onoway

heard about this on the forums a few years ago but just ran across this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tvXocLYX0c&feature=relmfu It still strikes me as very bizarre

nothing to offer about the topic except this email someone sent me yesterday (the image of "Maxine" didn't come through :( ) BAIL'EM OUT!!! ???? Hell, back in 1990, the Government seized the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada for tax evasion and, as required by law, tried to run it. They failed and it closed. Now, we are trusting the economy of our country, our banking system, our auto industry, our home utilities, and possibly our health plans to the same nit-wits who couldn't make money running a whore house and selling whiskey?!" "What the Hell are we thinking?"

The other day I caught the last half of an interview with an engineer who carried a table and a couple of chairs down to a street corner and set himself up to give free advice. He said he was astonished that not only did people stop and sit down but pretty soon there was actually a lineup of people waiting up to 40 minutes to talk to him. Apparently he does this regularly and even has a few regulars.:) He doesn't claim/pretend to have any training in psychology or finance or anything; if someone asks he tells them no, in 'real life" he is an engineer.

Viewing Khan's program as the answer from heaven to all questions is likely a mistake as any program will speak to some kids' needs and not others. But I was bemused by one comment in the antiKhan blog post referred to by Elianna (I think) saying "Rather than instructing students with Khan’s videos, we should be inspiring them to figure things out on their own and learn how to create their own knowledge by working together." Whatever happened to not reinventing the wheel? Kids who relate to math - and many more will if they feel they have a handle on it - would be free to then go on to exploring the world beyond Khan. I bet that most classical musicians don't start out with a grand creative flourish, they start out learning HOW to play the piano or whatever. Some may learn almost instinctively others not so much but they all need to learn what each instrument can and cannot do. How frustrating if you never learned that a piano was only one instrument of many and cannot make the sounds that a bassoon can so keeping on trying to make it do so ..what a waste of time! It seems to me that Khan is teaching the mechanics of how things work in a way that many kids find easier to relate to; whether they are used to videos now rather than books or whatever the reason. I think one major advantage will be that the kids shouldn't be under pressure to keep up (or be held back). In my experience working with kids who were regularly booted or even banned from classrooms, often it was directly related to feelings of being inadequate in the requisite skills..once they had those skills, the behaviour largely disappeared. Kids, like everyone else, like to feel competent and resist situations where they feel incompetent. It's no fun to be the only one in the class who doesn't "get it". In an earlier post Phil said: "I think that the secrets to a strong education system are not rocket science. You need to create a culture of high expectation in the classroom. That means creating a structure of discipline where children are punished not only for misbehaviour, but also for under performing. As soon as it becomes ok for bright kids to hand in adequate assignments, then one has lost the battle for expectations." I STRONGLY disapprove of punishing kids for "not living up to their potential." All you will do is make the kids resentful and angry and distrustful. Punishment is fairly well recognised as being far from the optimum way to motivate people. If you must punish someone, punish the teacher for not making it worth while for the student to do so. Something else might be noted; in unfortunately too many classrooms, being smart and at the head of the class will not bring admiration and friendship from fellow students, esp if a lot of them are struggling...to punish a kid in such a situation for diminishing his/her apparent abilities is cruel. There are other much more productive ways to deal with it.

It just happened again..no other GIBS got to game in ♥ except at my table although all made 5. The auctions all start out the same, then one GIB gets rambunctious. I use the download version (the web version gives me a headache) and I'm not sure which sort of GIBS inhabit that world but it is extremely frustrating. I've only played about 6 hands with GIBS since the last time that happened so that's sort of a high percentage of weirdness. I am beginning to wonder if the GIBs on the download version are fixed to make playing on the download version frustrating in the endless quest to force everyone to switch. I will probably give up bridge online before I use the web version, sorry to say.

I don't know if this has been addressed before but can anyone explain why, with 15 tables of 3 GIBS and one human (all humans sitting south, both human and the human's GIB pard passing throughout) 14 tables end up in 2♠ making extras and one table (bidding starts the same) ending up in 4 ♠ +1? Sometimes it seems as though the GIBS are already running a tourney among themselves! This sort of thing seems to happen a fair amount where ONE GIB will go off on its own.. I have wondered sometimes if the GIBS are actually individual bots and one is a renegade! (Have I been reading too much science fiction? :ph34r:

