DrTodd13

Something is clearly wrong with this data if Turkey came in 11th. We all know that at least 90% of Turkish players are experts.

Somebody else said it very well. Here you have a director who is already proven to be intentionally ignoring the laws of bridge by forbidding psyches and then we expect this director to be able to exercise any kind of judgement about what is and what isn't a psyche? Such directors should be called dictators rather than directors. They make up the rules as they go along. You have no idea whether what you are about to do will be punished or not. If the dictators were logical, they would have to ban misbids as well because if you psyched you could always claim that you misclicked or didn't know what the bid meant or you were confused about the meaning. If they punished misbids, then everyone who is sick of "no psyche" tourneys should enter and call director every time your inept opponents violate the system that they claim they are playing. Dictators would be hopelessly swamped with calls.

I agree to that point as well. 1♠ was not a psyche.

You should be aware that around half of the free tourneys I see the directors explicitly ban psyches. Is this still playing bridge? I don't believe so but they get to make the rules. It is their tourney. You should read the tourneys rules carefully and if they don't say psyches are disallowed and something like this happens then I suggest you contact a "yellow" and have them talk to the person so that they can clarify their tourneys rules in the future.

Remember the denim jacket and button fad that went around in the late 80s? I always thought it looked kinda silly but I did see one button that I thought was funny. It said "I have trouble remembering names. Can I just call you asshole?"

Todd, we can all point out idiotic statements that folks on the other "side" make. It really doesn't do much good to point out that there are idiots out. For example, I could go and comment that you are (apparently) too stupid to understand the difference between an isolated data point and a long term trend. I don't bother doing so, because it doesn't really advance my point. (For what its worth, the academics are, for the most part, in pretty widespread agreement about global warming. There are a few genuine skeptics. There are a LOT of folks that tobacco and big oil pay to muddy the waters.) I've tried to be civil with you. You obviously can't take it when somebody points out failed predictions of your beloved religion. I have a Ph.D. on my wall that says I know how to do research and it seems to me that it is the rabid GW fanatics that eschew any failed prediction as an aberation and trumpet every hot day as GW is going to kill us. I try to point out silliness on both sides. Sure, no one here is accomplishing anything but the rest of us are at least managing to have a civil discussion and then you stick your head in with your I'm-smarter-than-everyone-else attitude and anyone who isn't convinced of GW is an idiot. You make fun of conspiracy nuts and then claim your own conspiracy that anti-GW people are stooges of big oil. Either discuss things civilly or shut the hell up.

Where are the killer hurricanes this year? It has been kind of funny this year. Half the stories have been "GW does not cause larger numbers or more powerful hurricanes" and the other half have been "GW is going to kill us with large numbers of more powerful hurricanes." Those academic conferences have got to be rip-roaring fun. It's also pissed me off...a recent story "earth hottest it has been in 1 million years." This is a total and ridiculous lie. You only have to go back to 1300 or so to find a climate hotter than ours today.

Fred basically said he didn't want to have the same person have to answer the same question twice should both opps ask about a bid. However, there's no reason one couldn't remember the first explanation and provide it to the second opp upon request. All it requires is programming. I suspect Fred has a model where he doesn't cache the result and is resistant to doing so perhaps fearing lots of work for little gain. I would prefer a system where the system masks potential ethics issues (and makes them non-issues) rather than relying on an educational campaign for people to learn the ethics of when and how to ask for an explanation and how to deal with UI issues.

I wouldn't call Somalia anarchist any more. I'll have to check out that other place you mentioned. When I say anarchy, I don't mean chaos nor do I imply the lack of what might be called a police force. I simply mean that police forces would be private and I wouldn't be coerced into using one. Anyway, we just have different axioms. You seek to maximize overall societal good, whatever that is, and I seek to minimize the violation of people's rights. I'm well aware of situations like the prisoners dilemma where independent actors produce a sub-optimal result but to me, that is a small price for freedom.

