if you would like one. I need to know how many to get.

Price will be $15 if delivered at the BAT. With shipping, a little more.

The Google Chart API is awesome.

What got added to my SuperMemo study list, and when:




The graph shows number of anagram sets, not words, learned. There are about 65000 sets of length 5-8.

Bottom tier, in blue, is fives*.
2nd tier, in lime green, is sixes. I went through them over about 10 months.
3rd tier, in red, is sevens**. I focused on them after the sixes.
4th tied, in dark blue, is eights**. Note the loss of steepness of late.

* I knew the JKQXZ fives by mid-2005; this shows only what's in SuperMemo.
** With the OWL2, I cleared out my old lists of sevens and eights, but quickly relearned them around August '06. I had the OWL lists and some supplemental "new word" lists, but I then shifted to the new system entirely.

Donate to Zyzzyva.net.

Do it now.

(Version 2.0 is coming out, and saganist deserves to be recognized fully)

As many of you have noticed, cross-tables.com is pretty slow lately. This is mostly not, as many have guessed, because of my V2 user interface changes. No, it's that the back-end database, provided by my hosts at GoDaddy.com, has become progressively suckier. Merely loading the web-based database management tool--which runs none of my own code whatsover--takes as long as 25 seconds to come up. Other times, it's about half a second. Clearly, the database itself is getting bogged down because many (many) other sites are using it.

I have to switch. Does anyone have any experience--for sites that require some moderate back-end work--with other hosting providers? This is not going to be terribly fun, but the site is getting unacceptably slow, and updates (when Keith sends me new data) now take about 45 minutes elapsed time instead of maybe 10. Frustrating!

How about we get some positive vibes on our shared LJ here?

(all in no particular order and without careful consideration of alternatives)

Five people I'm in AWE of:

1. Warren Buffett
2. Tiger Woods
3. Daniel Kahneman
4. Richard Feynman (awesome enough to be picked posthumously)
5. Morris Dees

Greatly admire:
1. Barack Obama
2. Jon Stewart
3. James Randi
4. Johnny Depp
5. Meryl Streep

Admire
1. Bruce Springsteen
2. Wayne Gretzky
3. Prince, yeah, you heard me
4. Neal Stephenson
5. Bill and Melinda Gates (for their Foundation)

Teachers I Want to Publicly Thank
1. My parents
2. Madeline Caum, 9th-grade English
3. James J. Sweeney, computer science
4. Donna Eberz, math team
5. James Maas, Psych 101

And let's not even talk about what happened to daughter #2!

And I always thought it would be a Velociraptor that got my poor daughter...

What I'm working on.

No pay yet, but it's fun to learn new coding tools and to dream. If it works, it's a good thing all around.

Of course, if you know any angel investors...

http://xkcd.com/386/

(Additional XKCD text: "What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll continue being wrong!")

GENERAL

How did you get into the game?

Scrabble taught me the alphabet. At age 3, I would line up the 9 A's, 2 B's, etc., and then I'd bitch about my tiles when I got to UVW.

Later, I played my brother a lot, especially in the summer of 1974 when he was heading off to college and I was heading off to Junior High School. I remember a 401-398 barn-burner, but then again, we kept the dictionary open and were allowed to grab a blank off the board if we had the matching letter.

In 2003, I played a childhood friend (rlandau on ISC) three games on a lazy Sunday morning on the Cape (we debated BO, QI, and LIEF). Another friend, from The Motley Fool, engaged me in a series of e-mail games on The Pixie Pit.

And then. Of course. Word Freak.

Why do you play?

Because I love the FLOW.

TOURNAMENTS

First tournament: 2005 BAT (not including two 3-game club tourneys)
Last tournament: Saratoga, 5th place
Next tournament: 2008 BAT, probably
Favorite tournament ever: 2006 NSC in Phoenix

GAMES

Favorite game ever: I suppose the tie against benphial at the 2006 Lake George tourney. benphial was one of the most supportive clubmates* at the Lexington Club when I was starting out, and it's been fun to move up the ranks with him.

Most excruciating game ever: A game in Dayton in which I challenged ATAXY and failed to challenge both KYANOSE* and KYANOSES*.

Highest Scoring Game: 618 at the 2007 Boston (not BAT) tourney, finding the only bingo with DEINFY? through an A for a double-double.


OPPONENTS

First tourney opponent: Jamie Ryan, in the club tourney

Most common opponent: spherulitic and satireblank

Most feared opponent: I'm less fearful than I used to be. gijoel666, probably.

Your Scrabble "daddy" (someone you've played many times in tourneys and never beaten): I'm 0-3 against both gijoel666 and Aaron I-don't-have-a-blog Bader.

Whose daddy are you? spherulitic, apparently.

Five opponents you like to play:
I like playing Scrabble. Seriously, if you're not on the "don't like" list, I like playing you.

Five opponents you don't like to play:
See above. I like playing Scrabble

Well, OK:
1. People whom you don't want to beat because hearing them whine is worse than losing.
2. People who think that your successful challenges were just "lucky".
3. Bitch-and-bingoers. "sigh.... eighty-six".
4. I like playing Scrabble.
5. I like playing Scrabble.

Five opponents you'd like to play but haven't yet:
1. bricap
2. meezerman
3. hebdomad
4. jasonkb
5. <lj user='everyone_else_here!'>

You are in the finals in D1 for the 2016 National Scrabble Championship. Who is sitting across from you?

My parole officer.

WORDS

Five words you hope you get to play someday:

1. MANGANIC (tip of the hat to el_jefe_rey for the typo correction)
2. WELLDOER
3. BOBBERY
4. AUTHORIZING
5. ADMIRABLENESSES

Mid-morning today, I put my hands into my winter coat's pockets and discovered... a single glove. I checked hither and yon to no avail. Given that I have on occasion accused my wife of being a Frequent Loser of Gloves, I felt ashamed that I had gone and done the very same thing myself. Oh, the irony.

So I splashed on home, through the torrential rains, to let her know that I was indeed guilty of... (cowskin sin?) (the glove that dare not speak its name?) (glove's labour lost?) ... well, whatever.

This conversation ensured:

Me: Well, it appears that I have lost my glove. I'm sorry that I ever accused you of careless glove-wrangling.

Her: Hah!! <pause> Oh.

Me: What?

Her: I borrowed your coat this morning.

Me: The black winter coat?

Her: Yes.

Me: So... you lost my glove this time?

Her: Possibly.


A quick recon of the kitchen found the missing object quickly and the angels joiced and then rejoiced encore.


--EXEUNT OMNES--