pilowsky

All of this would not be a problem if Declarer was able to continue playing cards after claiming until the result is obvious. This is how it is implemented on another platform so it ought to be possible. That way, everyone is happy. On BBO I try to claim early but if it isn't accepted after a few seconds I cancel the claim and keep playing. A key reason for being able to claim and keep playing is so that players with slow or tricky internet can get through the session. Claiming and continuing to play is the internet equivalent of demonstrating your line of play.

The evidence is very clear that omicron will bind to the ACE2 receptor wherever it is present in the respiratory tract. It's early days yet and the reason that omicron is less of a problem is unclear. The cells lining the nose and throat are similar in their expression of ACE2 to the expression in the cells in the lung - it's one continuous layer throughout the airway. I suspect the largest reason omicron is causing less severe illness and death is because so many people are vaccinated. In countries where vaccination is patchy omicron is still causing problems. So-called "natural immunity" and "healthy living" is orders of magnitude less helpful than a three doses of vaccine. Just to speculate, if the omicron variant changed in such a way that it binds much more avidly to the receptor one could imagine that when you inhale a dose of virus much more of it will be trapped by receptors in the upper airway and this means less gets to the lungs. This would change the way the disease affects the host. If you are familiar with chromatography you could imagine that viral particles that bind more strongly would get stuck at the top: the principle is the same. I'm only suggesting this by analogy to the size-exclusion principle that our airways uses to prevent particulate matter from getting into the lungs. I have no actual evidence. Another possibility is that something else in the virus particle that determines how easily it latches onto the cellular machinery to make more virus mutated so that if it gets in it is less damaging. This seems less likely but again, no evidence. Training people and funding research so that when pandemics roll around is vital but not a high priority for government. The success rate for grant-funding is very low compared to the excellent proposals. Now we have the additional problem that politicians think they know what should be funded. They create "priority areas" and funding is not decided solely on the basis of excellence. How many Hollywood films do we see where a post-doc fights off aliens and saves the world. US movie/video expenditure in 2019 was ~65+ billion. It has been since at least 2007. The NIH spends about 42 billion annually on medical research. There are other sources of medical research funding but the entertainment industry also includes sport and television. Every hospital bed seems to have a television, but I don't know if it helps as much as a ventilator.

Go to Account. Then Settings. At the bottom you can turn off lobby chat. It's worth playing with all the settings to get what you like best. I turn off sound effects as well, and Vugraph notifications.

Here's a tangible benefit. We are unlikely to see letters to foreign leaders like the one below. Unless they've already been torn up and flushed down the toilet.

The rankings increase as you acquire more masterpoints - these can be from anywhere and are converted to BBO points at whatever the conversion factor is. The reason that you see so many people with a rank of 1-4 is because the ranking scale increases linearly but the number of points need to go up a level is on a log scale. So you need only 1+ points to get a rank of 2 20+ points to get a '4' and 500+ points to get a '9'. This means that most players are clustered around the 2-5 rank unless they are A) really excellent and win a lot of daylong tourneys or B) very rich or C) devious.