I never said they could be provided easily. My position is that all taxes are inherently immoral. My view is that if enough people aren't willing to voluntarily pay for a defense agency that they don't value their freedom sufficiently. If we had fiscal responsibility in terms of defense, we wouldn't be off all over the world invading people We'd be focusing on defensive technologies and leaving everyone else the hell alone. You have certain inalienable rights but one of those is not to other people's money. If there is a road that you never use but a delivery service uses then the delivery service uses that road and they pass that portion of the road's toll onto you as part of the delivery charge. In this way, those who gets lots of packages are not subsidized by those who don't get any. Same thing for the ambulance company. I pay for their service and they pay for the roads they use. All your arguments are "we must force people to do something and contribute their money otherwise bad things X, Y and Z will happen." You talk about rights but essentially you want a society with no rights at all. You want a society where people can take a vote and do absolutely anything based on their definition of good. It isn't an issue of goverment waste although they are horrendously wasteful. My fundamental axiom is this area is that applying force against someone to get them to conform or contribute money is wrong. Your axiom is that whatever the majority of people agrees to is right and in that kind of society nothing is sacred.

About that fire protection thing... What if your neighbor doesn't care if the fire spreads beyond his whole house? What if your neighbor doesn't believe that fires are likely and doesn't invest in any kind of fire protection what-so-ever? Would you move into next to someone who didn't have fire insurance/protection and your only choice was to not live there or pay for insurance for his house too? I think this would stop people from moving in and this would reduce this guy's property values so he would be better off paying for the insurance rather than have his house value go down. Second point would be that does this guy have a mortgage? No one is going to give him a loan with fire insurance. CC&Rs are still ethical and communities would make it a prerequisite of buying that you have fire insurance/protection.

You choose to pay for fire protection your neighbour (whose house is very close to yours) doesn't. His house catches fire. What do you expect your fire protection service to do? There is a child whose parents, for whatever reason, can not afford to pay for its education or healthcare. Should this child be allowed to go uneducated and untreated? If I or someone else chooses to out of the goodness of our own heart contribute to some child's education or health care then so be it. If no one is willing to donate money for this cause then yes, the child should go uneducated and untreated. If someone is living in lavishness and chooses out of selfishness not to help this child then I would say that is wrong. However, it would also be wrong to force this person to be generous. About the fire thing, my fire protection service could stop the fire from spreading to my house. If my house was so close to theirs that that might not be possible then I could either pay more to have them protect my neighbors house as well or my neighbor and I could agree to use the same service. None of these issues are unworkable. I'll agree it's not as convenient as what you have now but at least you would have a choice and it would all be voluntary.

Fooled is not the right word I think. It isn't like people don't know what the government does. It is that they have been endoctrinated to believe that that is good. Like Atul says, it is doublethink. People simultaneously believe "thou shalt not steal" and "taxes are necessary." To me, these are mutually exclusive beliefs because I see no moral difference between whether one person takes my money versus 300 million. On a slightly different note, I ran into this show on cable-access last night by this guy Alex Ansary. He was interviewing Aaron Russo who is some movie/TV producer and who ran for president last time...I think he barely lost the Libertarian nomination to Michael Badnarik. Russo said that he was friends with one of the Rockefellers and that one time this friend asked him what he thought the motivations behind the women's liberation movement were. Russo spouted the concensus opinion that it was about equal pay for equal work...yada, yada. The Rockefeller laughed at him and said that those high-up in government had sponsored the women's lib movement because it did two things. First, it moved more people into the work force which then increased tax revenue and gave government more money to spend and gave politicians more power. Second, it relinquished much of child care to institutionalized settings where endoctrination could more readily happen. An interesting theory. I don't know if it really was sponsored with this in mind but that is certainly a consequence of that movement.

Q: What do you call it when a lot of fascist crap comes of out of W's mouth? A: Bushit.

At MPs, there is no need to throw out extremes. A top board of 600 versus 2200 doesn't affect the rest of the field. At IMPs, with a small number of plays per board, the 2200 score can really skew things. In the long run it doesn't matter but there is always the day where the cards don't run your way and the opps bid to unbeatable game after unbeatable game and you wind up 50IMPs down for the day for the sole reason that a bunch of intermediates can't manage to bid game with 28 points or they screw up the play. You know if opps bid game and make it that 95% of the time you expect to lose 3 IMPs. You should punish the people who fail to bid game and not reward those who do the normal thing. Therefore, my opinion is that your IMP score should be based on the median result and not the mean result. If N tables have played the board, compute everybody's differential by comparing them against (N/2)th best score.

