FM75

The 2♣ bid seems to be an underbid, but West (and we) must take it at face value. So what options does West have after 1NT? He did not preempt on the first round third seat at adverse vulnerability. 2♣ must show spade support under the above assumptions. What about 2N? Is that lebensohl in competition? Does it show unbid suits (including partner's)? Clearly the second was unavailable. Lebensohl would unilaterally commit the partnership to play 3 red. He did not use any of those options, but passed. After a rebid of clubs by opener, no support by responder, and no spade rebid, West could picture partner with something like 5=x=y=3. So West has 3 choices (if the X is takeout, which appears not to be part of the partnership agreement). Unilaterally bid 2 of a red suit, unilaterally head toward 3 of a red suit, or pass. Double is eliminated, since absent a PA, it should be penalty oriented. West has to consider that partner thinks that the 1 club rebid shows no biddable 4 card major, so likely a 5-6 card club suit. That leaves pass, 2H, 2D. At this point, lebensohl makes no sense and a bid of 3 is just silly. If not pass, then which red suit? East could have shown 5=5=x=y immediately. With a decent 5=4=x=y, he might have rebid hearts to let partner pass or correct. If West bids, then 2♦ seems best. I guess I favor pass here. The best opponents are likely to do is +130. Their probable range is 90-130. Our best looks to be -100 which ought to be about average (partner did not rebid, so is not 2 suited). Sure we could make 90 our way, if everything works out.

Logic error: Somebody said you "need health insurance". Wrong - you need air to breathe. You might want health insurance. You don't need health insurance unless: 1) You have or will have a medical problem. 2) You can't just live with it now or when you get it. 3) You don't have enough money to pay for the care, if and when you need it, AND 4) You can't arrange to acquire the money to pay for the care, if and when you need it. Many people do not meet all of those. Some not even any of them. Compounding the logic error. We need the medical insurance the the government says we must have. "Don't worry, sir. I am from the government and I am here to help you." There is the slippery slope. But wait. It gets worse. Obviously you can't choose to insure your risks. Why don't we just make everybody buy car insurance, homeowners' insurance, personal liability insurance? So what if they don't own a car. They might drive one. They might not own the house, but accidentally burn it down. Finally, god forbid, they might have a pre-existing mental illness and buy a knife and go out and stab somebody, not killing them, but making them invalids for life! (No not a gun, they will be outlawed soon enough.) The government of the people No matter what - yes, not by or for. The House has already repealed PPACA numerous times. Obviously, by the people, is gone. OK. We stepped onto the slippery slope. The healthy will pay EXTRA money for the unhealthy. If that is fair, let's just charge everybody the same for car insurance. After all, alcoholism and tendency to speed are pre-existing conditions. So are the propensity to get distracted while driving, having poor vision, or reaction time loss (old folks, with reaction times about the same as drunks (does any state measure this?) But wait! That is not enough. Rock climbing and sky-diving are dangerous. Since we can't charge a premium based upon risk, let's outlaw risk-taking. Heck, did you know that triathlons are an order of magnitude more dangerous than marathons? No more triathlons. No more football. (Just watch reruns of old games.) No more hunting. What do you mean you want to buy welding equipment to work on antique cars? What are we paying all these legislators and regulators all that good money. Don't they realize we have people doing things besides taking a walk and watching television (and playing bridge)? Rewrite the curriculum Yeah, they probably already did that. America is not the land of opportunity and home of the brave and the free. Forget all that. We are the home of the wimps, the weak, the vast teaming masses looking for a free lunch, free healthcare, free TVs, internet, cell phones and the right to speak the language from where we came from and if it isn't English expect to write everything in our language. Taxation without representation That did not go out with the passing of the 16th amendment. We lost that later with Social Security - a tax paid by the yet unborn - a government passed Ponzi scheme. It has never been a real "pension system" administered well or poorly by the government. Just a free lunch for today's elderly paid for by today's workers and tomorrow's. - Hey, I did not grow up in Nanny Jersey, and I hope to leave soon.

For those of you who want to read the bill - hey, you can if you want. Good luck understanding it. :) https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr3590/text If you want a nice, printable copy... http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111hr3590enr/pdf/BILLS-111hr3590enr.pdf You will want to visit Staples before you print this - at 906 pages - if you print on both sides you can get by with just a single ream of paper. The table of contents is 12 pages. I wonder if that would fit in a BBO post. LOL Yes, you can be sure that most of your congressmen did not read it - you will see why. As to Winston's comment. Sorry, when I said "voters ... should go back to grade school" the voters that I was talking about were the congressmen who voted for it. It is hard to blame the voters who elected their fools - they never had a chance to read it first. (Congressmen used here referring to all of Congress, not just the House of Representatives). Perhaps we should add their staffers in the group that needs to go back to grade school - or maybe they are smart and just liars. Note also when it was signed. Well after it was clear that the White House had already identified the problem of people getting their health care plans canceled. As to the guy who so clearly stated that the plan allows any existing plan to be kept, I challenge you to find the wording to support that claim!

