Fun and hatred.

I've heard it attributed to Erma Bombeck -- though I can't track down the quote -- that one should never marry someone until they've played the board game Monopoly together, because that's how you can see the true person within. 

That's pretty good advice. Someone who is cruel and ruthless in meaningless things may be very cruel and very ruthless when it counts. Some women look for that in a man -- a guy who's a killer, who will protect and provide -- only to find out that he will cut them off at the legs when it suits him, too. On the other hand, some women want a nice guy who couldn't care less who wins or loses, and then get furious when he turns out to be a couch potato. 

Monopoly can be illuminating. 

Board games can teach us a lot. One of the reasons that people like myself who love words are so frustrated by Scrabble is that, as my wife noted, it's not really a word game. It's a math game. People with good vocabularies think they have an advantage going in, but the mathemagicians who know how to slay with an X on a triple letter score and always know how many of each letter tile are likely to still be in the bag are the ones who win. They can make up for their lack of words by -- completely within the rules -- hogging the official Scrabble dictionary while they scan their letters. They're not looking to get rid of that Z. They're looking for a way to get set up by you to dump it on the triple word score next time. Because it’s not the killer word that counts, it’s the killer score.

All this is very educational, but for those who really want to know how evil their friends and loved ones can be, I still say that you can't beat Avalon Hill's classic, Diplomacy. It is the king of bad relations. 

1976 edition

Forbes magazine called the game board "the map that ruined a thousand friendships," and I'd say that's being nice. The goal of the game, for up to seven players, each representing a pre-World War I nation, is to take over Europe, which means capturing eighteen of the thirty-four major cities (as supply centers). There are no dice, no cards, just moves and alliances. All moves are written in secret and played simultaneously.

I believe that it is impossible to win this game without screwing someone over. 

There's no way. You can only survive for any time by making alliances, and if your alliance vanquishes the other alliance(s), no one player will yet control enough of the map to win. Someone's gotta go down, and the best way to do it is a surprise attack, when you can mortally wound your former friend and he cannot stop you. We called the game Screw Your Buddy.

I've played the game many times, and it's ugly. It’s the only game I have ever seen end with someone's announced move being "I flip the game board." In this game it's routine. There are no good losers in Diplomacy. There are no good winners. Just sore losers and sore winners. No one's happy.  

It's amazing.

The last time I played, I started out with an ally who said we would experiment with the noble idea that we would be pals straight to the end. Blood oath to not attack each other. I took advantage and made an unusual early aggressive move on an opponent. He didn't like it -- basically, he didn't want me as an ally, he wanted to control my country -- so he immediately stabbed me in the back. I swore the game off after that. The hatred would have made Emperor Palpatine look like Tweety Bird.  

If you want a classic game that tests the mettle of up to seven people, try Diplomacy. Even people who are weak on strategy can do well if they're good on personality. Of course, you may never speak to one another again, but c'est la guerre. 

Time's up?

I was alerted by Mr. Philbin to this story -- it's from 2019, citing a story from 2018, and it's from Mr. P, but it's still interesting.

Schools Are Beginning To Take Down Analogue Clocks 

Because Kids Can’t Read Them Anymore

...Should we be at all surprised to learn that kids today are having trouble reading analog clocks? Unless their parents have these types of clocks hanging on the walls of their homes, why would the children ever need to use them to tell time? So even if someone teaches them how to read an analog clock, the children might quickly forget again if they never get any real practice.

This has become so much of an issue that a lot of teachers in the UK have taken down analog clocks in classrooms and replaced them with digital clocks. They are afraid that students would otherwise waste too much time wondering what time it is and stress themselves trying to figure out how much longer they have before they need to turn in their exams.

The source of the story is questionable -- something called APost -- but it links to The Telegraph, so I assume there's some basis for the piece. The 'Graph story is behind a paywall, alas. 

Is it true that kids can't read a regular analog clock these days? I guess it's possible that no one ever taught them. Still, I remember my mother teaching me the basics -- the Little Hand is on the Hours, the Big Hand is on the Minutes -- before I even started school. How hard is it to remember that?

Of course, the piece about children freaking out about the time during exams has the ring of truth -- not because the kids do panic, but because teachers might think the little perishers would, and our whole goal in life is not to educate and challenge the next generation but to coddle them like fresh eggs.

A follow-up piece in USA Today, however, quotes Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, who says telling time the old-fangled way is still valuable: 

"The skills that you need to read an analog clock are skills that kids when they’re young begin to learn," she said, citing concepts such as counting by fives and fractions.