In the tinker-toy system I wrote, if one person asked a question I would get the answer from the bidder and then send the answer only to the person that asked. I would also cache the answer so that if the other opp asked that he would be returned the same answer. I hadn't done it yet but eventually you would want a small delay built in so that you couldn't tell whether pd had previously asked the question or not.

Just a few thoughts on this continuing thread. First, I have the Microsoft flight simulator program at home. Just working with this program, I think it would be possible to learn enough to be able to navigate a 757 to NYC. You can either get the charts and do navigation via VOR or you can plot a course via GPS and have the auto-pilot follow it. It might take me a few minutes in an unfamiliar cockpit to find the switches but I know what they look like. Don't put me on a watchlist or anything but I've tried flying planes into buildings in this program and it is pretty easy, especially for tall buildings. Landing is the difficult part. Hitting the Pentagon would have been harder but not impossible. The vast majority of people will accept any answer the government gives regardless of how ridiculous it is and would only change their mind in the face of overwhelming evidence. A small minority rejects everything the government says regardless of evidence. There is basically no changing these people's minds. Some people realize that governments lie about some things and tell the truth sometimes. Figuring out when they are lying and when they are telling the truth is nearly impossible because of the other two groups arguing across them. Unfortunately, governments know that people are like this and so it makes it more likely that they'll try to pull something. Don't leave any smoking guns, cover your tracks, have a reasonable sounding cover story and you can get away with almost anything. The physics and the chemistry involved in this event is certainly not simple. You've got hundreds of types of materials with strengths that vary depending on temp. Materials that burn and some that don't. The temperature depends on the availability of oxygen and now you're talking fluid dynamics. I don't think it is fair to say someone is ignorant of physics and chemistry if they disagree with the official position. There are probably very few people in the world with all the knowledge necessary to understand what could or did happen. Everyone else has to rely on what others tell them. Those with some physics training may say that causing floors to pancake must take energy and that energy must come from the momentum of the collapsing floors. This should and must slow the collapse down. The only question is how much does it slow it down. This relates to the breaking strength of various joints, welds, etc. and again becomes a complex problem. I don't think it is unreasonable to ask this question and in fact shows some knowledge of physics to be able to even ask it.

That's the way I implemented it in my system.

Everything gained IMPs except for 1N, 2♠ and 3♥ but the frequency of those are pretty low so the std deviation is pretty large. The numbers are raw and not normalized to average IMPs won but I think you have the information there to normalize the results. One flawed pair playing a system against sometimes crazy opps hardly is an accurate measure of worth so take it for what it is worth.

The following numbers are for a period in time in which we played our FP system both vul and non-vul. I don't differentiate in these numbers. These represent 1644 times that we opened the bidding. I'm lazy so I'll figure you can interpret the numbers. If they are too cryptic let me know and I'll explain further. I have a bunch more numbers than this if there are any specific queries. One thing to notice is that our 1N opening is a surprising loser. Opening pass is doing better than 1♣. 1♠ isn't that frequent but seems to be a big winner. Overall, we seem to have gained the most from the opening pass. Total - opening | frequency | average IMPs | freq * avg P | 0.20 | 0.531548 | 0.108637 1C | 0.15 | 0.446250 | 0.065146 1D | 0.11 | 0.782065 | 0.087530 1H | 0.28 | 0.268478 | 0.075122 1S | 0.03 | 1.330233 | 0.034793 1N | 0.09 | -0.086667 | -0.007908 2C | 0.03 | 0.116667 | 0.002981 2D | 0.05 | 0.851685 | 0.046107 2H | 0.02 | 0.588000 | 0.008942 2S | 0.01 | -1.635000 | -0.019891 2N | 0.01 | 1.776470 | 0.018370 3C | 0.01 | 0.890909 | 0.005961 3D | 0.01 | 0.653846 | 0.005170 3H | 0.00 | -2.375000 | -0.005779 3S | 0.00 | -1.160000 | -0.003528 3N | 0.00 | nan | 0.000000 4C | 0.00 | 3.300000 | 0.002007 4D | 0.00 | nan | 0.000000 4H | 0.00 | 0.000000 | 0.000000 4S | 0.00 | 0.000000 | 0.000000 4N | 0.00 | 0.000000 | 0.000000 5C | 0.00 | 8.300000 | 0.005049 Todd

