Given a triangular lattice which has had a number of nodes selected, is there a good algorithm for determining the minimum spanning tree which connects all the selected nodes? Or is this something which needs to be brute forced?

Looking over my bookshelves, I've decided that although Orson Scott Card and Robert Asprin are fine authors, and although the ten or so German translated versions of their books that I own are undoubtedly also fine, I'm unlikely to read them at any point in the near future. I don't want to throw them away, and I suspect that passing them to the ( Read more... )

The house is being attacked by baby birds. On Saturday, there was one sitting on the driveway looking small (which we left for its mother or for cats to find), and this morning one has hidden itself in our cooker's extractor fan (which we'll probably also leave as the alternative of dismantling half the kitchen doesn't appeal). Silly birds.

Carrie and I have designated the smallest bedroom in the house as the space room, with a view to painting the walls purple with lots of colourful planets, stars, comets and space detritus. Over the course of the recent holidays, this plan has progressed, resulting in a massive sun filling the ceiling, surrounded by purple walls just waiting to be ( Read more... )

BEST NOVEL ( Read more... )

Our house has a hole in the wall where a outflow pipe used to live. While sealed off on the inside, the outside was left open to give a nice little passageway into the cavity. And the steady stream of bumblebees entering and leaving said cavity leaves me in no doubt that they've taken advantage of this to build a hive ( Read more... )

The record of contact details on my phone confuses me ( Read more... )

Roman emperors, so it is said, had slaves whose job it was to ride behind them in parades, whispering 'you too are mortal'. After lots of recent good news on the games front, I've had an playtest experience along those lines. 'The King Is Dead' had been substantially reworked, and I'd been looking forward all day to wowing people with its ( Read more... )

Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes.

Apropos of comments about gender balance in panels, I've just realised how male dominated board games design is. I've playtested a lot of different designer's games, and can think of only two times that I've playtested a game designed by a woman. There are more out there, it's true, but proportionally there don't seem to be many. I wonder why ( Read more... )