Actually the 10 million is probably an underestimate. Recent estimates showed about 19 million individuals nationwide self-insured and estimates were that 80% were getting bounced. 100% of the people (1) that I know that paid her own insurance already got notice. They can't keep the same policy or rate. The 10 million was the White House estimate. The 48 million was also a government estimate. You conveniently ducked the second larger number, ducked the math, so you don't need to go back to school. It is clearly just religion for you, fella. You believe - facts be damned. Don't let those math and science guys get in your way. You are born again. Give Barack a big kiss and tell him how much you love Him and believe in Him. BTW. Pick the amount you want to bet. My bet is the number of people at the end of the month won't even have the right order of magnitude, i.e. they won't even have 100,000, much less 400,000.

I am with RSClyde here. I don't expect a stiff spade from partner because if opener is 3=5=4=1, 2♠ seems more likely than 2♦. If opener is 2=5=4=2, then a spade continuation seems ok - partner won't be able to signal. If opener has a weak 1=5=4=3 it still seems the best way to go.

Ok. He is sorry. No "The buck stops here." from Obama. You probably won't hear him admit that he lied, either. From Bloomberg News: "Yet, administration officials knew by June 2010 that as many as 10 million people with individual insurance probably would be thrown off existing plans. The cancellations are a result of provisions in the act, which Obama signed into law in March 2010, that say policies that fail to offer benefits such as prescription drug coverage and free preventive care can't be sold after this year even if they're [sic] cheaper." No "My bad", 3 months after signing the bill, or for that matter 3 years later. Also from Bloomberg: "Obama's pledge that individuals would be able to keep their coverage and their doctors was a central selling point of his health-care overhaul, aimed at calming consumers concerned that they would be forced to give up policies and doctors they liked as the program expanded coverage to many of the nation's 48 million uninsured." The administration had set a target of 800,000 Obamacare enrollments for the first two months. Speaking to a Senate panel on Nov. 6, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the initial enrollment for the first month of the program, which will be announced by the administration next week, will be "very low," though she declined to provide specific figures. OK - Let's do the math. First let's assume that they could meet their target of 800,000 for first 2 months. That is 400,000 / month. So the 10 million that they knew they had lied about would take 25 months to get through the system. So Jan 2016 - I guess on average half of them will get one full year of tax penalties in addition to losing their coverage. Now let's do the math on the 48 million. At 400,000 per month, it will only take 10 YEARS to get them signed up. Give me a break. Everybody who voted/signed this into law should go back to grade school.

Game Theory. Thomas Schelling. I would be seriously disappointed in our government if it were not spying on all foreign governments. (Just like they are doing, to the extent that they can afford to do so.)

Bioluminescence http://books.google....escence&f=false There are also bioluminescent fungi.

So one thing you should know - You sold a mortgage when you bought a house. That sale becomes a liability for you and an asset to the buyer - who typically resells it to another buyer, sometimes retaining the obligation to "service" the loan, which means collecting payments and passing them on to the new owner, as well as other related obligations. So you were not "given" a mortgage. You are also right about another key perception of the market. Lenders (direct lenders, such as banks) in the US became obligated to lend where they might not otherwise have lent - to buyers who they deemed not good credits, because of an act of Congress (well meaning, of course, but with unexpected consequences). That is where things like the mortgage insurance industry comes into the picture - think of them as credit reinsurers. Once the assets are sold, they get repackaged into packages more suitable to the ultimate investors - some of whom have long term liabilities, such as pension funds, life insurance companies. They typically have credit quality requirements to meet which may be either regulatory or investor imposed. So step in rating agencies, who have models based upon nearly 100 years of the performance of the mortgage market. (One nasty wrinkle - there was no history to back liar loans. They did include modelling to handle loss of market value, which for the most part was based on the loss of home values in the great depression when loan to value ratios where much lower, and some recent housing recessions that were not even close to as severe as the 2006+ recession.) The mortgage finance system is way too complex to explain here, but fundamentally you could pull out any single component and the crash could not have happened. That is why it is important to understand that the problem is systematic. Blaming a single culprit would only be done by someone who does not understand what really happened. Remove the ratings agencies, or the law that Congress passed, or "liar" borrowing, or long term buyers of mortgages - pension funds, etc., or the intermediaries - investment banks, or even the law preventing banks from going bankrupt, and the entire problem becomes far less likely. I have left out a number of other less direct problems that contributed to the CREDIT CRISIS, because explaining them has nothing to do with mortgages.

