[Rab] I trust that whatever celebrations caused you to chunder were well worth the consequences ;o)

[pen] Well... only just. I think it was largely due to some friends of a friend having just got back from Spain and insisting that I drink something that came out of a plastic container of the type you might use to package creosote. Maybe it was creosote. It certainly wasn't very drinkable. Nevertheless, I drank it... and when popping into my parents for coffee the next day, decided to stay not just for an hour but two days to recover. Yum. So if you see me on Saturday, remind me to avoid the noxious end of the beverage spectrum.

We missed you

*blushes*. Now go forth and get the dates changed on the front page!

Right, probably safe to come back in, then, and make again my suggestion for a new game that was lost the other day. Is anyone on for a round of Collective Consciousness Hangman, in which one person sets a conventional hangman problem, but only other players are allowed to reveal the letters or add lines to the scaffold.

Other players take guesses in turn as to which letters are in the word. The players who arbitrate over what letters are in the word are not allowed to confer. The shape of the word can only emerge through tacit mutual consent - via, in other words, the collective consciousness. Ask Kevan to explain more about this.

Playing it in Dan's chatroom the other day we realised it was a sort of metaphor for the designoid nature of evolution, akin to the passage from Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker where he uses "blind selection" to arrive at the Shakespearian phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL". Possibly I had eaten too much chocolate cake at that point, however.

Well, the Great Bear is looking a little bare, so could be a candidate for slaughtering. Sorry this suggestion disappeared into the ether before; I'll back it up right now as I'm feeling paranoid at the moment!

I meant to say I thought this was a good suggestion!

Yay! Today's Celebdaq rating: #130.

It's back! [rab] Nice work!

I've recently discovered that I can access all my favourite MC pages via WAP on my moblie phone. And as i get free WAP 24/7 I can access whenever and wherever I want. But the slight drawback is I can't actually contribute from it and as the pages are so tiny it takes a very long time to rread anything, so yet again its another of those 'you can look but you can't touch' situations I find rather frustrating.

I wondered about writing a WAP interface to these pages, but the documentation I looked at scared me... might not be beyond the realms of possibility though.

Seeing if Mr Cron is talking. Ignore.

*silent*

Does that mean the tert worked?

Kinda. Today's backup kinda semi-worked, but I thought Mr Cron was supposed to contact me if there was a problem, and he didn't... must investigate.

I'm seeing if Γ and γ actually produce gammas (gammae?)

I was seeing if this possible; the capital gamma (Γ, created by Γ) might come in handy in Collective Consciousness Hangman

Probably not on all browsers. (Thinks 'links').

Glad mc5 is returned - your hard work is much appreciated rab...
Celebdaq: I'm - 3154623 - currently ranked very low indeed :) - are we league forming?

blamelewis]Its great to see you with an id, there is a Celebdaq mini-league, the greatest challenge is to unseat evil_edna. Our hopes lie with snorgle and I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

Not one, but two posts to the server in as many minutes! Lawks!

[rab] Nice place you have here. I'm sad I haven't really had time to visit before, but I'm sure I shall be back.

For a second I thought we had an imposter in our midst, but if it looks like a Dunx, feels like a Dunx and tastes like a Dunx then I'm probably about to get arrested.

[Dunx] You want to be careful with that duck.

I'll get you, Inkspot *cackle*

Boo! Tiny divs again.

evil_edna]make way ... make way
By luck more than judgement, early in the week I sold all my Theakston and Rooney for 13,000 shares in Catalina Guirado, handsome payout of £7,000 and promptly bought some more. My other id with four high moving celebs yielded hardly anything, these I've sold for Becks.
Oh! ... and did I say I was No 1 in the mini league

And all the way into 5th place. Thank you, Dale Winton. :)

Whoah! Well done DrQ!

[Dunx] Hello, nice to see you here. I was wondering, it is possible to get a link from orange to here please? Cheers!

[Lib] Eminently possible, and even quite likely. Probably when I upload the Lock Cup pages, actually.

Just looking at the front page, shouldn't the "More Long Game" be the "Longer Game"?

Err... I'm sure I'm missing the obvious but how does one view leagues and suchlike - or are they an entirely informal affair - I had thought they were a section on the celbdaq site? Mystified of Moorgate

blamelewis]At the bottom of the page Click here for a pro trader version of this page.
Hopefully just below the names of your celebs you now have Create / edit personal leagues
In Leagues You Are In, click on Celebrity Mornington Crescent DrQ is a bit of a dark horse and is coming up on the rails.

Found it this morning - thanks for adding me - must have been blind last night!
Now to get off the bottom rung of the ladder!

Don't dare try the furcation game - but what fun - the Sound Charade made me chuckle (as did the psychic dialogue later on) - could I put in a tentative request for a new game of Sound Charades, at such time as a slot becomes available? I miss them!

For those passing their newsagent, take a gander at the front page of The News of the World, under Becks:my fear for thin Posh. (I know train delays are the cause of much grief but...) "David Beckham has admitted for the first time he feared for Victoria as her wait plummeted"

must spend money!

[Dunx, re More Long Game] It's because this site was originally called More Crescent before we settled on the mobile-phone-company-lookilikie mc⁵. Since the Morniverse is full of anachronisms, I can't see any reason to change the name.

Anyone know the state of play with !!York/"Mordac"? I think we're waiting 'til it shows up, before we start Sound Charades anywhere else.

I've commented on this at MCiOS, but I think either jim or Simons are the ones who are most 'in-the-know' about the state of play there. Btw, nice furcation, but can you explain the rules of Oh yes it is!. I have a vague recollection of this on York, but as I can't get to the archives at the moment, I can't study the form.

