Who's the Center of the Hollywood Universe?

You probably know about the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, which shows how every Hollywood actor can be linked to the Footloose star.

But Bacon isn't your best choice if you want to find someone who, on average, has a smaller distance between connections. See http://oracleofbacon.org/center.html for an analysis that hunts down the true center of Hollywood.

And okay, any thoughts on who the worst is? The analyst gives the connections, so you know the most obscure actor has been in one movie with just one other person.

Sling

Via Wired, a well-done puzzle game (http://sling.ezone.com/game.php) where you control a slingshot-like ball of slime on a quest to rescue its fellow slime denizens.

Ze Frank Takes On Another "the show"

Ze Frank spots an angry rant (a joke, one suspects) about how Ze Frank "stole" the title "the show" from someone in the Midwest. Ze Frank responds in full schoolyard glory. Read the comments on the original video (which requires a YouTube account) for another round of laughter.

TSA Hacking

This amusing post on boing boing informs its readers that a gun in your checked luggage will give you all sorts of exemptions from the normal TSA process, and virtually ensures that your luggage will get to you at the end of a trip. The original author transports his expensive camera equipment in checked luggage, because it gets locked up tight by the TSA itself.

Probably not the consequence they had in mind.

Episodic Gaming

Slate features a look at episodic video games, which have intrigued me ever since I first heard of the concept. You the player buy "installments" in a game's story, frequent updates that wouldn't take long to play on their own. The article makes the point that the average gamer, now about my age, has little time for the tens of hours of gameplay required by the best modern titles.

I'd add that we also pick them up less frequently. I took my DS, fitted with A Link to the Past, onto our European plane flights, but because I hadn't played since, well, my last big plane flight, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do. I had to look up a walkthrough when I returned to try to piece together my mission. That's probably why "quick games" have done so well on XBox Live. It's easy to play Tetris for a few minutes between household tasks.

The common wisdom says that games have become more like movies, but I'm looking forward to an era where they're more like TV shows. Perhaps game companies need to start hiring TV's best writers. After all, the Slate article asks, "And how do you distill a game about a war against a demon horde that can only end when you slam shut the gates of hell?" without noting that Buffy the Vampire Slayer did just that. Several times, in fact.

Bohnanza!

While in France, Melissa and I taught my mom and her husband to play Bohnanza!, the über-popular game from Germany. We had never opened our copy, which we bought after our friends Pavel and Kathleen introduced it to us. (We had to re-learn the rules as we taught it.)

The quick-paced game has a simple set-up: You have "bean fields" (two to three spots in front of you), and you plant "beans," cards with clever artwork that portray different types of beans—soy beans show a bean in farmer's garb, chili beans(?) sport a devil-like flaming bean lighting a cigar over spilled gasoline, and so forth. Each field can only hold one type of bean at a time. You trade for advantageous beans and harvest your bean fields throughout the game, cleaning them out and collecting more or less coins depending on the number of beans in the field. The player with the most coins at the end wins the game.

Despite the chance element of a shuffled deck of cards, the game requires a light amount of strategy because you must play the cards in the order you receive them. Since you must plant at least one bean on each turn, you often find yourself harvesting a bean field before it's reached its maximum value, even if you have cards elsewhere in your hand that would increase its worth.

But the fun comes from the trading. Beans have a certain objective worth based on their frequency in the deck, but that goes out the door in the face of a subjective value. There may be zillions of wax beans in the deck, but if a player needs one for another coin because s/he knows that a harvest is coming, they might be willing to give up a lot in exchange. (You plant all the beans you received when you finish trading) "How valuable would it be to you...exactly?" "You could really use this card; it would give you another coin." You can also donate cards to other players, getting nothing in return but preventing a bean field uprooting. The table top chatter reveals casual manipulative streaks, strategies, and desperation.

Bohnanza! is a social game, with fortunes shifting around the table as players harvest their fields. In the games we played I thought that I was keeping discreet silence about how well I was doing, only to discover at the end of the game that I had lost. Our scores were in the mid-to-high teens, so a few points here and there can make a difference. Now that we've rediscovered it, we'll be sharing it with whatever game-playing friends we can scare up (why do most of you live so far away?)

Numb3rs

Now that I have a video iPod, I started browsing the TV shows at the iTunes Store. This is a bad idea. (Yes, I could have watched these videos on my laptop without a video iPod, but the iBook can be bulky on BART.)

I was delighted to discover that Numb3rs is online. Ed Pegg consults for the show to ensure its mathematical accuracy, and I've been curious about it since he first mentioned it.

