M and I performed a double-blind study of four kinds of water. Our preferences agreed, in order: purified water, filtered tap water, natural spring water, and unfiltered tap water.
(I know the labels here don’t make sense. They were the first four Greek letters I could recall.)
Working on a variation of Settlers of Catan called Vineyards of Catan.
Mayfair Games has blank tiles and replacement card packs. Current plan is to print out vineyard tiles and wine cards on sticker paper to stick on the blank tiles and replacement cards.
Progress updates to follow.
Imagine for a moment that you were a point in multidimensional space, and your nearby neighbors in this space are people that share your preferences for restaurants, bars, and clubs. In this model, a bar you like is very near to you (e.g., by a Euclidean metric), while some place you hate is far away.
This model rules Yelp. A review on yelp is a measurement of the distance between the reviewer and the reviewed. The review will be favorable if and only if the reviewer is nearby the reviewed in the model.
A restaurant (e.g., Bite) gets good reviews because the people that review it know or can guess, before they go there, that they will like it. If they didn’t, the place wouldn’t have such stellar reviews.
So why do some places get terrible reviews? I see cases that would cause this. First, if a new nightclub (e.g., Universal) is still “figuring itself out,” it might attract a lot of people expecting one thing and getting another. In other words, they are not near the place in the model, but they visit it anyway because they think they might. Likely, because the place is so new, many people are testing it out, so you can expect the reviews to be unfavorable, even by the people who are supposed to like it, because the presence of outsiders ruins the whole experience.
In another case, a super-exclusive bar might only cater to a very narrow range of clientele. In other words, you have to be unusually close to this bar in the model in order to like it. Perhaps it only supports one or two cliques of regulars, and everyone else is shunned.
In this example, the radii correspond to the ability of a bar or restaurant to support a wide or narrow section of people.
Take a regular blog, and flip it around. What do you get? A reversed blog, of course, where vistors write questions or comments and the author anwers. Sounds stupid, but I think people could get a lot of fun and use out of this. I see this manifesting as a single site with multiple instances (e.g. blogger or livejournal), funded by ads, and configurable to control who can ask questions, who can answer, and so on.
Here are a few examples. A couple’s answers their friends’ questions. A researcher’s or expert’s revblog answers questions from others in her field. A CEO’s revblog answers his company’s employees. Changing the parameters around may allow anybody to ask and answer (a forum) or only the author to ask (a traditional blog), but keeping in the spirit of “questions” and “answers.”
For instance, imagine this were a reversed blog where I come up with silly ideas and you tell me if they suck or not. Would that be a good idea?
I’m working on a Greasemonkey script to add syntax highlighting to Wikipedia in Firefox. The trick is to replace the edit page’s textarea with an editable iframe as the page loads, then you can do crazy fun stuff with the document which I will refrain from mentioning because it’s much too nerdy.
At first I thought an extension was the way to go, but its turns out extensions are aimed at tweaking Firefox’s interface, not fussing with the page. Greasemonkey is perfect for the job, since it basically just executes a script on every page that matches a given pattern. Plus, users don’t have to go through the hassle of downloading crap and restarting the application.
This screenshot shows link underlining, headers, and boldface (i.e., embiggening). I haven’t figured out how to handle styling as the page is edited, though, but once that’s out of the way the rest should just be a matter of regex hacking.
Here is a quick WikiSyntax demonstration.
To celebrate my endeavor to read Howard Zinn’s Why Southerners are Jerks: A People’s History of the United States, Michael and I have started designing a game called Bourgeoisie in the spirit of SimCity, basically what SimCity 2 through 4 could have been if Will Wright had more than two ideas to rub together.
The idea is to get a bunch of players to represent business owners, and they collude against each other to gain the upper hand in a diverse marketplace based around neighborhoods and cities.
An excerpt from the wiki, dealing with law enforcement:
Workers and players may perform illegal activities that attract the attention of law enforcement. For instance, a player may own a mafia syndicate that extorts protection monies from the nearby businesses of other players in exchange for not sending soldiers over to permanently silence the other players’ workers. This is just business. The victim in this case may either pay the protection or pay the cops to protect him by bribes or pushing through legislation against organized crime. The mafia boss, of course, may also bribe law enforcement to look the other way. This is the mechanism by which illegitimate (under the table) transactions are taxed.