Wednesday, October 6, 2021 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

[seaborgium]

Casey successfully rang in three times

Of course, he had four rights, one of them being a DD.

*she

[Leander]

Is there a topic that Matt has shown any blind spots with? I can’t think of any. He tends to stay away from pop culture a bit, but I think that is him strategically looking for DD which aren’t typically hidden in those categories. When he goes to them, he tends to be rather strong.

It is amazing that he isn’t yet at Ken Jennings’ halfway point.

Visual clues. He squints like he needs glasses and his opponents have done well when there are pictures.

Also, fashion clues have largely been absent from his run. I think he missed a few that showed up in non-fashion categories.

He missed a few clues about flags last season.

He also missed a few about boxing in a Muhammed Ali category a while ago.

[Robert K S]

Casey successfully rang in three times

Of course, he had four rights, one of them being a DD.

*she

LOL, I did watch this game and knew that. I screwed it up anyway, because I had male childhood friend of the same first and last name. I don't think I've used my Casey's name as a security question answer yet.

[Robert K S]

And you were the next poster.
viewtopic.php?p=362490#p362490

About that, I never was able to watch the full credits video you posted because it wasn't loading, no matter what I did. I was able to see at least part of Naomi Slodki's name from the preview images that came up as I scrolled across the video timeline.

[mikebdoss]

Neil Gaiman helped me out with today's FJ, as he had an issue of Sandman called "Thermidor", and it had stuck in my brain since college.

I was very impressed with Matt running the Bible category, especially the $600, $800 and $1,000 clues. Those seemed super tough to me.

[Robert K S]

Today was an interesting game if you like seeing Matt achieve unique personal bests. Matt absolutely dominated today's Double Jeopardy! round on the buzzer

It's also worth noting that Matt did not lock-clinch or lock-superclinch this game as early as others. This game was lock-clinched at clue 17 and lock-superclinched at clue 19. By comparison to his better games (clinchwise):

#8454 14/17 Game 7
#8458 16/17 Game 11
#8477 14/17 Game 30
#8481 14/17 Game 34
#8483 17/19 Game 36 (this game)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Matt's closest game to date was his first one, which was against a 3xer, Josh Saak. The scores going into Final were $20,200 (Matt) vs. $19,800 (Josh) vs. $12,400 (Elizabeth Devereaux).

[tddeveryday]

I'm not saying that was Matt's best performance ever, although I think it's up there, just that there was an extremely long series of clues in DJ! where it was Matt ringing in, over and over and over with barely any interruption.

[Robert K S]

I'm not saying that was Matt's best performance ever, although I think it's up there, just that there was an extremely long series of clues in DJ! where it was Matt ringing in, over and over and over with barely any interruption.

Yep! Not arguing with your observation. Just pointing out that there are interesting different ways of analyzing game dominance

[Sherm]

28 questions that could be rung in on in DJ. 2 were left go by all the contestants. That leaves 26 times questions were rang in on.

Matt rang in first on 23. Casey got 3. David got shut out.

That speaks for itself. Of the high value clues in DJ, Matt got 14 out of 15 on the buzzer. He was also 5 of 5 at the $800 level. He will never lose if he can keep doing that.

[DBear]

Significant amount of trash this time. Got darts, twee, superconductor & saturnine.
Couldn't get parvenus, looking at nouveau-riche & debutante.
1991 best Metal Grammy:. At least it wasn't Jethro Tull that time
Big clues:

[opusthepenguin]

But then again, I am obsessed with the French Republican calendar — it's quite possibly my second-favorite historical topic after the papacy. Converting the calendar and clock into a decimal system was absolutely brilliant.

They should've left time the way it was and switched the numbering system to duodecimal. The base 10 system sucks. An hour divides into half, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth without needing fractions. Change it to "metric" and you lose that flexibility. If we had a base 12 numbering system, we'd retain the flexibility AND have all the benefits of the metric system. Instead they change timekeeping to take on the INconvenient aspects of the metric system. They could've had a 10 (12 in base 10) hour day with 100 (120 in base 10) minutes to the hour. Boneheads.

[Linear Gnome]

They could've had a 10 (12 in base 10) hour day with 100 (120 in base 10) minutes to the hour. Boneheads.