When I first started playing FP, it was for fun and something different to distract me from the mundane 2/1 everyday. I had always suspected that 1♥ fert vul was not sound. Playing it for 3 years, we ran into a few cases where we went for a number against air. I wanted to try to make the system more sound for the BBO league tournament where people have advanced time to prepare and are more likely to adopt a good fert defense as Josh proposes. Our results may vary but I can try to dig up some statistics that I generated a few months ago on how many IMPs we gained or lost on each of our opening bids. I think the only thing that differs from what those here have said is that we haven't had the experience that the forcing pass is an IMP loser. Maybe my memory is fuzzy but I'll dig out the numbers and post them when I get a chance. Todd

Here are a few things I heard the other day. Silverstein supposedly got 7 billion in insurance payouts. It doesn't sound right but the same report said he had only invested 15 million in the properties. That's one heck of a return on investment. Yes, they cited that he had also taken out policies specifically covering terrorist attacks right after getting the lease. I don't know if that is an unusual action or not. I also heard that WTC 7 fell about 6pm and that last firefighter left the building 5 or 6 hours previous to this. This docu I saw claimed that Silverstein's "pull" comment referenced the time around which the building fell and not 5 or 6 hours earlier when the firefighters left. Also, there was some debate over the use of the word "pull" in the demolitions industry. This same docu had a clip of a demolitions guy using the word "pull" to describe finishing the demolition of one of the WTC buildings in the days after the attack. This docu was obviously pro-conspiracy so take it as you will and check the sources. Also, there was obviously a conspiracy to damage these buildings. The only question is whether it was a conspiracy of 25 or 50 radical muslims or whether the conspiracy included anyone in government. It is obviously possible to keep this conspiracy quiet enough because it happened so I don't think the "any conspiracy that large would be detected" argument necessarily applies.

Why can't we all just get along? To me, the answer appears to be human nature. Humans appear to be programmed to try to run other people's lives and try to force them to live as they see fit. This instinct manifests itself in many ways such as ostracism but primarily through the need of government to seemingly legitimize themselves. Look at the totally insane drug war. I saw a report yesterday that the US spends 10-12 billion dollars a year try to enforce marijuana prohibition and that more marijuana users are arrested than all violent criminals put together. A third of americans try marijuana at some point in their lives and thus 1/3 of the populace have been defined to be criminals. People are always going to do stupid self-destructive things and it isn't anybody's business trying to stop them. The masses seem to differ with my opinion and it is just the busybody syndrome. Anyway, governments breed nationalism to maintain the status quo and keep the us-versus-them mentality. They seek to maximize their power which means that they cannot let anybody choose to leave their control. People get very upset when their power to run others' lives is dimished, ergo the refusal of China to let Taiwan be "free" not to mention the refusal of Lincoln to let the south be free. I guess he forgot the contents of the declaration of independence. To the degree that flags are mixed up with nationalism, I hate them. It is useful to know whether someone is located for a number of reasons...language, time zone, likely systems they play. I second what others have suggested. Give the ability to list languages, your timezone and your systems. Let people type in their location and then nobody can blame BBO for taking a political position on whether a territory is independent. Another option is just to ban all fascists from BBO. If someone complains that Taiwan has a separate flag then ban them. They come to your free site and start complaining...who the hell gave them the right. I'm sick of people.

If you can surf the web from work and you have a machine at home that is on all the time then you can access BBO from work. I could tell you how to do it but everyone who has ever expressed interest in doing this has given up once they saw how complicated it is.