Self-kibbitzing and other forms of cheating in bridge

I wrote recently about cheating in online chess tournaments. I no longer play chess but do play bridge quite a lot and with the pandemic have done so online, playing in tournaments frequently. Bridge has many more opportunities for cheating than chess, even when playing in physical space with all four players around the same table. This is because chess is played alone and the board is visible to everyone so that the only way to cheat is for a player to secretly get information from a superior player or a chess engine.

But bridge is a game involving partners where the cards held by each are hidden from the others during the bidding process and just one player’s cards are exposed on the table once play has started. So knowing what cards other players have is very helpful. The bidding process consists of conveying information about one’s cards using bidding conventions that have to be shared with opponents using a ‘convention card’ so that opponents know what your bids mean. If one uses a bidding convention that is not standard, you are expected to alert the opponents and, if asked, explicitly tell them what the bid means.
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The ship stuck in the Suez Canal

A container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal has created a huge backlog of shipping traffic.

The ship is 1312 feet long and the portion of the canal it was going through was only about 1000 feet wide so it was essential that it go really straight. But it appears that due to high winds and poor visibility due to a sand storm, it did not and got wedged. Now it requires over 700,000 cu. ft of sand to be removed from the bank to free the ship.

I have sailed through the Suez Canal on an ocean liner twice when I was a young boy, going from England to Sri Lanka. I still remember the weird feeling it generated because in certain sections, the canal was so very narrow that when you looked at the two sides of the ship from somewhere in the interior, you would see just the desert on either side moving past, so you had the illusion that the ship was traveling on land. You had to go to the railing and look over to see water below.

The other legal shoe drops

Dominion Voting Systems has hit Fox News with a $1.6 billion lawsuit for defamation for its wild allegations against the company that it engaged in massive election fraud to deprive Trump of the presidential election victory. It had earlier sued Trump’s erstwhile lawyer Sidney Powell for $1.3 billion.

The company alleged that the network “recklessly disregarded the truth” and participated in a disinformation campaign against it because “the lies were good for Fox’s business.”

n the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump falsely asserted that the election had been rigged against him. His allies promoted outlandish conspiracy theories about Dominion to support Trump’s false claims.

“Fox took a small flame” of disinformation and “turned it into a forest fire,” Dominion said in its lawsuit.

“The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawsuit added. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”
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In its lawsuit, Dominion specifically mentioned hosts Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro, three of whom were named as defendants in Smartmatic’s lawsuit. Fox is the sole defendant in this suit.

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We need more of this

Some congressional Democrats have introduced a bill to shift some of the spending for a new weapons system to other uses that actually help people.

Congressional Democrats are introducing legislation to transfer $1bn in funding from a controversial new intercontinental ballistic missile to the development of a universal Covid vaccine.

The Investing in Cures Before Missiles (ICBM) Act, introduced in the House and Senate on Friday, would stop funding on the proposed new missile, known as the ground-based strategic deterrent (GBSD) which is projected to cost a total of $264bn over its projected lifespan, and discontinue spending on a linked warhead modification program.

Instead, the life of the existing US intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minuteman III, would be extended until 2050, and an independent study commissioned on how best to do that.
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‘Milkshake Duck’ and the perils of internet fame

I had not heard of the term ‘milkshake duck’ until yesterday. This is not surprising since I am always way behind the trends in the fast-moving world of social media. If I blog about some social media phenomenon, you can be pretty sure that it is already a few years old and may even have passed into oblivion, replaced by something that I have not heard about as yet.

The term ‘milkshake duck’ apparently originated in 2016 with this tweet.


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How can they be so dense?

The NCAA, the body that governs US athletics at the college level, has long had an unsavory reputation of enabling the exploitation of students so that everyone profits handsomely from certain college sports except for the athletes themselves. You would think that such a big operation would have at least the minimum awareness of public relations. So it is hard to explain how they could not have known that the way they treated the women’s teams in the college basketball tournament compared to the way they treated men would undoubtedly come to light and show how much they devalue women’s sports.

Samantha Bee described what happened.

What happened when progressives won Democratic party elections in Nevada

Akela Lacy and Ryan Grim write about how the Democratic party establishment in Nevada reacted after a slate of progressives won every post in the state party leadership races. The outgoing party establishment, rather than conceding gracefully, reacted in a very Trumpian manner.

NOT LONG AFTER Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.

She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.
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Lord of the Flies was wrong about human nature

Most people have read this famous 1954 book by William Golding or have seen at least one of the 1963, 1973, or 1990 films based on it or have read about it. It is widely used as a text in US high schools. It tells a chilling story about how a group of British schoolboys marooned on a uninhabited island slowly degenerate into monsters, to the extent of torturing and killing. It is of course fiction but has been taken as a cautionary tale about the darkness of human nature and what we can become without the constraints of society, that often leads to an authoritarian view of what society needs to do to keep these terrible human impulses in check.

But it appears that what that story reveals is not about human nature but of Golding’s view of human nature.
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