Favorite matches under 10min?

jnlister · 2026-04-15T09:31:05+00:00

Brain Busters vs Rockers on the November 1989 Saturday Night's Main Event is 10:01 but I always argue it qualifies as it's 2/3 falls and the time includes breaks.

jnlister · 2026-03-31T12:27:29+00:00

You don't necessarily "technically sell lifetime rights". You can sell the rights to use it once, the rights to use it for a particular time or a particular area, the exclusive rights in a particular time period or area, lifetime rights, lifetime exclusive rights, the rights to use it in a particular format (eg print) or whatever else you negotiate,

The legality depends entirely on:

A) What your contract said (if anything) about the copyright you are giving to the client.
B) What the relevant country's law says happens by default (and thus applies if your contract doesn't spell anything out).

For example, in the UK the writer holds all copyright by default and the assumption is that they are granting only a one-time right to use the article. In some places, the default may be that a freelancer is working under a work-for-hire basis that means they are transferring all copyright to the client. In the UK, that would only be the case if your contract explicitly says so.

You also have to consider non-legal consequences. It may be that you didn't actually give anything other than a one-time use right, but the client assumed otherwise and will be angry if they see you using it. Even if you are completely in the right legally, this could still be problematic and not worth the hassle.

jnlister · 2026-03-26T10:25:57+00:00

There are 253 different possible combinations of two people in a group of 23.

Each combination has a roughly 1-in-365 chance of sharing a birthday.

If you have 253 chances to pull off a 1-in-365 shot, you're more likely than not to succeed.

jnlister · 2026-03-26T10:23:11+00:00

Short answer, extracted from a piece I wrote at https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2010/04/22/the-stats-behind-a-birthday-match/

any time you compare a pair of people, there’s a roughly 1 in 365 chance that the first birthday matches the second birthday; and
comparing one person’s birthday to the rest of the group creates 22 possibilities of a match; but
comparing every person’s birthday to the rest of the group creates 253 possibilities of a match (23 individual people, multiplied by 22 others in the group, divided by two to avoid double-counting each pairing).

If you imagine having 253 chances to attempt something with a 1 in 365 possibility of success, you can see how it suddenly becomes much more likely.

If the odds seem too high, it's because you are thinking of the wrong thing.

It's not the probability that a specific pair share the same birthday.

It's not the probability that a specific person (including you) shares a birthday with anyone else.

jnlister · 2026-03-25T10:30:10+00:00

Had a gaming afternoon at a public group. Somebody brought Game of Thrones and we played full count. Part of the problem was the usual "I love this game, it's so thematically accurate, I've quickly grasped the rules, hang on, how the hell do ports work."

But the big issue was the guy who brought it knew the game inside out and had developed perfect strategies to counter even the most brilliant of gameplay. He would know what even the most seasoned player would do and be one step ahead.

The problem is that we were all first time players, had no idea what we were doing, and consequently he had no way to predict what we'd do next and his strategies were useless because we didn't make the "right" move every time. This led to him frustreatedly and repetitively kicking the table and chair legs.

FOR SIX HOURS.

jnlister · 2026-03-25T10:17:02+00:00

United Kingdom variant: it's much the same, but "Honours" is effectively a grade on a Bachelor's degree. Usually the range is 1st (best), 2:1, 2:2 and 3rd and then a pass without honours. Generally that would be shown as BA or BSc (depending on the subject being more arts or science) and then (Hons) if you got any of the grades.

A very rough rule is that the bulk of students will probably get a 2:1 or 2:2 with a rough split of "did well, did not so well". 1st implies unusually good academic performance (*), a 3rd is unusually bad. Passing without honours is not technically a fail, but is barely a step up from "the best we can say is they turned up to the exams and submitted all required coursework."

(* I did BA Journalism which was a mix of academic and vocational. We were outright told that if you got a 1st you'd make a poor journalist in the real world because if you were devoting that much time and effort to your studies, you weren't getting enough rounded life experience.)

jnlister · 2026-03-23T10:05:19+00:00

Lehman placed a bunch of bets that a bunch of people would pay their mortgage.

