Category: Games

Sena and Jim Do Two Person Juggling Again!

Against all odds, Sena and I did what looked impossible the other day—Two Person 5 ball 2 Count Asynchronous Juggling. For some reason that was harder to learn than the first two person juggling trick we learned.

You can find only a stick figure GIF of how the trick is done on the web. It’s harder than it looks. It took us about 3 hours to get it right. It’s hard to appreciate how it’s done in a YouTube when the jugglers are shown from a side view. On the other hand, the balls fly in every direction and moving the camera closer might have resulted in knocking over the tripod.

It’s not a competition, even thought it reminds you of a table tennis match. You have to put the ball where you partner can catch it. The pattern is similar to the cascade in that on count 1 you throw a ball from one hand to the other and on the two count you pass a ball to your partner. The count is very important.

It’s very important to lob the balls up fairly high. This gives you enough time to catch what’s flying at you.

It’s great exercise. You can see why I wear safety goggles.

Thoughts on Jack Trice

I was outside doing yard work the day before yesterday and my neighbor across the street walked over to say hello. We got to talking about sports and football came up. His wife stopped watching football because it was so violent—but then switched to watching hockey. He wondered when the Iowa Hawkeye vs Penn State game was going to be on. No, I’m not going to discuss that any further.

Anyway, that led to my mentioning how brutal college football was back in 1923 when Jack Trice, Iowa State University’s first black athlete was killed on the field during a game with the University of Minnesota. My neighbor was incredulous. He’s in his 80’s and he’s never heard the story.

In fact, I had just learned about the whole Jack Trice story and commemoration event in his honor the day before that, only because Sena told me about it.

All this year long there has been a 100-year anniversary commemoration of Jack Trice, Iowa State University’s first African-American athlete. The program will culminate on October 8, 2023 with the closing ceremony.

Football was a rough game in that era—but rougher still because Trice was black. Many believe his injuries were deliberately and maliciously inflicted because of his race. It’s more than plausible. In 1997, the football stadium was renamed Jack Trice Stadium. It’s the only major college football stadium named for an African-American.

Sena and I moved to Ames in 1981 so that I could enroll in Iowa State University. I was so immersed in my studies that I never gave a thought to Jack Trice. I don’t remember the football field being named Jack Trice Field in 1984.

As I looked through the commemoration website, I wondered how it was possible for me to have ignored the story of Jack Trice while I was there.

I think it’s for the same reason I never knew anything about James Alan McPherson, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and who was teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop during the entire time I was in medical school, residency and a faculty member at The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics.

I was working hard. I finally found out about McPherson after reading a news item about a neighborhood park being named after him in 2021.

I should pay more attention. Anyway, Iowa State University did a tremendous job putting this commemoration event together.

We Are All Still Learning to Play Pong

I noticed an article the other day about Monash University in Australia getting funding for further research into growing brain cells onto silicon chips and teaching them how to play cribbage.

Just kidding, the research is for teaching the modified brain cells tasks. They succeeded in teaching them goal-directed tasks like how to play the tennis-like game Pong last year. You remember Pong from the 1970s? Shame on you if you don’t. On the other hand, that means you probably didn’t frequent any beer taverns in your hometown while you were growing up—or that you’re just too young to remember.

The new research program is called Cortical Labs and has hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding. The head of the program, Dr. Razi, says it combines Artificial Intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology to make programmable biological computing platforms which will take over the world and bring back Pong!

It’s an ambitious project. The motto of Monash University is Ancora Imparo, which is Italian for “I am still learning.” It links humility and perseverance.

There’s a lot of suspicion out there about AI and projects like the Pong initiative in Australia. It could eventually grow into a vast industry run by robots who will run on a simple fuel called vegemite.

Shame on you if you don’t know what vegemite is!

Anyway, it reminds me that I recently finished reading Isaac Asimov’s book of science fiction short stories, “I, Robot.”

The last two stories in the book are intriguing. Both “Evidence” and “The Evitable Conflict” are generally about the conflict between humans and AI, which is a big controversy currently.

The robopsychologist, Dr. Susan Calvin, is very much on the side of AI (I’m going to use the term synonymously with robot) and thinks a robot politician would be preferable to a human one because of the requirement for the AI to adhere to the 3 Laws of Robotics, especially the first one which says AI can never harm a human or allow a human or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.

In the story “Evidence,” a politician named Stephen Byerley is suspected of being a robot by his opponent. The opponent tried to legally force Byerley to eat vegemite (joke alert!) to prove the accusation. This is based on the idea that robots can’t eat. This leads to the examination of the argument about who would make better politicians: robots or humans. Byerley at one point asks Dr. Calvin whether robots are really so different from men, mentally.

Calvin retorts, “Worlds different…, Robots are essentially decent.” She and Dr. Alfred Lanning and other characters are always cranky with each other. The stare savagely at one another and yank at mustaches so hard you wonder if the mustache eventually is ripped from the face. That doesn’t happen to Calvin; she doesn’t have a mustache.