Actually the story was linked to a number of different sites; I read a number of them and then just linked to the last one, since they all said much the same thing. I doubt very much any sort of civil disobedience since a) it had never been intended as a major business and b)the family got rid of all the rabbits/equipment as soon as they were told there were questions about the legality of it all. As far as the conditions of the rabbits; the USDA first found out about the Dollarhites when they were inspecting the rabbits at a petting zoo (the USDA were perfectly content with the rabbits' condition there) and they spotted the invoice for the rabbits which led them to these people. The Dollarhites had been supplying the rabbits on an ongoing basis for the petting zoo as baby animals seem to be the norm for petting zoos.The USDA inspector apparently told the owners that the rabbits looked healthy and well cared for but the cages were 1/4 inch too small.Apparently though, these had been bought as the standard cage size designed for large rabbits and by then they weren't raising meat rabbits anymore but dwarf ones for the petting zoo. In any case..What has been reported is the the USDA was said to have told them was that they were to be made an example of. What made me think of this in the first place was the thread on illegal immigrants and the non enforcement of laws on the books. If they ever did decide to crack down, it would make sense to tackle some small outfit rather than a big one which might have a major impact on their local economy. I wondered if that was what was going on here.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/usda-fines-missouri-family-90k-selling-few-rabbits-170245918.html and update http://dramaga.info/missouri-man-%E2%80%98not-happy%E2%80%99-with-revised-usda-offer.html

I think that perhaps the greatest value of this sort of thing is for the kids who are weaker in school. Excellent teachers usually find ways to reach the kids even if it means doing things differently in their classroom, as I see it,and often what they do differently is picked up and run with as "the answer". The thing is that excellent teachers have the adaptability to see when such and such a technique is appropriate and when a different one is, and don't count on one technique to reach all the kids. Lesser teachers often do, out of time or energy constraints or simply because they are not natural teachers and don't see the need/have the techniques to hand. Even worse is a teacher who has his/her own techniques and is thrust into a situation where different techniques are demanded. Sometimes these are simply incompatible with the teacher's attitudes or beliefs or even capacity. A teacher who is a strong believer in structure may have a very difficult time if expected to run a classroom where the kids decide their own priorities and activities, just as some kids who need more structure will have a difficult time thriving in that classroom. Some kid's bodies sink like a stone when they try to swim and others bob to the surface like buoys no matter what they do. Some kids need to understand; others just need to have the tools at hand to get by with. Not all of us are mechanics and care or even know anything about how the car functions, but we can still be good drivers and get from here to there competently. I liked the concept of this a great deal. I have nothing to say about the content or the presentation but I think the idea has a great deal of value in that it COULD be a way to give the kids access to the very best teachers for the material and the ones in the classroom could then be enablers and give the kids the intellectual and emotional support to deal with inevitable frustrations. Especially with class sizes this seems too much to expect now. The other thing I liked about it is that it could give homeschoolers a way to make sure they were getting the best material for their kids. If I had school age kids now I would be all over this, to use as a basis for the math & sciences and as a jumping off point for whatever investigations arose out of the material. My math was fine in my day but now is totally inadequate it seems (although I CAN make change:)) and it seems a good thing to have such material presented in a nonjudgemental if not fun way (is solving these problems harder than figuring out how to defeat the dragon or get the gold?.)

Probably the same as here in Canada. Nobody wants to work for minimum wage..and for good reason, it's not possible to do more than barely survive on it, esp if the person wants the sort of lifestyle to which most North Americans feel they are entitled. Many businesses can't afford to pay more than minimum wage. Menial work is also often very hard physical work and people aren't used to that idea and lots of people simply cant cope. One young man was told to bring a sack of something or other to the rig (about 50 feet)and he started out carrying it on his back, then on a shoulder, then cradled in his arms, then on a hip, then trying to walk like a duck with it in his lap and finally trying to drag it along the ground (where the bag split and spilled). The other guys watched this performance with disbelief. Although he was apparently a healthy 20 year old he simply wasn't capable of doing the work. Also, sometimes physical work involves some unpleasantness...talk to people about doing plumbing and the first things they think about? a) the money and b) cleaning out clogged toilets, at which point they happilly fork over the money. Or it might involve such things as being made very aware you are considered lower on the social scale than other people. When I was 15 I worked for a wealthy family for the summer and both the other girl and I were told we would be fired if the parents caught us talking to their 17 year old son! Many of the more expensive resorts have policies that 'staff" do not interact with guests except on a very minimal and work related level. If you don't have a sense of the ridiculous this could be quite painful. If you do then you may get yourself fired:). . Also,in North America at least, there has grown to be this idiotic idea that people who are not "professional" somethings or other are somehow lower on the food chain, less intelligent, closer to our chimpanzee cousins, so to speak.(A legacy of our school system..smart kids do the academic subjects, dumb kids do vocational.) A lot of immigrants don't necessarilly share this concept and are simply happy to have a job and what they see as a chance to live a better life than they would have had in their home country. Many kids growing up here, don't see the jobs available to them as being a chance to live a better life than that they are used to in their parent's home. They already have pretty much everything they want so why would they take work that they don't want to do? A waitress told me the other day that her ex fiancee's family were shocked to hear she wanted to stay home and raise a family instead of having a "career". She was unable to see the point of going to university when she didn't WANT to work out. Also, her then fiancee had spent several years and many dollars getting a degree which had not translated into a job; he had been supported by his parents for the couple of years since he left university and was unable to find work in his field. She didn't think that could be called success, exactly. She was very tentative and defensive when she told me this and was clearly waiting to be told that yes she should try to 'better" herself. I thought..how LUCKY she was to know what she wanted and to keep that goal in focus!