Wouldn't each hour have 144 minutes?

[opusthepenguin]

I was very impressed with Matt running the Bible category, especially the $600, $800 and $1,000 clues. Those seemed super tough to me.

Yeah, those were some good pulls, especially for 2021. Back in the early 90s I think they could've had more expectation of that level of Bible knowledge as basic. Romans was negbait for "Paul preaches in Rome," but only if you don't know Romans is one of Paul's letters and if the letter is from Paul to the Romans, then Rome is the one place he ain't.

Haman = Esther feels like it's still common knowledge in Jewish circles, and the title's the same in Hebrew so you don't even have to remember the crazy goy name for the book. Outside Jewish circles, it feels like a fairly deep cut.

"Jericho falls to the Israelites" is gettable if you remember that "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho" and feel like risking $1000 that this means the event happened in the book of Joshua. It's a short clue. Not much time to work through it and make up your mind to pull the trigger. Feels like the kind of clue where many contestants would get it on a DD but far fewer would decide to ring in.

[opusthepenguin]

They could've had a 10 (12 in base 10) hour day with 100 (120 in base 10) minutes to the hour. Boneheads.

Wouldn't each hour have 144 minutes?

D'oh! That was a gross error on my part.

[Linear Gnome]

They could've had a 10 (12 in base 10) hour day with 100 (120 in base 10) minutes to the hour. Boneheads.

Wouldn't each hour have 144 minutes?

D'oh! That was a gross error on my part.

I had thought about appending "unless I'm making a gross miscalculation" to my reply but wasn't sure if the tone would come across correctly. Thanks.

[Woof]

But then again, I am obsessed with the French Republican calendar — it's quite possibly my second-favorite historical topic after the papacy. Converting the calendar and clock into a decimal system was absolutely brilliant.

They should've left time the way it was and switched the numbering system to duodecimal. The base 10 system sucks. An hour divides into half, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth without needing fractions. Change it to "metric" and you lose that flexibility. If we had a base 12 numbering system, we'd retain the flexibility AND have all the benefits of the metric system. Instead they change timekeeping to take on the INconvenient aspects of the metric system. They could've had a 10 (12 in base 10) hour day with 100 (120 in base 10) minutes to the hour. Boneheads.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, base 10 is better unless you have 12 fingers Since the only time measures that have any physical meaning are days and years, I see no problem with days of 10 hours, hours of 100 minutes and minutes of 100 seconds. Who cares if they don’t evenly divide by 3 or 6? Months are more problematic since 365 factors into 5 and 73. 12 months of 30 days with an end of the year 5 day “New years break” has some merit. And leap years and centuries would have to maintained.

But all this is pie in the sky since we live in a country so tradition-bound that we can’t get rid of the penny or the dollar bill.

[opusthepenguin]

But then again, I am obsessed with the French Republican calendar — it's quite possibly my second-favorite historical topic after the papacy. Converting the calendar and clock into a decimal system was absolutely brilliant.

They should've left time the way it was and switched the numbering system to duodecimal. The base 10 system sucks. An hour divides into half, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth without needing fractions. Change it to "metric" and you lose that flexibility. If we had a base 12 numbering system, we'd retain the flexibility AND have all the benefits of the metric system. Instead they change timekeeping to take on the INconvenient aspects of the metric system. They could've had a 10 (12 in base 10) hour day with 100 (120 in base 10) minutes to the hour. Boneheads.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, base 10 is better unless you have 12 fingers Since the only time measures that have any physical meaning are days and years, I see no problem with days of 10 hours, hours of 100 minutes and minutes of 100 seconds. Who cares if they don’t evenly divide by 3 or 6? Months are more problematic since 365 factors into 5 and 73. 12 months of 30 days with an end of the year 5 day “New years break” has some merit. And leap years and centuries would have to maintained.

But all this is pie in the sky since we live in a country so tradition-bound that we can’t get rid of the penny or the dollar bill.

Not switching to 12 fingers was another mistake the French made. An alternative which would work pretty well is switching to base 6. You count up to 5 on one hand then for the next number you close those fingers and extend one finger on the other hand. One-zero--10 which is 6 in base 6 reasonably efficient.