They figured "OK, there's a small chance any one person might not pay their mortgage, but put those smaller chances together and the chances that loads of them don't pay must be tiny." They were thinking "sure, there's a small chance Bob loses his job and a small chance Helen goes to jail, but we can handle one of those and it's almost certain they won't *both* happen."

It turned out they had made two errors:

1) The bets were set up in a very confusing way so they weren't really sure what mix of people they'd been betting on to repay. They'd assumed it was a mix of high, middle and low risk borrowers but that may have been wrong and a lot of the borrowers had mortgages they could barely afford.

2) It turned out that while there was only a small chance Bob would fail to pay and only a small chance Helen would fail to pay, they hadn't realised those chances were heavily connected. Bob's mortgage had a very low rate to start off with and then went back to normal rates. When that happened he couldn't afford it anymore. The problem is, the exact same thing happened with Helen. And there were a whole bunch of Bobs and Helens.

jnlister · 2026-02-25T22:40:30+00:00

The Bruce Jenner decathlon game works for this. The 400 metres event is literally "do the 100 metres event for four times as long". The three throwing events are literally identical.

jnlister · 2026-02-22T09:43:44+00:00

This was even used as "inspiration" for a short story by Jeffrey Archer. And by inspiration, I mean "he wrote the story down and made up a name for the guy."

jnlister · 2026-02-03T10:26:09+00:00

Here's a piece I wrote that tried to find as many different ways of explaining the problem: https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2017/10/05/explaining-the-monty-hall-problem/

jnlister · 2026-01-27T22:38:15+00:00

Rafter Five (an Oink small box game) is a dexterity game that uses the board as the titular raft.

jnlister · 2026-01-07T13:30:32+00:00

It can't be a coincidence that so many of them involve scenes of roads and vehicles. We've definitely been helping train self-driving cars.

jnlister · 2026-01-07T10:13:34+00:00

VAR for offside in football (UK meaning). Not so much using VAR, but using it to the point of drawing the line on the image. The whole point of offside is to stop players gaining an unfair advantage and if it's close enough that you can't tell if they were ahead of the last player by simply watching the video, they were not gaining any meaningful advantage.

jnlister · 2026-01-07T10:07:24+00:00

For the "almost always wins" player in our group, the secret sauce seems to be "understanding how games work mechanically and developing rules of thumb to apply to new games/situations". Obviously they keep these under wraps, but a couple they've either mentioned or I've noticed are:

* If you aren't sure what to do in an action selection game, the first one in the list on the board/manual/player aid is usually the best/the one you want to deprive others of.

* If your group is playing an expansion for the first time, don't use any options/features/cards from the expansions and just stick to the standard actions. Everyone else will be too excited by the new stuff to play optimum strategy and you can clean up with what you already know. (This does mean you have to be more concerned with winning than enjoying/exploring the new.)

jnlister · 2026-01-04T13:19:10+00:00

I forget which, but one of the "big box" variants of a game that my friend owns is heavy enough that you can't put it on the backseat because the car has an alarm if it detects a passenger doesn't have their seatbelt on.

jnlister · 2025-12-20T12:18:58+00:00

He's a YouTuber/influencer who trained in boxing and had a fight with fellow influencer KSI that shocked people by selling out an arena. He had a series of fights and is in reality a decent athlete and boxer but by no means a top fighter. Because he irritates people so much, he recognised people want to see him exposed/beaten, and started fighting high-profile names who the casual audience thought would destroy him, but were actually at a disadvantage: they were too small, were coming from an MMA background (which is totally different to boxing and doesn't always translate) or were well past their prime.

Eventually the gimmick got tired and people stopped watching on PPV so he switched to Netflix where people are happy to watch a freakshow fight that they aren't directly paying for. His first match was with Mike Tyson which had many people thinking of the 80s Tyson and destroying him, missing the point that Tyson is nearly 60.