At any rate, Calvin draws parallels between robots and humans that render them almost indistinguishable from each other. Human ethics, self-preservation drive, respect for authority including law make us very much like robots such that being a robot could imply being a very good human.

Wait a minute. Most humans behave very badly, right down to exchanging savage stares at each other.

The last story, “The Evitable Conflict” was difficult to follow, but the bottom line seemed to be that the Machine, a major AI that, because it is always learning, controls not just goods and services for the world, but the social fabric as well while keeping this a secret from humans so as not to upset them.

The end result is that the economy is sound, peace reigns, the vegemite supply is secure—and humans always win the annual Pong tournaments.

Cribbage Pro Computer Game Demo on Brutal Level!

Sena and I enjoy cribbage. I sometimes practice using computer games. You might remember my video about Cribbage Classic last year. The other day I did a demonstration of gameplay on another game called Cribbage Pro. The developer is Fuller Systems, Inc.

It has 3 levels of difficulty: Standard (which you might call easy); Challenging; and Brutal. The developer of Cribbage Pro says that the Brutal level makes virtually no mistakes. It’s tough to beat. I won 3 in a row and then lost 2 before winning the 6th game. Fuller Systems, Inc. follows American Cribbage Congress (ACC) rules.

It’s a nice way to learn cribbage, play casual mode, or play against others on line in multiplayer mode, although I’ve never done the latter.

You can learn a lot about cribbage from playing Cribbage Pro. It has a tutorial and numerous other teaching resources for learning how to play either just for fun or with the goal of playing in tournaments.

It has a Muggins Rule Mode, which lets you count your scores manually and challenge the computer if it makes an error in its own scoring. Then you pick up the difference in score yourself. I’ve read that some cribbage experts say Muggins is mainly for people who like to argue. I’ve tried to play Muggins on Cribbage Pro, but frankly could never understand the procedure. However, among the numerous settings available you can count manually without activating the Muggins Rule.

Cribbage Pro is available for many platforms. It’s free if you can put up with ads. I paid $5 to get rid of ads. But the game itself has popups to remind you to either register to play in multiplayer mode or to rate the game. I’ve given it a favorable rating.

Thoughts on Gaming Disorder

I just read an interesting article in the latest print issue of Clinical Psychiatry News, Vol. 51, No. 5, May 2023: “Gaming Disorder: New insights into a growing problem.”

This is news to me. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual lists it as an addiction associated with the internet primarily. It can cause social and occupational dysfunction, and was added to the DSM-5-TR in 2013 according to my search of the web. I’m not sure why I never heard of it. Or maybe I did and just failed to pay much attention to it.

There are studies about treatment of the disorder, although most of them are not founded in the concept of recovery. The research focus seems be on deficits. One commenter, David Greenfield, MD, founder and medical director of the Connecticut-based Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, said that thirty years ago, there was almost no research on the disorder. His remark about the lack of focus on recovery was simple but enlightening, “Recovery means meaningful life away from the screen.”

Amen to that.

That reminded me about the digital entertainment available thirty years ago. In 1993, the PC game Myst was released. Sena and I played it and were mesmerized by this simple, point and click adventure game with intricate puzzles.

Of course, that was prior to the gradual evolution of computer gaming into massive multiplayer online role-playing and first-person shooters and the like. It sounds like betting is a feature of some of these games, which tends to increase the addictive potential.

Sena plays an old time Scrabble game on her PC and other almost vintage age games. I have a cribbage game I could play on my PC, but I never do. I much prefer playing real cribbage with Sena on a board with pegs and a deck of cards. We also have a real Scrabble game and we enjoy it a lot. She wins most of the time.

This is in contrast to what I did many years ago. I had a PlayStation and spent a lot of time on it. But I lost interest in it after a while. I don’t play online games of any kind. I’m a little like Agent K on Men in Black II when Agent J was unsuccessfully trying to teach him how to navigate a space ship by using a thing which resembled a PlayStation controller:

Agent J: Didn’t your mother ever give you a Game Boy?

Agent K: WHAT is a Game Boy?

Nowadays, I get a big kick out of learning to juggle. You can’t do that on the web. I like to pick up the balls, clown around, and toss them high, which occasionally leads to knocking my eyeglasses off my head. I usually catch them.

Juggling is a lot more fun than playing Myst. I would prefer it to any massive multiplayer online game. I never had a Game Boy.

Where is Juggling and Foosball on the Homunculus?

I saw an interesting article published in Nature about the homunculus being outdated because of a new brain MRI study indicating that there’s a mind-body connection between the motor cortex and neural networks controlling planning and thought. There’s a mouthful for you.

It makes me wonder about a few things. For example, can I improve my juggling skills simply by thinking about it? Actually, I spend quite a bit of time both practicing juggling and thinking about it.

