10. May, 2002 - local happenings

• Sensational bribery scandal roared through Minneapolis City Hall in the 1920s. A little history to consider when thinking about current political scandals. [strib]
• CityLiving announces 5.99 percent interest rate for first-time homebuyers in Minneapolis. The only catch is that it's only for homes up to $175,591, which is about $50,000 short of what most houses I've looked at cost.
• 'Do Not Call' bill sent to governor. It's a start, I guess.[strib]
• CSS Browser Support: Basic Concepts. Contains all the compatibility information you could want. This one's worth bookmarking if you're building web pages using CSS. [zeldman]
• The other day, I realized that video-games that have high-score boards reward risky behavior. For example, on a computer game of hearts which plays just one round (four hands), if you shoot the moon (take all the scoring cards) twice and don't get clobbered too badly on the other two hands, you'll probably end up on the high-score board. So the best strategy is to try and shoot the moon every time. That's very different from real life, where you only want to attempt to shoot the moon when you've got a reasonable chance because when you fail, you've got a huge score (which is bad) and end up losing the game. On a video game, when you lose, you just drop another quarter, same as if you'd won. The only difference is that your name won't be on the high-score board, which it won't unless you engage in the risky behavior of shooting the moon.
  
  Is there some larger point here? I don't know. I just found it interesting that you want to use a completely different strategy against computer games because the rewards are different.

Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek. Last updated on Fri, 10 May 2002 07:07:51.