david_c

Hawking [no 's' please] does not say "if there was a beginning, a creator exists". He is actually arguing for the converse statement, that is, "if there was no beginning, then there was not a creator". Note that even if you accept that this second statement is true (and Hawking is careful to avoid making such a concrete statement in this passage), it does not imply the first. An atheist would say that there are two possibilities - either there was a beginning, or there wasn't - but that neither requires a god in order to work. Hawking also seems to have a rather unusual idea of what God is - "God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws". This premise seems completely incompatible with any religion that I know of.

Perhaps Ben's point is that North-South is the pair whose actions look suspicious on this hand. It would be very reasonable to investigate them further, whereas the allegations against West are clearly unfounded. And I would lead a trump too. Second choice a small spade. Third choice the ♠Q (I could never bring myself to actually do this).

The natural geometry of the torus is Euclidean: indeed it is a quotient of Euclidean space. Admittedly, you don't "see" this if you try to embed the torus into (n+1)-dimensional Euclidean space, but why would you want to do that? :P

It might or might not be possible. Either assumption is consistent. To get clarrification, you need to accept either the continuum hypothesis, or its negation, as an axiom. I wish that was the correct answer, but it's not, you must have misread it. This is a question we were given in my first year at university, and doesn't require anything deeper than the definiton of countable / uncountable.

"Hilbert's Hotel" is concerned with countable sets and so doesn't seem to be relevant. Jimmy's statement "you can't get here from there" sounds more like Zeno's paradox to me, which is well-known to be fallacious. Infinity is a difficult subject. Let S be a collection of subsets of the integers, such that for any A and B in S, either A is contained in B or B is contained in A. Is it possible for S to be uncountable?

:) OK, if you fancy it, you can plan the play on a small spade lead. West turns up with all three trumps. But no, I thought the bidding was more interesting. Does South have better option than 5♦? Is North really good enough to raise? And should South consider bidding a grand slam? I was South, and I was fully expecting to claim thirteen tricks as soon as dummy went down. I'm glad I didn't bid one more though!

[hv=d=e&v=n&n=sa53h842dkj2cq976&s=shkjtdaqt8743cakj]133|200|Scoring: IMP[/hv] When we played this hand last night, East opened 3♠, South bid 5♦ and North raised to 6♦, which was passed out. What do you think of N/S's three calls here?

Agree with Peter et al. A blog would be a much better way of presenting Bob's lesson notes. Forums, on the other hand, are a place for discussion.

Ah, the fallacy of the compound question.

That's not quite the same thing. Note that language is a part of human nature despite the fact that babies are not born talking. I hope this is a helpful analogy. There must be more to it than that. I think you are missing this thing called "sentience". Of all the aspects of human nature which go in to making religion possible, this is the most interesting and important: humans (some of them, at least) have this ability to be absolutely convinced that they know the truth, just by relying on some inner feeling. I have a theory that my own atheism is explainable in the same way - I am absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as a god; the fact that millions of people disagree doesn't worry me in the slightest, because I know I'm right, and I don't care that I will never be able to prove it to anyone. I suspect that these feelings are caused by the same aspect of my nature which allows devout believers to proclaim with abolute certainty that god does exist. Unlike Gerben, I would never say, "I am not religious in any way." I am religiously atheistic. I used to think that this made my atheism somewhat less arrogant than other people's, as it means that my atheism is just as "irrational" as a belief in god. (I hate it when people like Richard Dawkins talk about other people's beliefs dismissively; this gives atheism a bad name.) But I then realised that in fact I was being supremely arrogant, as I'm saying that not only do I think I'm right, but that I can also explain why it is that everyone else goes wrong.

Well, I'm ashamed to say I had to look that one up in the dictionary, but yes, that seems to be the right word for it. [i've now edited my previous post: the original version should not have existed.]

How do you mean that? I am not religious in any way. Does that mean I am not human? There is clearly something in human nature which causes some people to believe such things.

I suspect that Sceptics point is that non-english speakers can't necessarily understand a tournament description written in English... Ohhhh! :D

Well, you would hope that it was in the tourney description ...

On the contrary: religion is a part of human nature. And so it does not make sense IMO to say that religion is an invention. You could perhaps argue that any particular example of a religion is an invention.

IMO the weak NT is a pre-empt, and weak NT systems make life harder both for you and for your opponents. So it was no surprise that in Mark's previous article, "why I hate the weak NT", the example hand given was 15 HCP balanced, as this is a hand which is difficult to handle in a weak NT system. In contrast, if you want to explain "why I love the weak NT" you need to give examples of hands which are difficult for your opponents to bid. A classic example would be about 11 points with a 5-card major suit, where it's easy to miss a part-score. (I would say the part-score hands are the most frequent gains for the weak NT. It's also perfectly possible for opponents to miss games, which is more spectacular but doesn't come up anything like as often.)

I hope you're right, but it seems almost impossible to distinguish this from Luis' example (1NT overcall by a passed hand, playing with an unknown pick-up), at least from a TD's point of view. IMO the Laws (even in their "online" version) do not deal satisfactorily with self-alerting.

I sing in the university choral society. Our concert is next weekend, we're doing Haydn Nelson Mass and Delius Sea Drift (quick plug for anybody in the Manchester area :rolleyes: ). I used to do a lot of composing, mostly piano pieces and song settings (so that I don't have to persuade anyone else to perform them). Improvising at the piano is a great cure for stress. Sadly this doesn't happen much nowadays as there aren't any convenient practice rooms around here, but one of my main goals for the future is to own a piano as soon as possible.

Ravel, Howells, Szymanowski

2♠. Dead minimum, but there's no rebid from partner which can cause any problems so a "waiting" 2♦ seems unnecessary. Better to tell partner about the 5-card suit and decent values.

Oi! There's no need for this cheap point-scoring, and as an Englishman I would appreciate it if you left us out of it.

Apologies if any of my posts seem a bit negative, I really do think that FD is great, but at the same time there are a few things which would make it so much better. It's good to be able to stop displaying the "No agreement" disposition. It means that when there's no disposition which fits, I can select "No agreement" and it will be much clearer to the reader. But this really needs to be controlled by the writer of the file, not the reader. Otherwise, if the reader selects "display always" then they will be told "No agreement" even when that isn't true. This problem could be easily solved by creating a new disposition called something like "Do not display" (or, if you like, an empty string). Possibly this could replace "No agreement" as the default. Any chance, Fred? For suit lengths, there is a further complication in that the default ("Any #") is often quite useful information. I'd really love to be able to define some bids as "Any #" and others as "Do not display suit length". But I realise that this would be a relatively large change to the program.

Oh. I was sort of hoping for the other answer :) Isn't this just going to cause more problems? Like, you make a bid which you think FD has described as "Forcing to game", but you're not sure whether the opponents can see that?

I'm a bit confused - are these options set by the person who creates the file, or does each person that the file is displayed to get to choose which things they want to see?

2♦ gets my vote. I like raising on three cards; the fact that partner promises four makes it easy.