Sena has recently started thinking about and practicing juggling. And I made a little video about the cascade practice in an effort to help her get unstuck from the 3-ball toss and catch at the 1-2-3 and catch stage. It’s a slow-motion video of me demonstrating the 1-2-3-4 and catch stage. It’s intended to help her visualize how to let go of that pesky ball in her non-dominant hand after the third toss.

The implications of the new brain study for helping patients recover from the effects of stroke are fascinating.

It reminded me of the game foosball. What do you mean you never heard of foosball? It’s a table football game which was enormously popular in the 1970s. You could probably find one in any bar, along with pong, a sort of electronic table tennis game that was also popular in the ‘70s.

The foosball table was usually located at the back of the bar, across the mandatory squishy carpet and kitty corner from the bathroom.

You could never get on the foosball table at one of the local bars in my hometown. It was always monopolized by a gang of local tough guys who would slam the ball so hard into the goal slot you’d swear it would burst through the end of the table.

In a way, it was a good thing foosball occupied those guys. It distracted them from what they liked to do most of the time, which was to bash anyone who got in their way. I think foosball might have cut down on the number of bar fights in small towns.

There was this guy I used to work with who told me stories about bar fights, some of which he enthusiastically got involved in—when he was younger, of course. Somebody named Stumpy (or maybe Stubby?) was a friend of his who had a wooden leg and never missed a chance to mix it up despite his prosthesis. When a fight broke out in a bar, Stumpy would just back into a corner, brace the wooden leg against a wall and whale away at anyone dumb enough to throw a punch at him.

But when foosball tables got installed, the tough guys tended to take out their aggression by slamming balls. You could always spot a foosball gang. They braced themselves, one leg back and one knee sort of braced against the table. They could twirl the little men with great skill and could fake, pass, and finally kick the ball like a rocket into the goal. It was often sort of a grim spectacle. They didn’t look like they were enjoying themselves so much as making believe they were tearing people apart limb from limb.

I’m not sure where the foosball neural network is in the brain, but I’m pretty sure it’s on the hands of the homunculus in the motor cortex.

That’s also probably where the juggling network is.

Jim on a Winning Streak on the Bigfoot Cribbage Board

Ever since we got the Bigfoot cribbage board, I’ve been winning. If you believe in lucky streaks, I’m on one. However, Sena wins most of the time when we play on the jumbo cribbage board.

Is it the Bigfoot cards? Is it the Bigfoot pajamas? Sena was so overwhelmed she put her house slippers on backwards.

My reward was to put together more knockdown furniture.

Christmas Day 2022 Antics!

Christmas Day at our house was a lot of fun. I got a coffee mug that specifies the importance of cribbage. Sena got a throw that sort of complements the throw she got me on our anniversary.

Those throws add a lot to the ambience in the room. And the coffee mug really speaks to the “importanter feature” of cribbage in our life nowadays.

This was the one of the best Christmases ever. We’re up to our ears in gratitude. And that’s the most importantest thing of all.

Snow Day!

I wrote this post yesterday because I didn’t know whether or not we’d have a power outage because of high winds (up to nearly 50 mph) predicted for the Arctic Blast this week.

When we’re not outside scooping our walkway and driveway, we’ll probably be playing cribbage or, God forbid, Scrabble (which I always lose).

We’ve heard about the renewed interest in board games, one of them being Scrabble. We recently found an old Scrabble game at Old Capitol Town Center (formerly Old Capitol Mall). It’s Super Scrabble and it was on sale for $50 at a hole-in-the-wall shop lacking an entrance sign. The high price is because it’s a collectible relic from the past, although a quick internet search revealed it was made in 2004—hardly an antique. You can find them on eBay for $30. On the other hand, you can find them going for as much as $179 at an on-line store called Mercari.

We’ll also probably take a break by munching on our Christmas cookies.

I’m all set for the freezing weather. I’ve got my thermal underwear out and sweats out, along with my heavy gloves.

The wind will probably make shoveling pointless at times. We’ll probably bag it and then I’ll practice the juggling behind the back trick—another pointless activity.

Sasquatch Cribbage Board Game!

Today was the inaugural game on our new Sasquatch cribbage board. It’s a very handsome item, made of walnut by the maker, David Sprouse, in Ferndale, Washington. His website is 3MoonsMakerSpace and he markets the boards on Etsy. It was delivered only a couple of weeks ago. It came with pegs and deck of cards. It has a hole in the back for hanging on a wall, if you want.

We played the game to 61 just for the sake of brevity since the point was to show off the board itself.

I don’t know really what to make of Bigfoot stories. Many claim to have spotted the creature way out in places like Washington state and elsewhere. There are reports of a few sightings even in Iowa.

I wonder why you never find corpses or even fossils of Sasquatch? Probably because extraterrestrials beam them up too quickly in order to harvest the fur for throw rugs for their space ships. The usual problem, of course, is getting the smell of beef jerky out of them.