When you buy liability insurance for the privilege of operating an automobile, you may be charged based upon your actuarial risk factors in all 50 states and DC. When you must buy health insurance for the privilege of living in the United States, ... ok, if you are high risk, you can transfer that risk to someone who has low actuarial risk. This does not seem like insurance at all. It should seem "fair" only to high risk buyers.

Q.E.D. Thanks for playing.

Given your observation of 3 in the first 12 boards, the probability of getting exactly 5 in 24 boards is about 4.36% - a bit over one every 25 times that it happens.

LOL - you must always pull boards that have exactly 13 cards.

Given that tens of millions of homebuyers were gambling on the real estate market with somebody else's money, you might expect that. But nearly none of those fraudster's has ever been prosecuted, and likely never will be. They are immune from civil suits, since they have no assets. They are semi-immune from criminal suits because there are so many of them. So the lenders got stuck, and when they failed, the honest taxpayers got the shaft. Too big to fail - ever since The Great Depression. All of the government programs since then have bolstered the behavior that causes the problem. Bailouts = moral hazard. Eliminated them and the system changes profoundly. If the country changed the banking laws and allowed for banks to go bankrupt like any other corporations, things might change. But that means that people placing deposits in a lending institution would be expected to make intelligent decisions about those institutions' credit quality (ability to repay the money that they "deposited"). It also means that you (the depositor) are taking the risk and not transferring it to your taxpaying buddies. What can you take away from this? If you have really sound analytical capabilities, you could correctly arrive at the answer that the system has weaknesses - that the system is the problem. If you do not have that, then you will take the easy road and search for a single culprit, most likely the one that by your upbringing, you have been biased against since early youth. If you can only find a small number of culpable players, you do not understand the market at all.

OK - maybe not Berra, or Bohr :) W. J. Moore, in Schrödinger, Life and Thought (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989), p. 320 refers to this as an "old Danish proverb" that Bohr was fond of quoting. All Danes, however, know that it was the cartoonist Storm P. who said it first: »Det er svært at spå, især om fremtiden«.http://chaosbook.blo...dk-citater.html

Shouldn't or can't? This is something that you could try. Rig up a link to login that does the same thing except have the iframe link to a domain that does not exist. It takes DNS quite a while to figure that out, because the have to go to the top level domain servers to get an authoritative answer. If the login can be completed before you get a 5xx response in the iframe, then you know you are ok. Of course, you need to test it in all browsers.

My partner and I are playing Oliver Clarke Precision (OCP), a super-precision variant with control and trump asking bids on after any positive response to a 1♣ opening. We have artificial space saving step bids over interference including double, redouble, and pass where available. Opponents who know the system have significant latitude to interfere, and preemptive interference is their best option. Currently, we have a Lebensohl-like forcing pass (by opener) in the system over any pre-emptive bid at 3N or higher, which forces to responder to double. A fast 4N would deny a stopper, a slow 4N promises one. Other bidding on could either be Italian style controls, or a continuation of asking bids with abbreviated response scales. We are not happy with this. Though it does not occur often, our concern is that sometimes we have a far better score available defending a doubled contract than making a small slam or even in some cases a grand slam. Maybe we are worried about something that comes up too rarely. We are experimenting with things like turning on the "lebensohl style pass" even on auctions as low as 1♣ - (p) - 1M - (1N). We are happy so far using it after 1♣ - (p) - 1M - (2♣) (regardless of whether it is conventional or natural), or after any pre-emptive action by intervenor prior to responder's first bid. We define pre-emptive in this situation as any two level bid except clubs, e.g. 1♣ (2♦, but not 1♣ (2♣) Do people playing other strong club, or artificial systems see this problem? If so, we are wondering about other answers. Should we be willing to occasionally miss a slam with a beat that is not strong enough to make up for it?