It is the virus, sars-cov-2, not the disease COVID-19 that is endemic. Diseases don't become endemic - only infectious agents. The meaning of endemic is that it is endo- like endocrine, endogenous and endometriosis: it simply means "within". "-emic" as in pandemic, endemic etc is something related to a single group. [Edit many use epidemic to describe a surge in an existing non-infectious problem. It does get a bit overused though.] This does not mean that it cannot be eradicated eventually but that's another problem. In medicine it also refers to things that are caused by specific physically identifiable particles that have a capacity to reproduce within some kind of host. In this way tetanus cannot be called an epidemic or even endemic because although Clostridium tetani is found in the ground that you walk on, it isn't transmissible by simple human to human contact. Coronaviruses are here to stay. The subtype sars-cov-2 virus might mutate (for better or for worse) just like influenza, but it now has an animal population that it doesn't harm that we are in contact with all the time where it can mutate and remerge from at any time. In fact, I haven't heard of an animal that it doesn't affect. I think that this is because the binding receptor 'ACE2' is so old evolutionarily that it is present throughout the animal kingdom and throughout the body. Sars-cov-2 is now endemic. It has a highly mobile collection of hosts - bats, deer, children where it does (relatively) little harm and where it can mutate and occasionally pop-up with new more vicious variant - just like influenza (WHO- "Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the flu kills 290,000 to 650,000 people per year."). In my mind it became endemic when omicron emerged. At that point it became "tolerable" - unlike smallpox, leprosy and polio which humans would still like to eliminate. Other agents that cause a massive burden of disease worldwide seem to be of less interest presumably because they tend to cause few problems for wealthy westerners unless they are making nature documentaries. There are other biological mechanisms that infectious agents use to mutate and transmit that are not seen in coronaviruses but these differences do not seem to be an issue for coronaviruses maintaining themselves in human accessible reservoirs. BTW, coronaviruses were around causing disease in humans for a very long time. Here's one from 1999. And in 1973. COVID-19 can also be considered a virus of our time. It causes most of its unpleasant effects in people that are either older than 65 (something that was much less common in the 1950's - not that long ago). And in people that have reduced respiratory capacity because of obesity (along with a smaller bunch of other disorders - emphysema, smoking, cystic fibrosis). This combination of differentially harming people that are overweight/ older than 65/ are smokers is reflected in the populations where it is most damaging. The meaning of endemic is fairly clear it means that something is no longer just passing through the population and will burnout and not be a problem - that would be an epidemic. Our ability to combat any disease is markedly hampered by our (I mean societal) disdain for training people in high-level thinking (PhD and up). Research funding is now at a very low ebb. It's much easier to dislike Mexicans, Canadians and New Zealanders than it is to spend two decades of your life training and learning how to solve really difficult problems. COVID-19 is a disorder that weaves together all the threads in the water cooler: education, climate change, political philosophy and more. Speaking of endemic problems, the current crisis also highlights the epidemic of scam journals and conferences. I wish some of the cyber-security experts out there like Jim Browning would go after these people - they probably operate from the same call centres as the Amazon scammers. PS This is also why religion although it is transmissible and "of the population" is not endemic in the USA, or elsewhere - except metaphorically.

There is no reason why both are not possible. Sure, keep the duplicate bridge clubs where people can grimace and shout at each other for a couple of hours - or as you put it - socialise. But why not, for example, introduce a hybrid option. Why not get rid of the cards and use computers - four at a table. In this way, a briefly - or even indefinitely - incapacitated player can easily compete. With a hybrid approach people might even be able to start introducing their children/grandchildren to the game. Telling the tide to go back didn't work for King Canute - it won't work for Bridge. The pie is getting smaller. Rich old people is not going to make it bigger.

I would be (conditionally) shocked to learn that.

I'm not a huge fan of team sport in general. But playing or watching Rugby, Cricket or Tennis I do not see the same animus directed towards team mates if someone fails to make a winning play that I see constantly in Bridge. BBO has today posted an appeal to the Bridge community by L. Cohen (not the singer) to attract and 'deal' with a new crop of Bridge players (My link). His plan is to appeal to wealthy retirees. This plan does not strike me as a plan for sustainable growth. Without a change in the culture of Bridge where an addiction to the norms of the 1950's - straight out of Bill Bryson's life and times of the thunderbolt kid - where use of normal language is considered outrageous the sport is doomed. As for the nostalgic image of families playing cards around the kitchen table like we did, the constant site of parents with young children both staring at screens ought to give one pause for thought. Cohen makes the point that the current crop of players are older people that started playing in University - a common story. Mais ou sont les common rooms d'antan? They aren't coming back - and neither is the kitchen table. Cohen rightly points out that the nature of gaming (I assume he means mind games specifically) has changed irrevocably. He's right. If Bridge doesn't move with the times it will go the way of the horse and buggy and then old players will sit around w(h)istfully wondering where all the flowers have gone.

So just to add a piquant footnote to this story comes a player named pitiful getting a bollocking from Zia in this episode of New Tricks from yesterday. Made me feel a little less hopeless.