Good for you, Carol Burris! Her answer is similar to the old answer to "Why do we have to learn algebra?" which has always been something like "Learning algebra helps to develop your critical thinking skills. That includes problem solving, logic, patterns, and reasoning." (Quote from Wonderopolis.) So being able to understand the face of a clock is not only easy and interesting but useful. Look at some of the things schools are expected to teach kids these days -- music, drama, cheerleading, sex ed, environmentalism, hating America -- are any of these necessary to produce citizens capable of conducting themselves in the world? No, but our teachers think they're important. Well, I think being able to read an analog clock is, too. In advanced classes they'll learn to read the ones without the numbers. 

Roman numerals are graduate-level stuff, though.

It's nice to know that in an era where schools and libraries are dumping world classics, and teaching woke history and even woke mathematics, that there's still support in the United States for something that isn't dumbed down. So there's hope that when the little brainwashed know-nothings emerge to hang us all in an American cultural revolution, they'll be able to determine the time for the public hangings in both digital and analog. 

In the UK, the oldsters will be able to send messages to one another with a clock cipher and escape. 

Live a little.

I recently read that human beings cry up to 30 gallons of tears annually. That's each of us, not all together. And it's a good thing that we don't do it all at once, or we'd be dead. In fact, we'd be worse than dehydrated, like we got zapped by the Kelvans; 30 gallons of water weighs more than 250 pounds, so a lot of us would disappear up the spout, as it were.

The fact is, we live out our entire existence on earth incrementally, one meal, one breath, one tear at a time. Years ago I heard about the "bologna loaf" method of tackling large and daunting projects -- no one can just sit down and eat an entire 10-pound loaf of bologna, but anyone (except perhaps the most bologna-adverse) can eat one slice. Do that every day and eventually: no more bologna.

Now, I don't know why someone would need to consume that whole loaf, nor how it could stay fresh long enough for such a period, but the point is illustrated well. You can't do it all at once, so do a bit now.

People sometimes like to advise us to live one day at a time, and there was even a hit country song along those lines in 1974. And while this doesn't mean to go hog-wild and throw away all your money today like Don Ameche leaving for space in Cocoon, it does mean that there's no day in which to do anything but the day we are in. So focus on that.

The mathematics of increments are always mind-boggling, though. Based on an average lifespan, the American male will brush his teeth more than 57,000 times, eat more than 86,000 meals, take something like 576,700,000 breaths. Hell, I'll probably spend 100 hours playing a game on my phone that I don't even like that much. And yet we think life is too short.

The Huffington Post's more useful Australian site addressed this topic two years ago, and their calculations provided some weird figures: You'll spend:

• just over 13 years of your life at work 
• with an extra year on top in unpaid overtime
• more than 11 years looking at screens
• 16 months exercising
• 4 and a half years eating
• 26 years sleeping

Man, just looking at all this makes me tired. I think I'm about six months behind in my sleeping, so I'm gonna lie down and catch up, k? See you at Christmas.

A numbers game.

Coffee math.

A K-Cup conundrum:

I've noted before that Dunkin' Donuts coffee has a prominent place in our household. In addition to a pot of rocket fuel in the morning and a pot of decaf after dinner, the day is filled with Dunkin' in Keurig pod form. Yes, we're pod people. I confess I like to try different brands of coffee for my K-Cup usage, but the lovely and talented Mrs. K prefers to stick to DD.

So, when I go to the Big Box Warehouse Member Store, I get her the Big Warehouse Boxes of caffeinated and decaffeinated. This way she can regulate her caffeine intake. During the day she uses two pods for big cups o' joe; she usually likes a half-caf, unless she's flagging (in which case, full strength!) or it's getting late (then decaf, or I call it, kissing-your-sister time). The pods usually go at about the same rate.

But Dunkin' seems to think that decaf drinkers don't drink as much coffee as caf drinkers. There are 72 pods in the caffeinated box, 54 in the decaf box. Normally Dunkin' sells both kinds of coffee for the same price, so it's not like the 18-pod difference is caused by the cost of the Swiss water process or something. And indeed, the decaf box is cheaper because it has fewer pods. But why does it have fewer pods?

No one I know can tell me. Seriously, if you have any insight on this, leave it in comments.

Now the math part. I asked myself, "Self! If you wanted to have an even number of both kinds of pods, how many boxes of each would it take?"

I sat down with the ol' adding machine, abacus, and Texas Instruments calculator to crunch the numbers, and it's not much -- three boxes of caffeinated pods is 216 pods, the same as four boxes of decaf pods.

So that solves the how but not the why. Why are their fewer decaf pods in a box? Even if people consume decaf at a slower rate than caf, it's not like these things go stale in a hurry. (The box I bought last month is good for a year.) And why do you taunt me with mathematics, Dunkin' Donuts?