[DrQ] But Wayne Rooney didn't bring that great a dividend (as I found out). You'd have been better with Britney Spears or the Beckhams.

Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest.

[rab] Merely an observation rather than a criticism; it's always nice to have these things explained. I would agree that revisionism in this case would achieve little but consistency, and that's hardly important is it?

Consistency?

(That last comment to be read with a'raised-eyebrow' tone-of-voice)

Rules? ;:-)

(NB. !York looks fine to me (that should point to Game 829)

[Martha Farquar] Nice table, thanks!

I wish it would stop raining. I've got to walk home, ok, so it isn't far, but I don't own any protective clothing for such a downpour and some git has stolen my umbrealla. But then again if it wasn't raining there's still a high chance that i'd be here, as the other option is to revise for finals. Anyone got any good motivational/revision tips?

[MF] Are you angling for a pint too? [Lib] No motivational tips, but I know a welter of displacement activities. Prior to my finals, I arranged all my CDs according to spine colour. Bonus points if you can tell me how this is possible, bearing in mind that colours live in a 3-dimensional space. (Cue flerdle telling a different story).

[rab] Even if colour were a continuous 3D space, any finite collection of CD spines could still be sorted by colour because the space of CD colours wouldn't be continuous (indeed, because CDs themselves are discrete items, it seems to me that even an infinite collection of CD spines, coloured from a colour space of arbitrary dimension, would still be sortable by colour, but I must admit my grasp of such things is not what it used to be, if it ever was).

Yes, if you imagine a map of 3D colourspace, your CD spines are simply a series of points in that colourspace with close neighbours joined by a line of your devising. So your shelf represents a one-dimensional journey (as it were) in that 3D colourspace. If your CDs were reasonably well spaced out, then there are many many possible ways of doing this. I only know this because of my similar journeys through the three RGB dimensions when creating Acre Street moves. :)

[Martha Farquar] Very nice.

[matt, Projoy] Well yes, I suppose you could order colours by their hex rgb triplets, or Pantone number, or whatever. But that's not the way I chose to do it.

[Projoy] Pedantically, RGB hex colours for Acre Street moves aren't taken from a continuous space to start with, so it isn't quite the same problem, but on the other hand, it is. As you say there are any number of ways of connecting the dots and thus of sorting. Some of these may correspond to different ways of expressing colour in N dimensions (HSV, YUV, Lab, CMYK, etc), others may be more arbitrary. In the case of CD spines, the issue is more complex because they may be printed in multiple colours, and may include special inks or other production effects that don't fit into any such colour space (metallic, dayglo, holograms, fun fur, etc), which would have to be incorporated into any sorting scheme in some (probably arbitrary) way. [rab] So don't be coy -- how did you do it?

Oooh, have I posted in here before? Not sure. Anyway...
[rab, a coupla posts before, thanks for the cue] Apart from colours not existing, you're not too far off the mark, at least in the most classically accepted models...
And I have a collection of 50 novels (by the one author) arranged in colour order. The trickiest bit is knowing where to start, if you're going to arrange them simply linearly. Highly recommended for displacement.

[matt, flerdle] I give in and admit that I cheated slightly. Firstly I made use of the fact that I had two shelves, one for a grayscale (black to white) and one for colours ordered roughly according to the rainbow. The difficulties you mention arose:

• Spine not a single colour - resolved by choosing the 'dominant' colour.
• Shiny colours/trims - like gold and silver. Basically ignored, unless the entire spine was so made at which point I think I assumed the nearest matt alternative (like yellow for gold, or gray for silver).
• Colours not existing - like brown. See above. Pretend it's dark red.

So there you: Bob's yer Uncle - Job done. Interestingly I'm reminded of the time we discussed putting in for a grant to fund the development of a brown laser. However this plan was deemed to silly, and we opted to devise a photon accellerator instead.

[rab] Did it accelerate brown photons?

As for brown not existing - do you mean that just for light or for pigment? Does the Chancellor of the Exchequer also not exist?

My order jumps around a bit - some of the novels are very odd colours, but thankfully it's the one colour per book. I'm not perfectly happy with it but, given the colours they are, it's the best I could do at the time. Some of the names are misleading, but it sort of goes aqua-greenish-greenybrown-yellowish-orange-red-purplish (dark-light-dark)-darkblue-lightblue-grey-brownypinkygrey-pink-brown-chocolate.

[Dunx] What we call "brown" isn't spectral is perhaps what he meant. There are varieties of brown (reddish, yellowish) but it's generally considered to be a variation of yellow (dark) in most specification systems.

Actually, come to think of it, you have reddish browns and yellowish browns and greenish browns - but do you see bluish browns? I don't think so.

[flerdle, re remark to Dunx] Yes, I'm sure that's what I meant.

Oh, if only "nish" were a word...

[flerdle] I suppose. I still think there is a difference between subtractive colours (ie pigment) and additive colours (ie light) in this regard, though I would also readily concede that brown is almost as much an absence of any other describable colour as black - which is perhaps why you don't see bluish browns, because brown is essentially black with less blue in it.

Consider - when you mix paint to make brown, you start with yellow then add a bit of red and a small amount of blue. Another option is to just mix red and green, but I've also made brown by starting with red and adding black. There has to be some blue in there to take the colour away from being orange, but not enough to make the blue distinct: the blue in brown is like salt in vegetables.

I should perhaps clarify that I am not actually all that attached to the colour brown, and only own one pair of brown shoes.

[Dunx] Nothing to say about brown, but I do know a lovely Asian lady called Nish, so I suppose that almost makes it a word.

hmm. i think i will sell all my stock tomorrow and buy someone off that stupid i'm a celebrity get me out of here programme. that annoying one-nostrilled wierdly blonde bint.