Alright

So this has been a sort of background thought in my head for a very long time (Decades). I think we have all brought this up from time to time as to the accuracy and statistical distribution of various d6. One of the points brought up in that discussion is the weight differential created by the pips having been drilled out. Ditto with the smaller dice like the Chessex bricks. If the results that he was able to come up with are legitimate, it is quite a sizable statistical skew. It would also bug me quite a bit if the claim is true that Chessex is aware of the anomalies and continues to produce quite statistically skewed dice for the economics of 33% more plastic mileage. GW on the other hand, shit I could believe them setting a known horribly faulty product out the door for half a penny a unit over 10K units. Cheap fuckers.

Skeptical side: Unfortunately, the reliability of the source is well... suspect and the statistical skew is huge! I mean, a post in a web forum is not exactly authoritative. At the very least I would like to see photo images of the die rolling aperatus and the empirical data. That would at least bring me a little closer to being convinced. Also, 29% of the dice came up '1's out of 144,000 die rolls? Holy shit, that seems way too skewed to believe. That means a '1' is on average TWICE as likely to come up then any other single number. This seems so egregiously outside the realm of possible unnoticed aberrations that it seems a farcicle. The poster states that he/she is an engineering teacher at ASU which, if true, would at least bring some credibility to the experiment. Unfortunately, there again is now way to confirm this. I mean this posting could very easily be seeded FUD from who knows what. A disgruntled gamer? A teenage prankster? Shit, this would be exactly the type of tripe my brother and his friends would cook up at 2am on a Saturday morning.

Trusting side: Again some of the information makes sense with regards to drilled pips and rounded edges. Unfortunately, the great wide Internet seems to have surprisingly very little information on the subject; however, a few sources do seem to confirm the higher accuracy of "high precision" dice in both the gambling and backgammon venues. Not to mention Casinos usually do their homework and stick to specific algorithms for very good reasons. So either Casino dice are either a oddity of tradition and mistrust or there is some truth to the claims of higher accuracy. Anyway, if you truly can make one 12mm die from the plastic saved on three dice as a result of corner rounding and pip voids, maybe there is something to this... If a die loses 33% of its pure cube volume as a result of pips and rounding, that has to have an effect if the material removed is not evenly distributed across the die's surfaces.

I will definitely be interested in seeing a more definitive study on this matter or at least a more legitimate venue. A note of interest... Since 40K and other GW games rely on rolling grips of dice at a time, would it not seem more practical from a real world simulation stand point if the experiment used handfuls of dice at a time and not isolated individual die in bins? How would all of the dice in a roll effect this statistical breakdown? Would the large quantity of dice negate or perhaps enhance the claimed variance from perfect random? That is unless this guy is like JP and those damn one die at a time rolls. Uggg! Also, I am curious how much of an effect this would have on the more standard sized 16mm dice as opposed to the 12mm Chessex brick dice. The pips are often proportionately smaller on 16mm dice and the rounding is less severe.

Little Squeezers... I used to like that stuff, but the last time i had a slice, ick! Just not the same as when I was 14. I gotta agree with Art, the homemade way is the way to go. Rude, yeah the TJs dough is pretty darn good and very convenient. I get it every so often. I totally feel where you are coming from. Put a pie in front of my face and I will eat until I am way too stuffed to the point of uncomfortable.

D>M>

y'all that play games where you win or lose by the dice... an interesting study coming out of this forum. I'm buying some square dice for sure.

"Little Squeezers" ahahah, perfect name. Actually, I do make my own pizza maybe once a week or so. Trader Joe's sells the pizza dough for about $1 dolla (and they have whole wheat, reg, and one that has herbs n spices in it) and I get that, rock the olive oil on the pan and top it up. Yeah, I do go a little loco with the cheese, but cheese is SO good. What was grossin me out about Little Meemor's was it was just BAD pizza, and I ate a LOT of it. And once I start eating pizza, not much that's gonna hold me back from going all out. SO GOOD.

ADD: Damn, I fryed up some Spam for lunch (well, not even Spam, a generic SPAM knockoff) and was eating it in little spamwitches when I decided to look up SPAM in wikipedia. Not very interesting, but it mentioned that in Gmail when you open your Spam folder they show you recipes for SPAM foodstuff! How long have I had gmail and never noticed that!? Like, WHOA.

Rood.. if you dig pizza.. just make your own for cheap!

Go by Walmart and pick up their pizza-shell pack for $4, comes with two large pie crusts. Get a jug of Prego to spoon onto it, brush on a little olive oil on the edge of the crust and throw your favorite toppings on it.. veggies, chicken, whatever. If you're trying to eat healthier, just don't throw down on the cheese. Think of it as a giant breadstick with marinara sauce already on it if that helps.. ;)

I like putting grilled chicken, shrimp and olives on mine. Tasty.

Some days I miss the ole greasy hut and little squeezers' pies.. but I don't miss the sick bloated after-glow. Hehe..

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck pizza! Specifically, Little Sneezor's Pizza. Was all set to have a healthy lunch when I saw "$5 Dollar Large Pizza ready to go!" Errrrrr, grabbed it, took it home, and BLECH... and I still ate a ton of it before just stopping myself.

Played CC last night. Fun time. Jon and gang you guys gotta hurry up and start playing it so's we can play each other Java style.

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Attention, people with more vowels than consonants in their name:

My attendance is iffy at the moment due to some scheduling issues for early in the week. Trying to work it out, but as things stand, I'm at about a 20-25% chance of making it for those dates unless I can get some sweet jumps from certain hard ass professors and whatnot.