Well, it is all about blame. Ken could probably chime in on this topic, with his math background. It is somewhat human nature to look for only a single cause of anything. Why? Well on the news, you only have 90 seconds, so forget finding anything out there. But the real world is virtually always a system of complex interactions of many factors. Really messy. Do we want to assign a percentage blame to the pilot, the engineer of the control system, the copilot who did not notice the problem, the weather and conditions, the time of day, etc. No. We ask for just ONE reason. So the NTSB will take months to do all the work to figure out what went wrong after a "disaster", but the news media has finished the story, long before the results are in. Take physics. It is all taught about idealized systems. Friction free, and all sorts of simplifying assumptions. Why? Because the math is tractable - solvable in many cases analytically. Resorting to computer modelling to take into account the real world is hard, and there is no glory in it. (Well maybe if you decoded the human genome cheaper and faster than the government could, but that is a bit of an aberration.) Population growth models. In calculus, everybody learns the model in which the change in the population is proportional to the existing population. The solution is the well known exponential growth. What the book does not bother to tell you is that exponential growth is completely a myth. It is fundamentally impossible. Pogo pretty much had it right. "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Slow breaking story. There are an estimated 19 million people who last year purchased their own health insurance. Bloomberg News has already identified nearly 1,000,000 cancellations of those policies. In a story today, there was an estimate that 80% of such policies will be cancelled. That would be nearly 16 million people, about 5% of the population. Most of those are likely not to be pleased, because they chose a policy in keeping with their perceived needs and ability to pay. Who is to blame? The President, Pelosi, Mary Landrieu - who all promised that people could keep their existing policies and doctors? The voters who voted the turkeys into office? Or is it a system that is too complex to fathom because government spending is done in numbers to large to fathom by any but a few people? Is it a taxation policy that is geared to gouging the minority in what clearly garners the votes of a majority - aka gaming the system. Suppose that taxes were flat, so that every politician's pet program could be priced in dollars per voter - yes, that scales the spending down to what everybody can comprehend - basic principle of numeracy. A 165 billion dollar program. That is just a big number like all the others - until you divide it by the population or the number of voters. 165 billion / 330 million people = $500. Let's round the $17 trillion debt down to 16.5 trillion. Whoa $50,000 per person. How the heck did we get here? Who is to blame for that kind of lunacy? If you have a single answer - carry on. 8 ever, 9 never. :)

I saw the same thing on Chrome in the past week. But I don't wait more than 60 seconds. Just close the window and try again. That usually seems to work. The problem is most likely on the server side. Though there is the chance that you have local internet traffic issues. What seems like a single event to a user usually results in many round-trip communications between the browser and the host on your behalf. Added: It could also be a problem with the ad-server. If they don't complete the communications properly, then BBO may not be asked to finish its login sequence.

I quit reading the second after counting up about 10 errors in the first 20 pages. The first book seemed pretty good. The work was so sloppy in the second that I wondered which data were good and which were wrong. Maybe some day I will have the time to finish the work I am doing and repeat the experiments. Note: Not only is it not truly peer-reviewed, but apparently they can't even afford decent editors who can check the simple factual stuff. If they ever put up an errata page to go with the book, maybe I would return to it.

Hi Bill. How is the gay rights movement going? Said to a straight co-worker entering the elevator on the first floor of the Empire State Building.

Good catch.

It is true. There is a wide range in beliefs - especially among the most non-scientific. The "true-believers" quote percentages of scientist believers zealously - as though science is something that is voted on. These are the folks that forget that the most profound discoveries in science were the most radical and most widely disbelieved. Even Einstein was never happy with quantum mechanics. He got a Nobel Prize for - nope - not special relativity, nope - not general relativity, that came after he got the prize. But everyone remembers that he said that "God does not play dice". On the other hand, Enrico Fermi, certainly the preeminent Italian physicist got awarded a Nobel Prize in 1938, for work that was proved to be wrong. Not only was it wrong, but he was apprised of his error after his initial publication by a German female chemist and before he was awarded the prize. He never retracted his publication. But in the climate change arena, perhaps the person who has made the most accurate statement on the subject is Yogi Berra - a Yankee Hall of Famer. Prediction is hard, especially about the future. Ok, Yogi was not talking about climate change, but just about predictions. I can't think of a statement that describes this better. The laws of gravitation are known to incredible precision. Yet the amount of error in predicting the position and speed of an asteroid 40 years into the future are incredibly imprecise. By hundreds of miles, etc. If we are to believe all of the predictions that are publish about climate change, we must believe things that are FAR less well known and further into the future. For example, the population of the planet, the economic developments that will occur, not to mention the predictions of scientific change. What probabilities were assigned to nuclear war? An epic plague, with 2020 proportions equivalent to the world's previous worst? Any reason why it should not be far worse with far higher global mobility? BTW. Does anybody know how many significant digits there are in the most precise measurements of temperature, the speed of light, the gravitational constant, Planck's constant? Who got the Nobel prize in physics this year? How many years ago did he make the prediction? (49). Did someone who should have had similar credit die before 2013?

Surreal is the Obama spectacle explaining the success of the program... "Nobody's madder than me [sic] about the website not working as well as it should, which means it's going to get fixed," Obama said. (That follows, how?!) Yeah, right. They had three and a half years to build a web-site. And, oh crap! Not only does it not work. But there is nobody to blame, and not a clue as to what is wrong with it, nor when it will be fixed. Gosh - maybe they only found out about a three plus, year project not working last week? About the only take-away here is that he can't blame the NSA, the Chinese, Korea, Iran, or Al-Qaeda. Who is still in Guantanamo, again? Surreal also. The failure of the Tea Party to extend the debt ceiling in exchange for defunding the failed contracting for development of the health insurance web site - since after all, you can do it all by phone or regular mail!

Sorry Ken, bond mathematics is really trivial, when there are no call or put options involved. Maybe you just needed to work things out a little more than you did. Also, researching the concept of a yield curve might help.