The download version you are always invisible unless at a table, when the people at the table can see you as white if you are kibbing, normal colour with a white bar (I think) if playing. The web version you are invisible unless someone asks about you whereupon the web version will tell them where you are. That sort of negates the whole purpose, to my mind but it seems to be the way it works.

That was the question..it is sort of important to know if 1430 or 3014 if the bid is to be of any use at all.

It would be REALLY nice if the description of the 4NT bid would include WHICH version of RKC the GIBS use. GIB just stopped in game instead of bidding the cold grand apparently because it misunderstood my response. Any way the alert (Blackwood) could be amended to show what FORM of blackwood? Please?

It was quite a shock to learn it is legal to use "meat glue" in the US and Canada and the story elsewhere is that now most of the countries in Europe have also decided to allow it.Supposedly in Canada at least, if it is used it has to be on the label of the meat (or fish, presumably) (I don't know what happened here; why the link doesn't show up as just a link...

http://www.247comedy.com/obama-musical

This is something relatively new to me but in the last little while I have had several GIBs simply not play when it came their turn. Today it happened twice with west GIB in less than an hour. The first time I redealt but the second time I wanted to see if the bid would make so swapped GIB out and sat in west seat and put GIB in south..everything worked fine. Is anyone else having this happen? It's very annoying.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/03/watch_lewis_black_endorse_dona.html

Something else you might try is forgetting about the vinegar entirely and adding a little nice dry white wine just before you are dealing with the cheese. And if you are going to all this trouble for the soup..perhaps you should make the bread to go with it?:)

Ben: I have no problem being a beta tester. I would be happy to help, including sharing with anyone working on these programs what I have learned over the past couple of years running the same sort of event. BBO has given me a geat deal over the past few years and I would be delighted to be able to return the favor however I can. It would just be nice to know ahead of time that this is the case instead of having the thing presented as a readytogo situation as any other tourney or team match. More than nice, I think it important. If others had the same experience today as I did, and believe it will be typical of these matches, then the ACBL will have lost potential players. It's a whole lot easier to keep them than to get them back.

You really don't have to go out and buy bones for stock. Buy a rib roast ..it really doesn't matter if they are roasted on the roast or by themselves.If you don't make gravy the bits from the bottom of the pan should be scraped and floated off and used for your soup stock. You can add your water and then after a couple of hours strain it if you want, to get the bits out, but keep the bones in with your onions etc until the final stages, they are easy to lift out. You can use short ribs. The meat will make a wonderful stew and the bones will oblige for the soup stock. Short ribs tend to be pretty greasy but that can be solved by sticking everything into the fridge overnight after it's cooked..the fat will congeal and can easilly be lifted or scraped off. Or choose your T-bones carefully and make them into strip loins and filet mignon and then use those bones. Or any other bones as far as that goes. I wouldn't ever go out and buy bones just for soup. The only thing that would take a lot of time is caramelizing the onions. Although I've made a lot of really rather good onion soup I've certainly never taken 5 hours to cook the onions before they saw the stock...will have to try it and see if that, rather than sauteing, really makes a difference that can be detected. The same thing goes for how you cut the onions.. At one time I worked briefly in a butcher shop and was astonished to learn it was not at all unknown for people to shop there regularly to buy "veal cutlets" and happilly carry them off saying how good they were, and frequently but not always what they were buying was pork. So I tend to be a bit cynical about most people being able to detect these nuances of flavor that take mega hours/effort to attain, especially if the people eating the food are or have been smokers.

