pilowsky

If you are 'blue' then you will both know when you are both online. Recently I have noticed a certain 'stickiness' with the database. If I 'follow' someone to see if they are following me, then return their status to neutral if they are not, then it can often be quite difficult to get the server to 'unglue'. Sometimes I have had to ignore first then return to neutral. Not sure if others have had this problem.

Couldn't agree more. If there's going to be a solution, it's a good idea to know exactly what problem you are trying to solve first. The people that don't like self-describing of 'talent' don't like it for a number of reasons. I play in the Beginners Intermediate Lounge and describe myself as an Intermediate. I'm pretty sure that many here would think that was over-rating myself. You absolutely cannot play in the BIL if you rate yourself as anything other than Beginner or Intermediate. This means that many people overwhelmed with modesty constantly self-describe themselves as intermediate or Beginner even if they have a ranking of J or 24 or similar. These unfortunates are so desperate for masterpoints they'll do anything. If you don't believe me ask the TD's. In Chess, the Elo system is internationally and universally recognised. It has its problems too because, for example, Australian players were disadvantaged by playing in a smaller talent pool. I assume this is no longer the case. Bridge needs to wake up to itself if it wants to be recognised as a mind sport alongside Chess and Go which have been around for a very long time. At the moment Bridge is still puddling about in the shallows. I know it's been going for a few decades, but that's nothing compared to the others. The idea is to attract participants not repel them.

I have a friend who plays on Funbridge - he tells me that they do use a ranking/ladder system. Of course, it is a somewhat different game.

As Paul Keating remarked of John Hewson, "it's like arguing with a column of smoke" - except you seem to meander even more than Hewson. The Holocaust occurred a bit later than that. Go back to ping-pong. If you are unable to understand value ethics by now its too late.

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear, the alert "pass forcing" appears when I, as responder, hover my cursor over the pass button. I'm just wondering how GIB would respond to a 'forcing pass' if opps don't oblige with a bid.

What you are advocating, reductio ad absurdum, is that all sides abandon normative ethics and the rule of law. This is not in keeping with civilised society. Gandhi would not approve and neither do I. My family were not slaughtered by the Nazis a few short years ago so that vast swathes of the American public can go around blithely and ahistorically denying the Holocaust. It is not right to meet stupidity, lawlessness and cupidity with equal amounts of greed corruption and criminality. What you are suggesting by saying that - and I quote "If Dems refuse to gerrymander and Reps do, at some point the map will become so red that the House will become as cemented in Republican hands" is tantamount to suggesting that if one group are crooks then the best solution is for the other group to be bigger crooks. That is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard. Please don't tell me that the arm of government you work for is the foreign service.

History - if you know any proves otherwise. South Africa, Civil rights movements, Arab spring, Berlin wall, asymmetrical warfare etc etc. It seems that you have an almost complete lack of understanding about political history. Almost every revolution is won from a position with 'one hand tied behind one's back'.

Re '2' pilowsky was just being a bit of a dill. He liked his diamonds and thought that if he bid 2♣ he could weasel out of it in 2♦. Tragically, his old friend the North robot had other ideas.

Apparently this forcing. Amazingly, 2 people passed and GIB made 2♣+1. One person bid 2♦ then passed after 3♣. fwiw, here's what happened to me. edit: sorry guys where's Mikeh - I just made another incredibly silly slam . ma

Words are funny things. In German, the word gestalt means shape or form. The adoption of this word by English-speaking philosophers and psychoanalysts conjures up ideas of quiet rooms with couches. In Bridge, 'shape' is something I learned to appreciate very quickly. Gestalt philosophers and psychologists believe that things are more than the sum of their parts. Structuralists are cut from a different cloth; they think that if you learn enough rules (elements), then you can cope with any contingency. Yesterday I played a hand in 2S and was very happy to make 2S+1 for +1 IMP. I felt that this was a good result until I looked more closely at the hand and discovered to my dismay that 4S+1 was available. Nobody had bid it, and nobody made more than 9 tricks. I then sweated over it for three hours on the teaching table trying to work out if it was possible to bid 4S sensibly, and if it was possible to make 4S+1 reasonably. Here's the hand; see what you think. East leads the ♥4 [hv=pc=n&s=saq2hqt76dt9caq93&w=sk65haj53dq82c864&n=sj9874hdkj76cjt52&e=st3hk9842da543ck7&d=w&v=n&b=12&a=ppp1cp1sp1np2sppp]399|300[/hv] Here's the dinner I made out of it for the poodles. What caught me out was that if I bid it differently on the teaching table, the lead changed, and there was a gestalt shift! It was immediately obvious to me how to play and make 11 tricks. Perhaps that's what Bridge is; being able to see the shapes in the noise.

I've had many titles in my lifetime. Fellow - * > 5 Professor * > 5 Doctor ***** for brains ++ *****wit ++ arrogant ++ Paul, you've been a good boy *1 pilowsky you have potential - many times. What I've noticed is that it doesn't matter how hard you try, the person sitting next to you will always be a little better. Just enjoy doing it, getting better, and contributing to the common good. Otherwise, what's the point?

Usually, but I thought I'd simplify it. When I asked the fishmonger around the corner from the Gerber-detesting Bridge club this question that was the answer he gave me. You gotta laugh.

In any event self-calibration of cognitive ability is a nearly impossible task. Zia is a novice when he's asleep, a world expert in his thirties, an intermediate after a few drinks and so on. Ask Shakespeare. In fact, somebodies expertise is only important in relation to YOUR ability. They aren't playing solitaire.

"iirc" - zel - you do have a sense of humour - good job.

Fail - ask Zelandakh He's good at cognitive tests.