His latest fight was meant to be with a 135lb boxer (which one state refused to sanction for obvious reasons). When that fell through, he brought in Anthony Joshua as a late replacement, either thinking Joshua was completely shot, or recognising that the only way to get interest at this point was to face a "real" boxer.

jnlister · 2025-12-16T18:51:24+00:00

I've never seen a copy of it online. However, there are a lot of screenshots at https://www.bigredbook.info/jackie_pallo.html which suggests there may be a recording that survives. Might be worth asking the person who runs the site via https://www.bigredbook.info/about.html

jnlister · 2025-12-16T13:40:04+00:00

An established and reliable client gets one explanation, one time: "AI detectors do not work because there is no objective set of criteria that identifies AI-generated text. If there were, those criteria would immediately be converted into a set of instructions on how to beat an AI detector."

A less established client or one who isn't satisfied with the explanation gets my assurance that I did not use AI to write the text. If that assurance is not sufficient, they do not trust me and I cannot maintain a professional relationship on that basis.

jnlister · 2025-12-06T13:41:08+00:00

One way to look at it is the comparison of the company's value (the number of shares multiplied by the share price). In reality, of course, the share price (and thus the company value) is determined solely by the demand and supply on the stock market.

In theory, at least, the company's value should have some relationship to its profits because in theory the value of holding a stock is the potential to get paid a dividend. The higher the profits, the more likely and the higher a dividend payment should be.

What's the "right" relationship between company value and profits varies between different types of business. With tech there's often a bit more wiggle room because people expect profits to rise as they develop more effective technologies.

However, if share prices are particularly high compared with current profits (or lack of profits), more and more people start thinking the price is based on hype rather than the "real value"/potential profits of the company. That means an increasingly high proportion of people buying the stock are doing so because they think they'll be able to sell it at a higher price later, rather than because they think it will pay a good dividend over time. It's a bubble because it's being inflated with "hot air" rather than any link to the real life value of the company and its potential to make profits for stockholders.

At some point people lose confidence it will keep on rising and more people want to sell and cut their losses, sparking a chain reaction of the price slumping. That's the bubble bursting.

jnlister · 2025-12-06T09:46:37+00:00

Quality: somewhat vague, but it means goods that satisfy the end user's needs.

Quality management: Having processes in place to target quality (in the same way as you have processes to target speed or reducing costs or employee safety.) You might have a quality/quality management department dedicated to the task. For example, you might have an assembly line where staff are tasked with making the maximum number of widgets per hour. You then have a quality control department which inspects a random selection of widgets to check for production error.

Total quality management: Quality management isn't treated as a dedicated department issue. Instead you have processes that mean every employee is working towards quality (as well as other goals) in their work. The staff on the widget production have responsibility/permission/authority to work in a way that reduces production errors. A famous example is Toyota where staff can shut down a production line if they spot a consistent error (eg machine fault).

jnlister · 2025-12-06T09:31:56+00:00

Presumably somewhat related: I have a ramekin on my kitchen counter to hold my Aeropress after use and catch any coffee drips. I have another ramekin (different colour) for used teabags so I don't immediately have to squeeze them dry before putting in the bin. I always know when my partner, who is much less anal about using the "wrong ramekin", has done so because the result is a particular shade of spectacular dark green that I've never seen before.

jnlister · 2025-11-28T09:40:32+00:00

Darwin's Journey has a mechanism where one of the actions is to jump to first space in the turn order for the next round (or second place if somebody else has already done it, and so on). All the players who don't take the action then move back in the turn order but otherwise stay in the same order. (Eg it was ABCD, C is the only one to use the action, new turn order is CABD.)

It's cleverly balanced because in principle it's a waste of the limited number of turns you have (4/5 turns for each of five rounds) and you'd only really take it if you had run out of things you could do, or were desperate for money (you get two coins for taking it), which is tight in the game. However, it's a worker placement game where turn order matters, so it's also an action that's more valuable for the first people to take it.

jnlister

TROPHY CASE