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[go]$$c Quietimes vs Ikkyu
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Ikkyu to go first, mainly because I am unfamiliar with how to do the nigiri exercise on here. Anyone?

It's a scout's honour thing. You, under spoiler tags, declare a number of stones and your opponent guesses odd or even and then checks the spoiler to see if they were right.

ahhhh. Then play next as appropriatly? Gotcha.

Since I don't have any stones handy, I rolled a d10. So: odd or even?

even

so you are black.

ikkyu, I didn't know what's a d10 -- an image search returned so many varieties! Wow, I had no idea:
For all to view, including Quietimes and Ikkyu:Also, ikkyu, your stones are right here :

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I had to find a way to choose randomly and since I was at work on my lunch break, I didn't have any stones available. But I did have two dice, one six-sided and the other ten-sided. The reason I have a ten-sided die at work is because one of my coworkers claimed that no such thing existed.

If I recall correctly (I haven't played in over a decade), ten-sided dice are used in Dungeons and Dragons to determine damage. For example, a sword might be worth 2 d10 plus 5. This means that if it's used successfully, you roll two ten-sided dice (or one twice), add the results together and then add 5. What you get is the number of points of damage done in the attack.

Google. ikkyu, thanks for the info. I never had the D&D experience, but I can guess from the abundance
of very pretty and fancy dice that it's much more popular than Go.

Tried that tact, didn't work. You're giving this person too much credit for intelligence. I once got into a long drawn-out argument with her about whether 3/10 and .3 is the same number or not. She claimed that 3/10 = .003. While this wasn't the only incident like this that I had with her, it was the most, "I can't believe I'm having this conversation with an adult."


In the US, I would say that this is true, though I don't know about anywhere else. I never got really into the game itself; for me it was much more about being able to hang out with my friends once we had graduated from high school and weren't able to see each other as much.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but D&D became very well known in the early 1980s due to: 1. the ridiculous satanic panics that were going on, and 2. a kid's cartoon show that was on at the time. So even if a relatively small percentage of the population actually plays, a large percentage has heard of it. Go's already been featured in a cartoon series, which I'm guessing was probably bigger elsewhere in the world than in the US. Maybe it would be good publicity to get silly but influential people to link it with satanism. High-ranking government officials already do this with such things as evolution and yoga, and those things have only increased in popularity over the past hundred years in the western world.

One thing I do know is that in order to even play D&D casually, you NEED a lot of things like books, character sheets, dice, etc. And the books alone are expensive. So it's a system designed to make money, especially when they come out with new versions of the rules every few years. So you have to buy new books and go online to complain with other players about the new rules. This is much more common than you might think. I don't know what proponents of Go might be able to take away from this, especially since Go isn't trademarked by a single company. But I have to think there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Roleplaying isn't trademarked by Hasbro either though! There's a lot more than D&D. That and you can just ignore the new editions and keep playing with the older one of your preference if you like. You can also borrow the book and dice from other people in the group, character sheets can just be printed off by whoever had a printer. We normally worked out who'd get what book between the the 5 of us in my group.

Now CCGs are truly expensive. Miniature wargaming too. Though again you can borrow a deck or army from a friend.

D&D's the only game I know anything about, so that's why I was talking about it.

Yes, you can do all the things you describe. However, a tendency I've noticed in the players I've met (both in my circle of friends as well as outside) is that they feel a strong connection with other players. As such, if a new rule set comes out, they have to buy at least some of the books to know what everyone else is complaining about. Otherwise, they get left out of a lot of conversations.

Anyway, I think this has gotten way off-topic (mostly my fault) so I'll leave it at this. Now if you'll excuse me, my wife is yelling at a woodchuck that's sitting on our back porch. Ta!

Hmmm, once they never understood basic arithmetic, it's very very difficult.
In a sense, it's the teachers' fault; the system failed.
But perhaps it's not too late...? Khan AcademyIndeed, quite a few interesting lessons.

You should try 0.999 recurring is equal to 1. That can be quite difficult to convince people of.

ikkyu, on a related note, I have a stupid question.

In this article -- Asteroid flies by Earth --
"An asteroid the size of a small truck zoomed past Earth four times closer than the moon on Saturday..."

What does "4 times closer" mean? Does it mean "1/4 as close as," or "1/5 as close as,"
or "less than 1/4 as close as" ?
If the average distance between the Earth and the moon is x,
does this mean the asteroid got as close to Earth as x/4, or x/5, or just less than x/4 ?

If someone says "Amy is 3 times as tall as Joe," I understand Amy's height = (3 * Joe's height).
But if "Amy is 3 times taller than Joe" -- I don't understand; does it mean the same thing?

Similarly, "Amy is half as tall as Joe" -- clear.
But "Amy is two times shorter than Joe" -- (probably awkward English and nobody says that), unclear to me.

I would take it to mean 1/4 as close as.


It means the same thing. "1 times taller", which nobody would actually say, would mean Amy is the same height as Joe.


It's awkward English, but would mean she is 1/2 as tall.

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In the 70's, when I was a young boy, my father was very particular about this (in Finnish of course, but the same principle applies): "3 times taller" is the same thing as "4 times as tall".

Nowadays everyone uses "3 times taller" actually meaning the same thing as "3 times as tall".

e: what really bugs me is that many people say "half bigger" ("puolet isompi" in Finnish) when they actually mean "twice as big". "Half bigger" should mean "1,5 times as big".

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Yes this is problematic in English. If I say that are two times more black stones than white stones, it's unambiguous that if there are 10 white stones there are 30 black stones. The "more" is the important part. If, however we're using words like taller or wider they functions strictly as the word "more" there and we should interpret the sentence accordingly. Whereas if we say "as tall" or "as wide" as in your example we are saying two times = x2.

1 times taller does mean twice as tall, however no native English speaker would construct the phrase "one times taller." You never make the one times construction, you would always say twice directly. However, phrases like "3 times taller" are interpreted as "3 times as tall" by many/most/almost all people so while it is a grammatical error on their part we might be seeing the phrase changing, similar to "may I?" vs "can I?" and so on. I'm pretty sure I read a style guide a few years ago that recommended avoiding the "X times more" construction in general use because it is ambiguous (it isn't ambiguous in some fields).

It's usually avoided because most people would say three times as many rather than two times more because it's a lot more intuitive.

TJ, thanks. "Buy two, get one FREE!"