(Did I mention that my corporate finance prof only gives an A grade for 97% or above? Jesus Camp!)

Hey Eric! After the gym I gave it another go and got you the Belf mask in about 5 minutes! All the sudden I hit 3 spawns and no one was around. Hearthed and mailed it to ya. Wear it out b4 u slang it for tonz of gpotatoes.
Here's my B.E.L.F. KULLROK wearin the Blood Elf Bandits Mask.

Attention people with big fat heads.

That is fine by me. Should I also expect certain people named after floor coverings from Asia using an antiquated colonial regional reference?

I presume that you are still vaguely familiar with the system, so I will send you the short version. AirBART from terminal to Oakland/Coluseum BART station ($2.00). Buy a BART ticket for $3.35. Take the BART train (SF, Daly City, Millbrae, or SFO bound) to Embarcadero. Exit BART portion of station and make way to SF MUNI portion of station through turnstiles ($1.50, coins only). Jump on an 'N' outbound. Get off at $ixt33nth Avenue. You know the rest I think.

No Kombat Drop Kommanders yet. I presume we will get to bust it out sometime soon.

Too bad about GenCon SoCal, not that the signs were not already there. Certainly the letter helps shed some light on things.

D>M>

Wow, a plethora of blogtastic delights awaits!

Yeah, Children of Men is great. Especially the scene in the warzone at the end. Don't want to pump it up to much but that was well worth seeing. The scenes of chaos all through the movie rang really true for me, too. Constant Gardener: I've been meaning to see this one based on the reviews. Now that somebody I know has seen it and liked it, I'll add it to the queue!

Aeryk: You should go to the convention on the 11th, 12th, and 13th instead. Because that week up to and until March 7, I will be stressed out as fuck and probably working 20 hours a day trying to get my goddamn project out the door. And after that I will be really happy and probably really drunk. Oh well! Pour one on the curb for me. What kind of convention will this be, anyway?

I haven't tried out Kombat: Kommander: Keurope yet. I have punched about half the chits and read the first two pages of rules... baby steps! I am pretty excited about it. Maybe Enron can help me with it since he has actually played it.

What I also picked up and am actually just as excited about is the expansion for Twilight Imperium (boo...). It addresses a common complaint of the base game by making it more of an out-and-out wargame with some Euro elements, instead of the other way around. It also provides a means to shave about an hour off the front of the game. All changes I'm excited about! Hacan, rrrrrowr!

Attention People Named Aaron

I humbly request the floor of your apartment to be used as sleeping arrangements for me March 4, 5, 6 as I will be attending a conference in SF. Also, as I am a moron and attended El Camino College, I request some guidance as to how to travel from a) Oakland Airport to Aaron's house, b) Aaron's House to Downtown SF, and c) back again.

Kewl.

Anyone played any Combat Commander yet? Comments?

Just saw "The Constant Gardener" the other day. I was very impressed! A very well made suspense/mystery movie. I went into it thinking it was going to be a pretty dry delivery / message about how we basically are using the African continent as our pharmecutical laboratory testing (and have been for 50-60 years, plus. See: Polio vaccine trials injecting Africans with SIV, creating HIV/AIDS epidemic.. but I digress.) but it was a very well crafted story. It utilized a lot of flashbacks and a split timeline to tell the before/after. I fully recommend this movie if you haven't seen it. One of the best I've ever seen.

Damn, just watched Children of Men. Really good! There's like a couple of pretty awesome and intense action scenes, and overall it's SO disturbing in that shiiit, feels like we could so end up livin in that world. Word is bond.
You know, it has NOTHING to do with Zombies, but watching it I kept thinking "this is what 28 Days Later should have been." Meaning, the pacing was just spot on. 28DL was cool but fucking dragggged oh my god, especially that whole segment in the military mansion!? Zombie fucks.

I have to say I was PRETTY sure that video was satire. What WASNT satire and kinda scary was the comments on that page. :(

This just in.. aparently the uber-homophobe is actually a deep cover satire. But, how sad it is that it's that believable in the first place? Sigh.

Also, went and watched some clips from Jesus Camp.. and wow. That is equally as scary, but it's actually real. Hence, why I guess it isn't all that suprising that we'd believe the "there's no backdoor to heaven" guy would be legit.

What a crazy world we live in.

That is some scary shit Art. I actually just got a DVD of this documentary called Jesus Camp. It is more horrifying than ay horror movie I have ever seen. I strongly reccomend it if you want to get angry about Evangelical Christians programming helpless children. It is indescribable.

This is so sad, it's funny. What's really troublesome is that I couldn't decide if this was a parody of homophobic gay bashing uber-Christian skit or not until I visited his homepage.. and it's not a parody. Wow.

Love the definition of 'irony' over on the upper right hand corner of the page (LOL):

Homophobic Christian Rock

Change, we fears it!

Google blogs wtf.

There is an open letter from Peter Adkinson at the SoCal Gencon website (RIP). Fairly interesting. Long story short, didn't make money, attendance dropped in the last year. All hail Creator.

I bought that game at Endgame. They mentioned the designer coming out sometimes. Apparently he lives in some Godawful backwater near Bakersfield? Anyway if I see him around I will definitely recommend that he add some Warmachine and Puerto Rico subsystems to the game. Also all the chits should be replaced with featureless wooden cubes. This is just my opinion but I strongly feel, it is right!