2005-04-13 RussCon Report

News

9 of us played 7 games! Single digits - what an unusually light turnout! Where was everyone? I blame the lack of a Meta Game this week. :)

Art Cars: There will be an art car parade on Congress Avenue, going south from the capitol, on Saturday 2005-04-16 (tomorrow) at noon. I intend to check it out. If anyone is interested and wants to hook up, email me.

Spanish/Esperanto: 2pm Sunday at Texspresso on Anderson Lane (by Alamo Drafthouse Village) is the weekly basic informal Spanish RussCon study group as well as the Esperanto formal study group.

If anyone in Austin wants about 5 shelf feet of Doctor Dobbs Journal and some other computer magazines from the past decade for free, let me know.

Game Results

Boggle	6	JP 5 RussW 3 Ben 1 MikeC -2 Clayton -2 BobK -5
Blokus	4	Clayton 3 JP 1 RussW -1 MikeC -3
Tichu	2	( Ben SarahM ) 1 ( BobK Whendy ) -1
Carcassonne	4	RussW 3 JP 1 Clayton -1 MikeC -3
TicketToRide	3	Clayton 2 Fina 0 BobK -2
RicochetRobot	4	Ben 3 RussW 1 JP -1 SarahM -3
Settlers	3	JP 2 RussW 0 SarahM -2

Poor Mike got smeared in Carcassonne. Final scores were 102, 84, 81, 31. Woot! There was a big farms race in this game.

It was fun to play the venerable Settlers of Catan again; it had been a while since I last played. In many ways, Settlers is the game that started RussCon.

Ratings

Rank Ratings:       
 3.2958 JP
 2.3671 Ben
 2.3026 RussW
 1.5686 Clayton
 0.0000 Fina
-0.6931 Whendy
-1.7916 SarahM
-3.2834 MikeC
-3.5827 BobK

Win Ratings:
 2.0273 JP won 2 of 5
 2.0149 Clayton won 2 of 4
 1.8971 Ben won 2 of 3
 0.2231 RussW won 1 of 5
 0.0000 SarahM won 1 of 3
-0.4054 Fina won 0 of 1
-0.6931 Whendy won 0 of 1
-0.7576 MikeC won 0 of 3
-1.2809 BobK won 0 of 3

JP is the Devil! Ben and Clayton are Co-Vice-Devils. I am the Vice-Vice-Devil.

If you are confused how the ratings work, you could peruse the FAQ.

I used GraphViz to generate the graph image.

Meta Game

Matt was the Meta Devil and mailed out no Meta Game. So I figured I'd just continue last week's Meta Game, but once again no one expressed an interest in being mummy-wrapped, go figure. If Matt doesn't come up with a Meta Game, I'll come up with one for next week!

Evening's Soundtrack

a flavor of india
Irshad Khan, The Magic of Twilight
Ustad Vilayat Khan, Sitar
Manilal Nag, Live in Woodstock
Ravi Shankar's Festival From India

I suppose this is a meta-meta theme... since there was no new Meta Game this week, there was no new Evening's Soundtrack...

Links

Dabblers and Blowhards by Maciej Ceglowski is a wonderful essay in response to Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

Engraved portraits of Gauss for sale!

Starfsmenn Sorpu búnir að stofna hljómsveit? Music video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by a wacky Icelandic band, with guitar and smashed kitchen appliances

I Wonder Why We Lost That Contract?

Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein compares Lichtenstein paintings with the source material from comics

Man arrested, cuffed after using $2 bills ... I like how they blame their ignorance of $2 bills on 9/11 at the end of the article

The Real Crisis shows some interesting health care statistics

SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator had a randomly generated paper accepted by a conference. Here is more info on fake papers.

Nix - has anyone seen or played this card game...?