The Worst Thing in the World ...worst practices...

Some counter-intuitive, some not. I haven't done the math on many of these. Some of them I gleaned from looking at the logs of the Optimal Solitaire Yahtzee Player, an invaluable resource.

• Early in the game, ditch a bad roll in the ones.

  Sure, you'll go negative on the bonus, but it's likely you'll make it up if there are still 4 or 5 number boxes left to fill on the left.

• Don't actively try to fill the 1s and 2s boxes.
  
  

Oakland Symphony Chorus provided support for the OEBS in a concert performance of Showboat.

The "concert" version of Showboat, as blessed by the rights holders, is a pretty sterile affair, with a droning narrator and most of the story excised. They've also edited/censored some language to confirm with modern-day political correctness.

All you have to do to get a mention in a big time comics blog is to send in something awful to the management:

http://joshreads.com/?p=3439

Typically what happens is that on your first roll you get 3 ones, and maybe a potentially useful singleton.

And you've already used the ones box.

So the question is, should you go for Yahtzee here? Or should you try to build off the singleton or just re-roll all five dice?

I suspect that if the probability is reasonably close to 1 in 6, it's probably your best chance at a Yahtzee in the game, and thus worth risking the Yahtzee box on.

There are 3 ways to get to Yahtzee from here, and we can sum their individual probabilities to get the overall chances.

I collect snobberies.

I like knowing what makes some things high-quality and other things crappy (it's different for every kind of thing), and being able to distinguish the subtle differences between the two.

However, the traits that distinguish good from bad are arbitrary and, like fashion, are often cyclic and based on class/expense rather than any intrinsic measure of quality in the snobbed object.

A lot of restaurants representing cultures with spicy cuisines offer dishes with a choice of heat level.

However, there is a LOT of variance in the actual spiciness of dishes at a given heat level, both from restaurant to restaurant, and even from chef to chef.

Originally I was going to propose a device that would measure the scoville units of a dish, along with a training and certification system so that multiple restaurants could offer a guaranteed comparable scale of heat.

But on reflection, the real problem is just that "hot" is ambigous.

A: Woof
B: What?
A (emphatically): WOOF!
B (get's it now): Woof!
A: What?
...
etc.

Minutes of fun whenever you need it.

I've been watching The Biggest Loser, and enjoying its strange combination of inspiration, disgust (stop crying already), exploitation, abuse, and crass commercialism.

I really love how whenever we see a retrospective of a contestant (every time someone is kicked off boot camp island, and once for each contestant on the finale) they have a big pants moment, where they stand behind their giant old pants and then drop them to the floor to show how awesome they are now.

After a furious session of blackboarding, we are pleased to present an incomplete^* collection of the axes of salad complexity:

Architectural

Complexity of construction

Conceptual

To what extent is this salad a metaphor?

Cultural

Number of cuisines included and effort made to fuse them

Financial

Expense of ingredients

Gustatory

Number of flavors sensed, and effort made to meld them

Logistical

Our second triennial, not-very-kosher observance of the Liquid Seder happened on April 11.

In this seder, each traditional food item is replaced by a cocktail involving the same ingredients. The resulting drunkenness (5 cocktails + 4 glasses of wine with only matzo to buffer the alcohol) results in a spectacular drunkeness that can only be appreciated by a people that were once held in bondage by a capricious Egyptian monarch.