August 13, 2009

• Loose Ends

  I’ve been board lately, and doing some internet searching.  I’ve noticed there are some things that I know that are not there.

  For the geology things, I have added them to Wikipedia.  This includes a page on: QFL diagrams, rock fragments, lithic fragments (they are different), Gazzi-Dickinson method, pseudomatrix, with adds to the pages on provenance and greywacke.  Let me know what you think and/or dispute.

  I also want to put out two rule variants to popular games that me and others have come up with.

  

  First, Apples to Apples varient (which if you’ve never played is a fun game), called Bad Apples to Apples.

  We came up with this on a drunken night of geobonding, and it works best in a similar atmosphere.

  In Bad Apples to Apples, you play the same game with the ‘green’ cards with adjetives and what-not, but the trick is, you get everyone a pad/scraps of paper and a pen.  Instead of putting down a red noun card, you write in an answer.  This (usually) will quickly decend into the depths of human vulgarity, which is the main source of fun.

  

  Second, a rule varient to Risk, which I call Quick Risk or Matt’s Version of Risk.

  A common (faster) way to play, called the French style, is to pass out the Risk cards with the idea that you get to place men on those locations (instead of alternating turns on claiming land).  Literally in a dream I had, in which I was playing this game while doing dishes at my dads house… really, no joke, this idea came to me.  It starts off the same: pass out the Risk cards to all players.  Instead of being able to determine where your armies are, you get the number (1, 5, or 10) of armies, based on the figure on the card, on that land.  In other words, you don’t get to pool your armies UNTIL the game has started AND some armies are larger than others, by dumn luck.  This speeds up the game dramatically because some armies are lost IN THE PROCESS of even conquoring one continent, even Australia.  The best part of this varient is the unpredictability of it.  Most of the time, the method of the game, or at least, the main battle points, can be seen and predicted before the first dice is rolled.  In this style, the battle fronts do not develop until much later, making it more fun and stratigic.

  On another note, my last fill-up of Carl was painfully short on mileage… almost 100 miles less than usual.  As a stats nerd, I wanted to know: is this normal?  So, I have been keeping my mileage for the two-year life of my truck, so I decided to plot up my MPGs.

  

  Here is the chart… not a big trend of worse mileage lately or seasonally.  This also makes me happy that if I had splerged for the 4×4 Tacoma, this data would be shifted down by about 5 MPG and I would have never broken the 30 MPG barrier.

  P.S. Shawn and I just started watching Dexter and wrapped up season one last night after midnight…. So good!  Really am digging that show…

  • 3:48 pm
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