I saw a seal

I just saw a seal swimming in the Lee near the Beamish & Crawford brewery.

Spirits lifted!

This is some dumb-ass law, New Zealand style

I'll jump on the bandwagon and post about this stupid and unworkable law currently moving towards the statute books in New Zealand.



(first spottted at Stephen Fry's Twitter feed, of all places.)

[boardgames] Sunday night at Casa Corcoran

We had alaimacerc round last night for a couple of games. He lugged his copy of Ticket to Ride over and we settled down to play out a fairly tight game on the original map. Helena (*ptoui*) turned into a crucial hub and I was screwed out of connecting through to Calgary right on the last move. Served me right for leaving it so long, but I really didn't have the choice.

Final score were alaimacerc 128, sammywol 123, mylescorcoran 117.

With a swing of 26 points on that Calgary ticket I'm really kicking myself I didn't make that 1-train connection in time.

We then played one hand of Money by Reiner Knizia, a newly purchased blind-bidding game as recommended by shannon_a. We just tried a single hand of it to get the hang of it due to time constraints, and alaimacerc took the prize there too, with the score sammywol 250, mylescorcoran 570 and alaimacerc 780. Again, my stupid fault for bidding all my Euros out when I should have held back one note to stop alaimacerc from taking the full set.

Still, good fun, and a nice end to a busy weekend of parties for our daughter who turned 6 on Friday. I'll try and get the photos up and post about that later in the week.

Risk literacy

Quite a nice article here on teaching 'risk literacy' or a basic familiarity with probability and statistics to secondary school children, and encouraging the ability to ask questions about the numbers and figures we're told in the media.

The nice closer from the article:

Professor Spiegelhalter’s four rules of risk, which he says everyone should know

Stuff happens We cannot predict exactly how every precise event will turn out, but we can often predict the overall pattern of events surprisingly well.

Compare like with like If you want to show that speed cameras reduce road traffic accident rates, don’t just put them in places that have just had a run of accidents.

What am I not being told? This person may well have got better after she took this wonder treatment, but how many other people’s stories are not being featured?

Twice not-very-much is still not very much Increasing a tiny risk may not be so important: almost everything interesting might help and it might also harm. The trick is working out the balance for you.