Interesting Stuff

Well, earlier this week, I took the Mensa entrance exam. It went quite well, and I’m fairly confident that I got in. However, I was surprised at how quickly I had to work! I finished all of the sections, but unlike other bubble-sheet tests, I didn’t have any time at the end to check my answers. For the SATs, the ACT, even parts of the AP tests, I had quite a while at the end to go over my work. Here, I had none of that. Several sections, I was still filling in the final bubble when I ran out of time. Eek! Well, I’ll find out if I’m in Mensa in about a month (though as I said, I’m pretty confident I’m in).

Speaking of Mensa, on Friday, Dad, Marc, and I went to a Mensa meeting open to the public as well (though they’re both members already). It was a lot of fun! There were some absolutely fascinating people there. Unfortunately no one my age, though there were a couple younger teenagers and about 5 people in their late 20s. Still, even talking to the old people was pretty neat. This is the first group of people I’ve met who actually can have a discussion about The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which was pretty neat. I still say the book’s premise is BS, but as someone there noted, this is the first time anyone has really looked at the topic. Cut them some slack, and we’ll figure it out eventually (for those of you who don’t know, the book pretty much talks about how a few thousand years ago, people supposedly spoke to gods and spirits on a regular basis. Just after this, these sorts of things stopped, and human skull structure changed slightly. The author conjectures that the corpus collosum, which transfers messages between the left and right halves of the brain, had recently formed, and before then, thoughts from one half of the brain were interpreted by the other half as disembodied voices, presumably from spirits. My argument against this is that this change in the corpus collosum, if it happened, would have to happen pretty much simultaneously all over the world, across different cultures on different continents who had not yet discovered each other, and this is unheard of from an evolutionary/genetics point of view, in which change comes from small, isolated populations.). Wow, that was a really long parenthetical aside. However, the Mensa thing was really cool. The thing that is open to the public, called First Friday, is the first Friday of every month, at the Officer’s Club at Fort Snelling, from 8:00 till late-ish. ‘Tis $5 for non-Mensa members to get in, and it’s pretty great.

Tonight, Jim and I played bridge again. Wednesdays are apparently quite popular here, as we had an 11-table Mitchell game, and that was considered small. We came in at a lackluster 7th place, but it’s not so bad, since we were nowhere close to getting Master Points (I can’t stand it when a single mistake cost me a significantly better score). I was introduced to the “cooperative double,” which Frank Stewart (national bridge columnist) hates. However, it kind of makes sense – it’s almost a penalty double, but asks partner what he or she thinks as well. Here was the auction – I open 1D, Jim replies 1H, I bid 1NT (I was 4333 with 14 HCP’s). Jim passes, and the guy on my right doubles. OK, I figure it’s for penalty, since the standard way to play is that any double over notrump is for penalty. However, my left-hand opponent then bids 2C. Jim doubles at that point, which I interpreted, erroneously, as take-out. What he actually meant was, “do you think they can make that?” As I had Ace-Queen-Ten in clubs, I should have passed, but instead I devalued my queen as being off-side, and bid 2H. Jim made it, but it was a below-average board for us. So, that’s the “cooperative double.” I can understand Frank Stewart’s dislike of it, since it is a rather ambiguous bid, but at the same time, it’s an easy way to keep the bidding open.

On a related note, I looked into Humpty Dumpty and Through the Looking Glass and bidding for Lily. She’s right – Alice never plays bridge with Humpty Dumpty, and he does not talk about doubles. However, bridge players have adopted his famous line (“When I use a word [or a bid], it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”), and refer to such ambiguous and confusing bidding (like the above cooperative double) as “Humpty Dumpty bidding.” Huh. You learn something new every day.

Having found something new for today, I have a lot of news for today – during the Mesozoic Era, it appears that not only did dinosaurs eat small mammals, but some mammals ate small dinosaurs.

In more important news, the US has wrapped up its search for WMDs in Iraq, thus confirming in my mind that the current occupation and war is completely unjustified. Unfortunately, it looks like Iraq won’t be able to have its scheduled election at the end of the month, and current estimates seem to put the length of our occupation around 10 years or so. This has the potential to be worse than Vietnam, though from the apathy of the public, no one seems to care at all. No one seems to remember that before the war, we witnessed the largest anti-war protests of all time, both here in the US, and in the world as a whole. No one seems to remember that the president swore up and down that they had concrete intelligence indicating that Iraq was developing a nuclear program, which we have now given up hope of ever finding. No one seems to remember that there were also supposedly concrete ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which again, we have given up hope of ever finding. We are sending undertrained, underequipped soldiers to unjustly occupy a country for the next decade, and no one seems to really care much about it. Unfortunately, I fear that at this point, pulling out would be more disasterous than staying there. Either way, I don’t think we’ve made the situation any better.

Finally, the Supreme Court has struck down laws that give mandatory sentences for crimes, thus giving the responsibility of sentencing back to the judges. I think this is fantastic in principle, though it shouldn’t have much of an impact in the courts.

OK. That was far too long. Hopefully, I will eventually get the hang of shorter updates more often, rather than my sporadic and voluminous prating.