It's only relevant when it comes to seeding in competition. Who cares what people self-rate themselves as out of an abundance of ignorance of understanding, or out of a desire to be included in competitions where they think that they can graft cheap masterpoints. If you really want to put a stop to all this nonsense then recognise that Bridge is Bridge. Every time one is faced with the problem that has to be solved and compared with the ability of a bunch of others you get ranked and points get awarded on a log scale. The amplitude of the points differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but the scaling is identical. I've said it before, I'll say it again: either you introduce a ranking system - eg Elo like normal sports have, or you allow central aggregation of masterpoints somewhere. Then this whole problem flies out the window. Masterpoints are longitudinal, but so is a ranking. You can't be the number 1 tennis player when you're 60, no matter how hard you try. Remember, masterpoints are not there to create a ranking, they exist so that the Bridge organisations have something to sell in order to maintain the infrastructure. The same thing happens at colleges, students get passed through even if they aren't great because the college makes money by selling them grades. They know that eventually, the dead hand of the economy will decide whether or not to pay for their labour. So long as we keep pumping money into the slot masterpoints will keep popping out the other end. The rate simply depends on the quality of the candidature we happen to find ourselves in and how good we happen to be playing that day. Call yourself an intermediate, a high spot card, a lowly serf, a buttoned-up dandy, Call yourself ready for dinner. Your opponents will examine your ranking, the date you started playing, the conventions on your card and the quality of your play. It doesn't take long to sort out what's happening. It doesn't affect how I play against you.

How much sleep is good for your cognition? I once made a recording from a single neuron in the brainstem and discovered that its dendrites sampled the fluid on the surface of the brain. I thought that was pretty cool and published it in 1993 in a Journal called Sleep. When I looked at it under the microscope it seemed as though the tendrils of the neuron were monitoring how tired the animal was. I'm pretty sure that I play better Bridge shortly after I wake up. I've never formally tested this, but it makes sense. Some people say that if you feel tired you should take a nap or drink tea or coffee or go for a walk. I think this is bad advice. Tonight I checked the literature - not very thoroughly - and this is what I found. Unsurprisingly, in healthy adults, if you disturb their sleep over a period of days, they get a bit snarky [1]. Finan PH et al., (2015) The Effects of Sleep Continuity Disruption on Positive Mood and Sleep Architecture in Healthy Adults. Sleep: 38:1735: doi: 10.5665/sleep.5154More surprisingly, I discovered an article titled "Changes in Cognitive Performance are Associated with Changes in Sleep in Older Adults with Insomnia". In Behav Sleep Med. 2016; 14(3): 295–310. doi:10.1080/15402002.2014.1002034. Wilckens KA et al.Before you get too excited about the Wilckens paper read that word "associated". I always warned my students never to include non-directional descriptor words like 'change', 'modulate' or 'associate' in their titles. These are completely anodyne and suggest that when you finally struggle to the end of the manuscript your time will have been wasted. The abstract starts with the exciting suggestion that "The present study examined sleep features associated with cognition in older adults and examined whether sleep changes following insomnia treatment were associated with cognitive improvements". Well, that's us isn't it!!! I'm excited. The Authors discovered that while it is true that better sleep is positively related to better cognition on a variety of tests - Bridge playing was not one of them - they were not able to demonstrate a positive effect of insomnia treatment. I have a few suggestions. First, just before bed read the Forum, secondly try to count shapes, thirdly, count the number of times Trump says 'I' or 'probably' or 'possibly'. Here's a cognitive test. Two birds are sitting on a perch, one says to the other "something smell a bit fishy to you? What did the other bird say? [1] Snarky - annoyed - nothing to do with mathematics - A snark is a connected bridgeless cubic graph (i.e., a biconnected cubic graph) with edge chromatic number of four.

You're right, they should never have let them out of captivity.

The points may be, but sometimes ranking increments seem to take longer.

Recently, an American friend directed me to the best US psephological site I have seen https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/ (538.com) Nate Silver's site has a 'Snake' which is the equivalent of Australia's electoral pendulum showing which states are needed for a Presidential candidate to win enough electoral college delegates to win the 270 required to become President. Setting aside all the Gerrymandering and other criminal behaviour, inspection of this snake immediately shows that the 'United States is STILL fighting the Civil war every two to four years. (Or the war of Northern aggression as they called it in N. Carolina when I visited in 1987). The 'red' states are almost all antebellum and the 'blue' ones Northern. Even the bottom half of California was confederate. You probably knew this but it was a bit of a surprise to me. Interestingly, when the armed forces have their war games the always divide into red and blue teams - even on Star wars! As I may have mentioned earlier, The main source of military labour in the USA is from the South. From here, they are deployed overseas where they gain experience fighting with people in Asia and Africa. Then they come back to the USA and leave the armed forces. Where do they go? Into the police force.

Well, I don't care what Mr Namechangedtoprotecttheinnocent says. I liked playing with the other guy. That's why I bought them 3 pots of Baby food. I just used Gerber with the robots and it was delicious . https://tinyurl.com/yxb7p2ed

Messages are also not delivered if the player is playing in a tournament or you are their partner in a tournament for example.

Madam, That's very interesting. This one occurred in an ACBL tourney at 21:24 0n 2020-10-12. tampateach was one of the four that made 6NT so she must be reasonably advanced. In 1976 I was in the common room learning what an Ace was worth after getting back from seeing a guy with MDP at my first GP placement and then trying to work out what was wrong with my Fortran subroutine while studying anatomy. I would love to see your Daddy's collection though. I am trying to learn this stuff from mistakes on BBO and by recreating hands I see in other places using the Hand editor. My Daddy told me that the only important thing in life is integrity, so I never cheat; although I might be a little snarky sometimes. I think my mother was a bit slack with the truth occasionally, but she had four kids under four in the north of England so that was OK. THANKS

yep, it takes a little while - even a few days.

There are Laws?