What do you mean who cares if they don't evenly divide by 3 or 6? School and conference schedulers do. Anyone who's trying to apportion time evenly among various events. You didn't mention dividing by 4, but that may be the most important. Lots of people keep track of quarter hours. (I suppose it wouldn't help my case to point out that attorneys are among them, so I'll just keep my mouth shut there.) Yet even that simple task is beyond a base 10 time system to accomplish without involving fractions or decimals. It's a bad system. Metric in general is good for science where one measures real world phenomena and decimals are inevitable if you want precision. Metric is less good for things like architecture and cooking--basically anything human-created where one may want to divide things easily into same-sized portions.

The year is definitely problematic. There's just no easy getting around the awkward ratio between the number of rotations and a single revolution. If we could speed the revolution up slightly so that a year is 360 days, that would be better. 12 months of 30 days each. You still can't divide the months into quarters, but oh well. Maybe 6 months of 60 days? But then you can't divide the year into quarters, and that's probably the more useful feature. If we have to keep the 365/6 day year, we could have the 12 thirty-day months and schedule 5 "free days", one at the end of each even-numbered month (including December in a leap year, otherwise not). These days would not belong to any month and would be holidays.

Is it really tradition that keeps us from ditching the penny and the dollar bill? I thought, especially for the penny, it was lobbyists from the zinc and copper industries. But maybe you're right. I wonder how much money those industries would lose if we phased out the penny and dollar bill at the same time. We'd then switch to dollar coins which would be bigger than pennies but not 100 times bigger, so it's still a net reduction in metal use. I suspect part of the problem is that we're too big and too stubborn/independent to be governed effectively in a top down manner. Canada made the switch, but they're generally more open to being governed from the top and they've only got the population equivalent of California to deal with.

[Volante]

But then again, I am obsessed with the French Republican calendar — it's quite possibly my second-favorite historical topic after the papacy. Converting the calendar and clock into a decimal system was absolutely brilliant.

They should've left time the way it was and switched the numbering system to duodecimal. The base 10 system sucks. An hour divides into half, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth without needing fractions. Change it to "metric" and you lose that flexibility. If we had a base 12 numbering system, we'd retain the flexibility AND have all the benefits of the metric system. Instead they change timekeeping to take on the INconvenient aspects of the metric system. They could've had a 10 (12 in base 10) hour day with 100 (120 in base 10) minutes to the hour. Boneheads.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, base 10 is better unless you have 12 fingers Since the only time measures that have any physical meaning are days and years, I see no problem with days of 10 hours, hours of 100 minutes and minutes of 100 seconds. Who cares if they don’t evenly divide by 3 or 6? Months are more problematic since 365 factors into 5 and 73. 12 months of 30 days with an end of the year 5 day “New years break” has some merit. And leap years and centuries would have to maintained.

But all this is pie in the sky since we live in a country so tradition-bound that we can’t get rid of the penny or the dollar bill.

Not switching to 12 fingers was another mistake the French made. An alternative which would work pretty well is switching to base 6. You count up to 5 on one hand then for the next number you close those fingers and extend one finger on the other hand. One-zero--10 which is 6 in base 6 reasonably efficient.
...

Is it really tradition that keeps us from ditching the penny and the dollar bill? I thought, especially for the penny, it was lobbyists from the zinc and copper industries. But maybe you're right. I wonder how much money those industries would lose if we phased out the penny and dollar bill at the same time. We'd then switch to dollar coins which would be bigger than pennies but not 100 times bigger, so it's still a net reduction in metal use. I suspect part of the problem is that we're too big and too stubborn/independent to be governed effectively in a top down manner. Canada made the switch, but they're generally more open to being governed from the top and they've only got the population equivalent of California to deal with.

Yeah, the penny is the zinc lobby really. Dollar bill is public stubbornness. (Same with switching to plastic currency a la AU)

And as for counting to 12, use your thumb to count phalanx, and only one hand required!

[Robert K S]

Plastic currency is really the worst though

[This Is Kirk!]

Plastic currency is really the worst though

I kind of like it. Nothing worse than rumpled old paper currency.