Shiny Toy

The Almighty Steve sang his siren song last week and compelled me towards the dangerous rocks of San Francisco's Apple store. Ravenous cash registers scarfed down my cash and spit out a black 80-gig iPod and the stave-off-any-problems AppleCare extension. (Without it, Apple devices seem to have problems about 13 months after you buy them, which always makes me think the salespeople should push the additional coverage in tough-guy accents: "That sure is a nice device you got there; it'd be a real shame if anything bad were to happen to it.")

The much-improved iTunes 7 and the beefed-up battery life pushed me over a brink that I've approached since Apple released the video iPod a year after I bought my iPod Photo. I don't know when I'd buy a $15 movie from the iTunes Store to watch on my iPod, but the possibility gives me that variant of smugness peculiar to Apple zealots such as myself.

I moved my one video blog subscription (the show with ze frank) to iTunes, bought a game from the iTunes Store just to try it out (Vortex, a 3D version of Breakout), and downloaded a TV episode to check out the video (Melissa and I will watch the show on the iMac, but I might consider getting the AV kit to hook it up to our TV). So far I'm happy with the new device, though I might keep my old one around because I use it for recording interviews, and I'm not quite ready for the $70 replacement that fits in the new models. It looks like iTunes can handle multiple devices, so that shouldn't be a problem.

The new ability to purchase games (including two ports from video-crack maker PopCap) suggests the possibility of a toolkit for other third-party applications. Anyone know of an SDK in the works? I don't believe one has existed to date. I don't have specific ideas for an application, and the minimal data entry capabilities don't allow for a wide application suite, but I always enjoy fiddling with programs on new platforms.

The form factor is the same as my iPod Photo, except that a flat black slab replaces the puffy white "classic" look and slims the little device by a bit. The screen is crisp and pleasantly larger than the older models, and I plan to do a better job of protecting it. Scratches and scuffs on my old iPod tell the tale of my device abuse.

Wedding Puzzle Hunt: Puzzle 2

There are two cryptograms to solve in the text below. In each one, a single letter fills in for some other letter. For example, B might represent the letter Z, Q the letter L, and so forth. An asterisk in front of a word indicates a proper noun. Of course, you’ll have to figure out where one cryptogram ends and the other begins. Post-game lessons: The answer to the question at the end has four different answers, depending on your parameters. Melissa and I checked the day before.

DGDTAIKD CKIUF HEIJQ QBD QIQDX LISDF XHRD EA *KHQMGD *HXDTMNHK QTMEDF QBHQ SMGDR MK QBMF HTDH EDVITD DJTILDHKF HTTMGDR. FHRSA, QBD HTQ IV NHTGMKY QBDX UHF HSXIFQ SIFQ. IKD NTHVQFXHK UHF CPVGG DGVFJ KSJH VP LDWJ PVWJ PA TJCPATJ PSJ PAPJW MAGJC VH *PSRHOJTZVTO *MDTI, DHO SJ CJP RM D CSAM SJTJ PA PJDLS D HJK EJHJTDPVAH DZARP PSVC DHLVJHP LTDNP. SAK WDHU PAPJW MAGJC HAK CPDHO VH PSJ MDTI?

Pretend to be a Guest Blogger

Lore Sjöberg offers tips to would-be guest bloggers, including an amusing "ultimate blog post" for several of the Internet's most famous sites.

Wedding Puzzle Hunt: Puzzle 1

My friends asked me to organize a puzzle hunt as a "morning activity" for their wedding day. Guests grumbled and pouted when I announced that they'd be solving puzzles at 10am (most had hangovers, which didn't help). In the end, though, they seemed to have a good time and, as I told them that evening when we handed out awards, all complaints that I had overestimated them had to be weighed against the fact that most groups finished all the puzzles in the time allotted.

Here's the first of the puzzles they found in their packet (I've cleaned up the instructions). All the answers led to somewhere in Victoria's Inner Harbor, and each team (which matched up to table assignments) had to bring back a souvenir from each spot to prove they had been.

Instructions: In each row below, insert a letter into the blank so that a 5-8 letter word stretches from somewhere in the left column to somewhere on the right. For instance, you could put an A into the first row to spell "BEATING." There are multiple answers for each row, but only one combination will spell out your destination. Post-game lessons: This spot goes by multiple names.

EACUBE_TINGLE
STROUP_CKETRY
BEAFRA_DRESTY
AREAPO_TALLON
GARDEN_EDALUE
PERAPE_KYTILE
PLAINS_RINGHA
RISPLA_ARDECS
SPANSW_REPTOY
LESPRE_DGAMET
TAMBUT_ERNTHE
POUDEP_ETENDO
PEROTH_RNYTSI