Joe's job is to make you personally happy? The proximate reason that Joe and Bernie are unable to implement (even more) measures that will cause material improvements to peoples lives is that people like you vote for people like Gaetz, Greene, Graham and others of similarly grotty moral persuasion. If you want a government that cares about people don't vote for the Ben Shapiro 'personal responsibility' parties. You are literally hoist on your own petard.

The title of the NYT article is classic click-bait and prima facie likely to be wrong. The current coronavirus has settled in nicely and is now as endemic as the influenza virus which has been around for >100 years. We need booster shots for 'flu because every year the H antigen and the N antigen change. As noted elsewhere the coronavirus spike protein is composed of two parts (akin to H and N in the influenza virus - as in the H1N1 variant). When there is a significant change to the spike protein the ability to: 1. bind to the receptor on the outside of the cell is affected or 2. The ability to enter the cell after binding is affected. The changes in binding and entry properties are likely what cause the differences in infectivity and disease severity. The current variant (omicron) seems to be better at infecting but not as good at causing disease. I don't know why but one possibility is that the ability to enter cells in the lower part of the respiratory tree is attenuated (that's a guess). In any event, the virus is now endemic, new variants will appear from time to time and like the 'flu some will be really bad. There are plenty of other problems viral, parasitic, bacterial and political to worry about in the meantime. I am so tired of stories in "the media" that start with variations of "The coronavirus is likely to (insert blah here): here's why." FFS (as eagles123 might remark) how about headlines that tell you what the story is actually about?

I hope it's holding up - it's the same sequence I had.

In solitaire nobody can hear you scream. That is my experience of how GIB bids also. Is that not how it is typically played?

As usual Trump replied with words to the effect of "Would you say 50% was a lot?" not exactly 50%. His phrasing is so anodyne it's like wrestling with a column of smoke (Keating P.). In the debate with Biden when challenged about his assertion that he had done more for ... since Lincoln he quickly replied "since". Still a debatable point but this left Biden rolling his eyes. To me this shows that far from babbling he knows exactly what he is saying, he isn't mad and should be held to account. This approach ought to be very familiar to Bridge players that have to deal with alerts like "could be strong" etc.

Oh ffs - I knew it was you all along!

Someone once alerted a 2♣ opening as "GF" and I was a little offended.

I once heard someone say that all contracts can be defeated by a club lead. One thing that Bird and Anthias note is that after a sound NT contract is reached, although it is true that some leads are better than others, the difference is not great: Sometimes only 1-2%. I also try to use the underlying principles that are suggested from the findings of Bird and Anthias but the proportion of the variance that their findings account for doesn't make them strong laws. More like reasonable excuses when things go wrong.

Good point! Read it wrong!

Would 2♣ here show both reds? If so what sort of hand would you use it on if not this one?

That's interesting since BBO has also posted here more than once that this is a known problem that "will be fixed" in the next version.

[hv=pc=n&w=sath92d6543c97432&d=n&v=n&b=5&a=1sp2hp2np3dp3hp4hp4np6dppp]133|200| Expert class bidding remains a bit of a mystery to me but the UK team reached 6♦. Gavin Wolpert was on lead and went through his thought processes before deciding on the lead. [/hv] After discarding the idea of leading the unbid suit, what was the first idea that he had? The hand comes from the New tricks episode on (The bidding starts at 8:49).

I guess this is what happens when the writing is on the wall and you decide to stop surfing the waive.

[hv=pc=n&n=sqt2hkq5dkq85ck64&d=e&v=e&b=6&a=ppp1np2cp2dp2hp]133|200| I think the biggest penalty of learning Bridge by playing with and against robots is that you don't know anything about signalling. Another deficit relates to the meaning of some sequences that are common knowledge outside GIB-land. In this real-life situation the bidding came round to me and continued as shown. In this sequence where GIB Stayman's and bids again it always has 8+ - often more. What kind of hand would be appropriate for the 2♥ bid in your systems.[/hv]