Next up: How many boxes of doughnuts vs. boxes of Munchkins will it take to come out even...

Celebrate Pi Fraction of a Second.

Continuing the theme of "holidays" from yesterday...

Today is Pi Day, the day we celebrate pi. Yes, it's March 14, or 3.14, the first three digits of pi.

If you really want to celebrate it at the moment, you should have blown a horn or rung a bell at 1:59:26 this morning. Too late!

When the news services say we're going to celebrate Pi Day, they out to put "celebrate" in quotes. I suppose it will be mentioned in schools, but "celebrate" seems a little... I mean, it's like throwing a party because water is wet. Except if all the water were anything but wet we would have a problem. If pi were a little different, would that change anything?

It is kind of interesting to wonder if pi could be anything other than what it is. Pi is an irrational number, a characteristic it shares with many people I know, and therefore even in different bases it will always be an infinite number -- unless it's in an irrational base, and even then it might be. But that's getting silly. Two irrationals don't make a right, though, although three left turns do.

Either way, pi is the number that we need to calculate the circumference of a circle, and to get anything other than that as pi we would need God to redefine the circle. A friend of mine who worked with little kids says that was the end of the line when kids would get on the "Why" train. ("Why is the sky blue?" "Because molecules of air split the light like a prism, and blue is the visible color." "But why blue and not red?" "Because of the wavelength of blue light." "But why does that make blue appear?" "Because blue is shorter and more scattered." "Why is blue shorter?" Repeat until you get to "Because God made it that way.") In other words, kids help illustrate that no matter how much you know, you eventually run into the end of your knowledge; and even if you knew everything, you'd wind up at the Unmoved Mover.

One more thought on this jolly holiday: I'd often heard the term "squaring the circle" to refer to that which cannot be done. Well, what does it mean to square the circle? And why not? I'm gonna do it!

Well, it turns out that squaring the circle means "constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge," according to Wikipedia, and "The transcendence of π implies the impossibility of exactly 'circling' the square, as well as of squaring the circle." So we either leave it there or we get back on the "Why" train.

Personally, I'm celebrating Pi Day by being glad I don't have to pass math tests anymore. Yay!

8 Ways to Count to 8!

1. 1

2. ✌

3. 🂣

4. ⑷

5. V

6. ੬

7. ❼

8. ㊇

Why are we such suckers for these kinds of stories?

Headlines like "7 Ways to Lose Weight While Eating Doughnuts!" and "5 Things You Should Never Put in Your Pants!" are click magnets, but why? BuzzFeed, Mental Floss, Sharecare, and especially Cracked are masters of the form. It's always 4 of this, 17 of that, 9 of the other. I fall for this stuff as much as anyone. What am I, Count von Count?

"10 Vonderful Facts about Johnny Bravo!
Ah ah ah!" (boom)

Thinking about it, I came up with 3 Reasons Why I Fall for Numbered Data Stories!:

1. I have an idea how long it will be. I am a busy enough guy that my time to spend with trivia articles is short; if you tell me it's an article about 7 Iconic Cookies and How They Originated I know not only that the article is limited in scope but also I have an idea right up front how long it will take to read.

2. Lists are manageable. We like lists. They make things neat, and we all aspire to some kind of neatness, even if we are incapable of it in our own lives. Take a subject that's inherently sloppy (like Reasons We Can't Solve World Hunger), and stick a number in front of it (5 Reasons We Can't Solve World Hunger) and everything seems more manageable, even if it's still hard. Now, if we can just fix these 5 Reasons....

3. No writer mission creep. These days you start an article entitled "Why Does Your Dog Like Belly Rubs?" and ten paragraphs in the writer has morphed it into a disquisition on the evils of corporation-made pet foods and THAT DAMNED CHEETO TRUMP. While this could still happen in something like "12 Great Cincinnati Street Names" it's unlikely, as each item is self-contained and less likely to flow into polemic diarrhea. The internal breaks keep it brisk and on point.

I have to say, children, that the numbered story is not just an Internet thing. In the 1990s I was working at a dead-tree consumer magazine whose editor in chief was a big proponent of catchy coverlines, and particularly liked to tease readers with a number. Running a line like "7 Ways to Lose 10 Pounds by Summer!" on the cover would be her ideal. Except that she really loved "that big fat 8"; it was a numeral she found to be eye-catching and maybe soothing. She would send the story back to the editor to have her and the writer squeeze out 1 More Way to Lose 10 Pounds.

The magazine did fine while she was at the helm. Not since, though.

Better 8 than never.