Doge2048

Doge2048 Low Score Success

This is a very silly game, and fairly mindless. I play it several times a day. Sometimes I win, mostly I lose.

I have a technique that allows me to make rapid progress but if followed diligently it inevitably leads to failure. The technique is basically to repeatedly press the down arrow until no more moves are available in that direction and then press the left arrow once. Repeat until you die, no more moves are available or you sense impending doom.

The idea is to keep your highest value piece in the lower left corner. It doesn't actually matter what corner you choose, any corner will work, you just need to stick with it.

Following these instructions will often bring you to a situation where neither the down arrow nor the left arrow keys will have any effect. My next step in these cases is to press the right arrow. If the bottom row is NOT full, then the next key press should be the left key. In most cases this will put your high value piece back in the lower left corner.

If there the bottom row is full, and pressing the right arrow does not open any spaces, go back to the original sequence of down-until-stopped and then one-move-left.

The advantage of this technique is you can make rapid progress without having to do any thinking. The disadvantage is that you will eventually get into a bind.  The trick is to recognize when things are about to get sticky and then stopping your automatic play to apply a little critical thinking to the problem. If you have enough room left (3 empty squares might be enough), you should be able to make a few moves that will cause enough pieces to collapse that you have enough room that you can resume automatic play for a bit.

A problem I often encounter is that pieces will often collapse unexpectedly, and if you are not watching carefully this can lead to a hole in the bottom left corner that gets filled in with a low value piece, and that just screws up my whole plan for world domination.

Since my technique involves charging ahead without too much regard for consequences, when I do succeed I often end up with a score well over 20,100. I don't know what the minimum score for successful completion is, but this is lowest I have gotten, and it was just a fluke. On occasion I have tried going on and once I got up to something like 76,000. I have not repeated that feat. My head was like totally in tune with the game, but after that I kind of lost interest.

Post about similar game.

Chernobyl

Elephant's Foot, Chernobyl Reactor

Detroit Steve sent me a link to a good story about the melt down at Chernobyl. It's a good story because because it is short and it gives clear overview of how and why radiation is dangerous. It's also three years old, which means it was written before the new shield was erected over the site. The new shield is an enormous steel structure that was erected next door and slid into place over the old sarcophagus.

Line-X

Indestructible Coating?!
This stuff got its start as spray on coating for pickup truck beds, i.e. bed liner. Now the Pentagon uses it for wallpaper.

Wheelz n Smoke

Wheelz n Smoke Maputo vs Joburg Spinning Session
Episode 2 of The Grand Tour takes us to South Africa where they send James May out for a ride with the locals.

Battersea Power Station

Opening sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 Thriller Sabotage
Rereading The Mission Song by John Le Carre. Most of the story takes place in central London and when our hero flies out of town on a helicopter, the Battersea Power Station is a landmark worth mentioning. I've heard of it before, it's quite the imposing edifice. Rooting around I found it has a small role in an old Hitchcock movie. It quit making power a while back. now it is being turned into condos.

Battersea Power Station in its heydey

To Infinity . . .

Aerospace & Defense | Paper Airplane
The American Arrow is an electronic component distributor. One of their divisions is Aerospace and Defense. There is also a European Arrow Aerospace that makes interiors for airliners. Near as I can tell they are not related.

The Biggest Aspidistra In The World

Gracie Fields The Biggest Aspidistra In The World 1938
Marcel got me started with this quote from Fake News by Richard Fernandez on PJ Media:

The reason why Allied deception operations were so effective against Hitler was because Goebbels had reduced German reporting to a lie machine, thereby destroying its credibility. Allied news, even Allied deception was more believable by comparison.

Cool, we're talking about veracity here, always an interesting topic. I want to read more. Starting from the top, Richard talks about the transmitter the Brits were using to pump propaganda across the channel:

It was not long before the British were running their own fake news operation against Nazi Germany under the 20 Committee. In this they were materially aided by the power of American technology. Rowen notes "If you ever listen to radio these days, you’ve probably heard “50,000 watts clear channel”. Today, as in the 1940s, it is still the maximum power allowed a US radio station. But in 1941, the RCA Corporation in New Jersey built for WJZ a transmitter 10 times more powerful. When the Federal Communication Commission refused to lift its ceiling of 50,000 watts, the WJZ 500,000 watt transmitter was briefly orphaned. Until the British heard about it. The transmitter was crated up, shipped to the UK and installed in bombproof headquarters in Sussex. They named it after a song sung by the English music hall entertainer, Gracie Fields: The Biggest Aspidistra in the World!"

That's how we got the video at the top. Gracie was a big deal back in the 1930s.

Now I go looking for information about the transmitter, and I'm not really finding much.

Water Cooled Vacuum Tubes for the Aspidistra transmitter

But then I stumble over the Alexanderson alternator: 50 tons of steampunk radio transmitter. This might be what prompted Gracie to sing her song.

Alexnderson Alternator

 An Alexanderson alternator is a rotating machine invented by Ernst Alexanderson in 1904 for the generation of high-frequency alternating current for use as a radio transmitter. It was one of the first devices capable of generating the continuous radio waves needed for transmission of amplitude modulation (sound) by radio. It was used from about 1910 in a few "superpower" longwave radiotelegraphy stations to transmit transoceanic message traffic by Morse code to similar stations all over the world. Although obsolete by the early 1920s due to the development of vacuum-tube transmitters, the Alexanderson alternator continued to be used until World War 2. It is on the list of IEEE Milestones as a key achievement in electrical engineering. - Wikipedia

Alexanderson Alternator Rotor

The rotor is five feet in diameter and turns at 2100 RPM.

Alexanderson Alternator Rotor

There is still one machine is Sweden. They fire it up a couple of times a year just so they can prove that it still works.

Merry Christmas in Morse Code
You can see the code just above the letters.

Update July 2021 replaced missing video.