I semi-randomly have difficulty sleeping. Sometimes it's straight up insomnia -- this seems vaguely but not strictly related to caffeine intake earlier in the day; oddly it seems coffee has more of an effect than soda. Other times it's far more annoying -- as I drift off to sleep, I will get sudden leg spasms/involuntary twitching (it can happen ( Read more... )

(apparently I only blog about bridge now)

pending letter to the editor of the ACBL bulletin:

Hello ( Read more... )

EDIT: link fixed

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. ( Read more... )

(I'm posting a couple sciencedaily links blind, because there seems to be some routing breakage in the intertubes, so you may not be able to read them depending on whether it's fixed yet.)

Don't forget to get your extra second of sleep tomorrow night.

Did you know: despite linking to a bulletin previously, I hadn't noticed that leap seconds are ( Read more... )

The physics of the knuckleball: "R.A. Dickey, pitcher for the New York Mets [...] has taken over as the league's only knuckleball pitcher after Tim Wakefield retired last season. But just what is it about the knuckleball that makes it hard to hit? Conventional wisdom has it that the lack of spin on the knuckleball causes it to move in completely ( Read more... )

Applying Moneyball to basketball: "His contribution revolves around a topographical analysis of NBA games which contends that there are really 13 positions in basketball - not just five." Contrary to the /. summary, I found the GQ article to be informative, but that could be because I don't follow basketball. Would be interesting to see similar ( Read more... )

A while back I ran across Stigler's Law on Wikipedia:

In its simplest and strongest form it says: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law", consciously making "Stigler's law" exemplify Stigler's law."Naturally, there is also ( Read more... )

Researcher runs IP network over xylophones

Geiger's network protocol, Internet Protocol over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), provides a fully compliant IP connection between two computers. His setup uses a pair of Arduino microcontrollers, some sensors, a pair of xylophones and two people to play the xylophones ( Read more... )

The gout-stricken foot is doing much better; maybe popping ibuprofen has helped. I'm about to do a 2.5-day off-site team building thing for work, which includes some sort of ropes course on Thursday. Right now I make it about +130 that I'll be able to participate in that.

The Smoking Gun: "After realizing she had left one of her 10 children at a ( Read more... )

Setup: There's a couple overlapping ongoing RGB threads concerning, variously, whether games whose conditions of contest are contrary to the regional authority's laws should be sanctioned and/or permitted to award masterpoints, and whether BBO games are examples of this (specifically, one type of BBO event has a human and 3 robots at each table and ( Read more... )