I tried to play in the team matches today that I understand were being offered by ACBL. 1) There was no time listed for registration cutoff & at first was told the registrations were closed(about 45 minutes before the advertised start time. ok 2) when I asked when the cutoff was, I was told an hour before the teams were to start but if only my p and I (rather than a team) then they had room for us. OK My p got disconnected so I found another and informed them, before the start time. Time went by. At 10 past the hour I asked if we had got in or were too late and was informed that indeed we would be playing. At 20 past the hour I asked if they needed some help as as far as I could see they had only three matches going and two of them were missing players, one consistently and the other flicking in and out. No reply. At 35 minutes past the hour I asked again what was going on and was told that oh they didn't have enough players so we would not be playing after all. I have NO idea how long we would have waited around if I had not asked. I was told that someone had been informed and she had been expected to pass it on although we were likely as unfamiliar to her as she was to us. In fact I had no idea who we were supposed to be playing WITH since the promo specified no partner or team needed, so I hadn't paid a lot of attention when told who our teammates would be. I was really looking forward to this and think it's a great idea but was appalled at the whole thing today. If registrations were closed an HOUR ahead of the play time you would think that they could have had things organized by the start time and known what was what. I am disappointed and quite annoyed at the total useless waste of time I spent waiting around to play. I have been running similar team matches (called Spur team matches) in IAC for about a year off and on and have run into most of the likely problems to be expected. NEVER have I left people hanging about after the matches start time not knowing if they were playing or not. At times we have had up to 8 matches running in the Spur teams and never has the last match to be set been more than 5 minutes over the start time. ACBL has a lot of people and should be able to do much better. Today left me wondering if I would bother trying to play again another time.

everyone here knows that BBO Rules :P

"Is this a real world example where you were called to the table?" Yes a team match hand three days ago "If so, why? There's no way for us to evaluate whether N/S was damaged." North/south maintained that they should have been told that the bid didn't specify that it might be light (not 15-17 hcps) and because it didn't, they didn't bid on as they would have had they known that. These were intermediate players (except for the 1nt bidder who was advanced)and sandwich nt is definitely not a commonly used convention in this particular group. The p didnt have any idea what the bid meant (not even the 5-5 dist, which the opps did know) and just passed throughout.

I am not sure I quite understand what I have read about alerts. If a partnerhip has no agreements beyond the general system and carding (2/1 standard) and one of them makes a conventional bid which his pard does not know or understand, how much explanation is required to avoid a penalty situation? Example:(West/East partners have not played together before) Imps *North dealer N/S red vs white. ~~~~~~1♥~~ pass ~~ 1♠ 1nt ~~ 2♥~~ pass~~ 2♠ pass~~ pass~~ pass north asked east what the 1nt was, east replied, "I have no idea." Someone asked west what the bid was and the alert (showing in the movie, not sure when it was put there, was 5-5 in minors which he did indeed have). After the hand was played, east said to his p "2nt shows minors p" to which west replied "that's called sandwich nt and shows the minors." East said "oh,ok I don't play that." North said that they had assumed it showed normal nt values, not unnt values which could possibly be weak, and so had prevented them from bidding on. It seems to me that since east had no idea what his pard was doing, to insist that the opps get a detailed alert explanation would be giving them an undue advantage over the players actual partner. They actually already DID know more than the partner in that they knew west was holding 5-5 in minors, which his partner did not. I regarded it (since the partner had absolutely no idea what the bid was) as basically the same as a psyche bid. Indeed, if in the conversation after the hand, west had identified it as a psyche, the opps would have had no recourse, as I understand it. So, by using the words "sandwich nt" after the hand was over, instead of "psyche" he should be penalized, although his partner was equally in the dark about either? This just seems wrong. My understanding is the opps are entitled to AS MUCH info as the partner has, not more. And I really don't think it's reasonable to punish someone for identifying (after the hand was done) a convention previously unknown to the partner, when he could perfectly easilly have said "I tried to psyche" without penalty. I would really like to hear how other people regard this and would have handled it. I was told today that I should have penalized the offending player/pair. It would be very helpful to have somebody explain this in a way that doesn't make that seem unfair and arbitrary. I should perhaps mention that when I discussed this with someone who is knowlegeable, his contention was that requirements are slightly different for online play since players cannot alert their partner's bids, but must alert their own. Although that's true, I still don't see how that justifies a penalty when the partner has no idea whatsoever of the meaning of the bid. If the partnership had any sort of agreement, then it's clearly a totally different situation.