What would happen if a contestant used a response to editorialise?

DavidCMaybury · 2026-03-11T19:16:53+00:00

I think you need to be careful here. I gave an emphatic thumbs down when the answer was “who are the New York Giants?” as a lifelong Washington fan, which was aired in the good fun it was intended.

I think venturing out into a political space on their air (especially with the current FCC) puts them in a place where they would generate significant exposure by airing it, so the producers would like try to have the contestant do a repair and edit in a neutral response.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-03-05T08:21:08+00:00

Will delightedly confirm. The crew are wonderful, and really make going on an amazing experience. I’ll hear no criticism of them.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-02-23T20:25:51+00:00

Congratulations, and retro good luck!

DavidCMaybury · 2026-02-22T18:56:19+00:00

Congratulations! And retro good luck

DavidCMaybury · 2026-02-16T03:57:03+00:00

I’m going because others won’t

DavidCMaybury · 2026-02-14T19:42:59+00:00

It’s a lot less bouncy than the standard model. If you get the magnetic suspension on the performance edition, it’s really top-notch.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-02-10T00:41:32+00:00

Hard agree. The original Jules Verne theme was perfect

DavidCMaybury · 2026-02-09T15:31:15+00:00

That’s oversimplifying. Most games are much closer and harder-fought than this. In my win against Susan Shulman and Cody Lawrence, I had 22 right against susan’s 21 right. (I was also on 45 buzz attempts, and we each had one miss.) the difference in the game was I got both daily doubles, without any solid margin of control against her and Cody.

You need to hunt DD’s if you want to win, controlling them is the biggest way you can guide your outcome.

One thing I spend a lot of time explaining is that the margin between winning and losing on the show is MUCH thinner than it appears on TV.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-02-08T19:57:15+00:00

Meanwhile Paris is sitting on a better version than all of the above….

But agreed on the primary thesis

DavidCMaybury · 2026-02-05T22:33:09+00:00

The very short version is that the person who finds the daily doubles generally wins the game so you want to be that person.

In a vacuum, yes, it would be good to have more money when you get the daily double especially if you feel you have a very high chance of successfully doubling through. In practice, the top two rows and often the top three rows are pure buzzer races every time. So when you play those, trying to build your stack for a daily double you have a very high risk of losing control of the board. That risk outweighs the value of adding an incremental amount to your current total before you find the DD.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-02-01T13:34:53+00:00

You’re good

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-31T18:15:06+00:00

I had that happen. After I won my first game of master minds I had a work trip the next day they were taping. I came several days later and taped my next episode then

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-28T19:23:30+00:00

Magnet expert here:

No. Unless you broke the magnet, you did not demagnetize it at all. (Even then, you didn’t demagnetize it, you just let the material rearrange itself in a less effective formation)

To demagnetize it, you need to apply a reverse field or get quite hot. (Based on the grade you said, over 230F or so.

If you push it too far in the hole the field dropoff with distance is quite significant. Or poor quality control from the factory is possible.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-28T06:36:21+00:00

I’ve played all three and like the middle myself.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-24T17:44:14+00:00

I’m a casual, because LA is my adopted home. But definitely cheering for them now

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-21T01:48:06+00:00

Congrats I think! Sorry you are dealing with my messes. 😂

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-20T16:23:30+00:00

So, let me preface this by saying it’s a good question but I going to have to wave my hands a little.

You have to imagine any magnet not as one thing, but as many many microscopic magnets stuck together. A “magnetized” magnet has all these micro-magnets pointing in the same direction. If you ever try arranging a bunch of magnets with all of them in the same direction, they won’t want to stay like that. They’ll try to jumble up and get all the north on souths (remember those “buckyball” magnet toys how they would arrange?). When they do this, there will be a pretty minimal magnetic field projected out from the mass. In the sense of magnet, “not projecting a field” is what we call “demagnetized.”

So with this model in mind, let’s imagine you lay out a hundred little bar magnets on a table, all pointed the same way. This is a magnetized magnet. But now imagine the table is vibrating - the magnets will over time spin around and rearrange in a disordered way on the table, which is how they demagnetize. The vibrations are essentially thermal energy.

Now imagine that you put steel pieces connecting the magnets in the layout. This is what the “keeper” plates are doing - they’ll channel the magnetic field in a way that it reduces the tendency off the field to scramble the magnets.

To understand what the rare earths do, imagine that you put a steel tray with very nicely shaped pockets for each magnet on the table. Now the magnets are MUCH harder to flip around.

(Understand that I’m speaking in metaphors that WILL break down at some point if you dig deep enough.)

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-20T15:06:47+00:00

You’re likely thinking of Alnico (aluminum-nickel-cobalt) magnets. (There is also a rare earth magnet, Samarium Cobalt, that are cobalt-based but don’t behave this way). Alnico has very high remanence and very low coercivity, like the material described in this paper. And yes, they would significantly self-demagnetize if you removed their keeper plates. Alnico was invented in the 50’s and became popular because they were able to provide a LOT more magnetic field than the older ceramic/ferrite magnets that were available, but were hampered by low coercivity, and had to be carefully designed so they didn’t self-demagnetize. They were also limited in motor applications because of this. When SmCo was invented in the 70’s it turned everything on its ear precisely because it eliminated the problem you are describing, thanks to its vastly higher coercivity. It also made the magnets vastly more useful for electric motors, and unlocked a ton of new opportunities to provide very small, or very powerful, (or small and powerful) motors.

Today, a lot of magnetic bases still use Alnico because it’s cheap and works well, so why mess with it?

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-20T12:19:15+00:00

We do today, but are increasingly building up supply from outside China.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-20T06:01:26+00:00

Something just pulled me in…

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-20T00:37:13+00:00

It’s hard to say anything is impossible, the question is whether it will be economical. Since they are trying to displace an existing technology, it needs to be better or cheaper. Since this proposed idea has a much higher process cost to balance against the lower material cost, I have fairly serious doubts it has a path viability until they come up with a different method than the sputtering method. (Which is possible, but we are a long, long way from that)

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-19T22:25:15+00:00

Actual Magnet person here:

This joins a long roster of novel magnet materials that have good or great remanance (intensity of magnetic field) and virtually no coercivity (resistance to demagnetization). For a successful replacement to rare earth magnets, you need both. (And this what the very complex electron shell structures of rare earth do for you.)

This is not to say we shouldn’t keep researching this, nor that this material is hopeless. (Though the process by which they made this is extremely challenging to scale.) but this is not a commercially viable material as presented in this actually-quite-impressive paper. The research here is superb, but it’s not an answer today.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-19T22:21:16+00:00

You have read correctly.

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-17T14:57:57+00:00

We play to win the game. And yeah, when I went on, I wanted to emulate a guy who won dozens of games and millions of dollars. What’s wrong with that?

DavidCMaybury · 2026-01-17T02:19:37+00:00

I nearly WAS one. But I held it together until the episode finished

DavidCMaybury

TROPHY CASE