jjbrr

anyway... this discussion of poker demonstrates how silly it is to compare bridge to poker when discussing the viability of bridge on television. poker is a betting game that just happens to use cards. it could be played with an Uno deck or dice or brightly colored rocks and the game would be the same. it is not a card game like bridge that requires counting and thinking about combinations (why is spell check telling me that combinations isn't a word? am i missing something?). They both involve probabilities and employing some kind of strategy, but that's about the only thing the two games share in terms of game play.

lol

incredulousowl.jpg

Hi softcoder, As a young player, I and other juniors appreciate your effort to get more young players in the game. Please let us all know if this tournament is a success. I'm sure if it is, there will be plenty of other teachers out there looking to replicate it! The United States Bridge Federation has recently started running its trials for junior teams at least partly as online competitions. For the past few years, it's been matchpoints, but the ACBL also still runs a swiss team format for the collegiate tournament to determine teams to compete in the Summer NABC. You can see the USBF's COC for the online trials here or visit usbf.org to look around some more. I also assume there is an ACBL COC for the collegiates, but I don't know for sure and I don't know off the top of my head where to look for it (probably somewhere on acbl.org).

Forgive me. I'll submit another joke for your pardon. Re: Axiom of Choice What is an anagram of Banach-Tarski?

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The cocky exponential function e(x) is strolling along the road insulting the functions he sees walking by. He scoffs at a wandering polynomial for the shortness of its Taylor series. He snickers at a passing smooth function of compact support and its glaring lack of a convergent power series about many of its points. He positively laughs as he passes |x| for being nondifferentiable at the origin. He smiles, thinking to himself, "Damn, it's great to be e(x). I'm real analytic everywhere. I'm my own derivative. I blow up faster than anybody and shrink faster too. All the other functions suck." Lost in his own egomania, he collides with the constant function 3, who is running in terror in the opposite direction. "What's wrong with you? Why don't you look where you're going?" demands e(x). He then sees the fear in 3's eyes and says "You look terrified!" "I am!" says the panicky 3. "There's a differential operator just around the corner. If he differentiates me, I'll be reduced to nothing! I've got to get away!" With that, 3 continues to dash off. "Stupid constant," thinks e(x). "I've got nothing to fear from a differential operator. He can keep differentiating me as long as he wants, and I'll still be there." So he scouts off to find the operator and gloat in his smooth glory. He rounds the corner and defiantly introduces himself to the operator. "Hi. I'm e(x)." "Hi. I'm d/dy."

What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?

That's funny. I was just thinking if you reread the OP and replace "bridge" with any skill-based hobby, "smart" with athletic when appropriate, and "club/tournament" with "social game/competitive game" about 95% of Phil's post will still apply.

And since this is the NHL conference finals, I'll hijack here instead of asking in the Q&A thread: How many whales would you estimate have been struck by lightning in open waters in history? Does it kill them or are they insulated with enough blubber or something to protect them? Are they smart enough to sense electrical storms in the atmosphere and attempt to maximize their time in deep waters to avoid being near the surface?

(with 2 spades and some values we XX first)

gotta join the dogpile. great job, guys. i think you guys proved you deserved it without any doubt, but the Diamond team played some amazing comeback bridge in the last segment. i was on the edge of my seat for every board. thanks for a great show fred, justin, et al. truly fantastic to watch. congrats, and keep up the hard work for the BB. we demand gold ;)

OP was definitely not the worst on the internet, and i could easily find several worse on this forum. the first paragraph is awesome, but the rest has some merit. though the idea of the OP describes something, imo, that isn't bridge and is a game i wouldn't particularly be interested in playing, i think it's not far from what would be required to make bridge a mainstream, marketable source of entertainment for the general public. to put bridge on tv, for example, the systems of the players would have to be easily understood and there would almost certainly have to be a "shot clock" to keep the game moving. but i'm in favor of interesting methods and excellent card play even if we have to sacrifice alacrity, so i think the points raised are a step in the wrong direction. edit: the computer stuff is a miss though, as has been discussed extensively.

i was upset at the distinct lack of emilia and white walkers though.

The Eyrie is awesome

2004 red sox and it's not even close at all.

i watched the first 4 episodes last night under the impression that hbo had aired 5 episodes. completely broke my heart to learn i'd have to fiend for a whole week before my next fix.

curious if you could provide an example of future perfect for us, in plain english. you know, the joke might be funnier with an example. I don't know much about English, but what I do know suggests that Antoine Dodson would have some comment about the quality of this joke. Just sayin'. meanwhile, politards, let us briefly discuss how badass the SEAL dogs are that allegedly participated in this mission: http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/1766/sealsdog1.jpg http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/6323/sealsdog3.jpg http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/663/sealsdog2.jpg and further, some interesting info about the chopper:

There's luck in bridge? No wonder I never win!

:rolleyes: thanks. that thought never would have occurred to me. it's just you. osama was someone who liked his followers to know that he was very much alive. 100% if he's still alive now, he'll release a video of himself holding up the "Rot in Hell" newspaper headline. That would be bad for us. Obama's not dumb enough to risk his re-election on something like this. You can put away your tinfoil hat. Meanwhile, allegedly the team that raided Osama's mansion and pulled the trigger is a group of america's finest. I don't think they're in the business of posing with Osama's body to post on facebook. Images and video aren't going to be leaked any time soon and certainly not a day or two after it happened, so no, it's not suspicious.

bring the boys home imo

http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/5756/zgstal.jpg http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/6915/02binladen4683custom11.jpg

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one more re: the explosion that occurred at the facility yesterday (they called it a collapse of a structure; it's pretty obvious from video footage that some sort of explosion (possibly related to pressure built up from hydrogen gas) occurred):

Hi everybody. I'm jjbrr. You might remember me from such threads as the off topic thread and the "what should i have for dinner" thread. I personally have found it helpful to read about the nuclear situation in Japan in very simple terms, so here are some quotes with information. Gerben seems much more of an expert than me, so he can comment if anything seems erroneous. Cliffs: Barring some unexplored, sci-fi-esque scenario like you might see in movies, the very worst case scenario at this point seems to be that the land directly around the plant might become uninhabitable for an indeterminate amount of time in the case of a total meltdown. Consensus seems to be that radiation exposure will mostly be held to a minimum, and areas outside of Japan mostly have nothing to worry about. Absolute worst case scenario would be a complete meltdown of the core, that melts through the pressure vessel, and also destroys the containment vessel. I really don't see a possibility of a chernobyl like steam explosion that would eject fuel material into the atmosphere. I certainly can't imagine a fire that would rage for 7 days like happened in chernobyl which put alot more radioactive material into the atmosphere. So hopefully you believe me when I say that this is not, even under the worst-worst scenario, going to be as bad as chernobyl. Some of the fission products that are in the core are gases. Iodine and xenon will be released as radioactive gases. These will spread far and wide obviously, fortunately they will dillute quickly into the atmosphere and shouldn't cause much of a problem. For the rest, it shouldn't spread very far from the plant. Some will get into the ocean right next door, some will contaminate the area around the plant. I believe that the 12 mile evacuation zone will be sufficient to protect the population. Of course some crazy ass thing could happen that could cause an explosion, which would spread radioactive particles for potentially several hundred miles This post conflicts with the post above, but this was from early yesterday morning, when there was less information available. Hope some of this has helped! Credit to will1530@2p2