Zooloretto…

Congratulations to Michael Schacht and the folks at Abacusspiele on winning the coveted “Spiel des Jahres” award yesterday. For those of you who don’t follow board gaming that closely (probably most of you!), the Spiel des Jahres is the German award for Game of the Year. Think of it as the equivalent of the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Zooloretto is a simple game that can be played in about 45 minutes and my boys who are 6 picked it up pretty quickly. As trucks full of animals arrive at your zoo, players have to put them into the appropriate pens. Different types of animals can’t occupy the same pen, so you have to be careful not to take too many different types of animals. Ending up with animals that you can’t put into the limited number of pens cost you points, so you have to manage your zoo carefully.

And as my kids have pointed out – the Panda is really cute.

If you can’t find the game at your local hobby store, try picking it up on the net at Thoughthammer or Funagain Games. 

The Future of Computing

I’m a little late to the party on this one, but if you haven’t seen the recent demos of surface computing, you should check it out here. It’s some pretty cool stuff. Of course it’s Microsoft, so expect to wait until version 3.0 until the bugs are out…  but still, I want a surface computer as my desk!

Congratulations!!

Congratulations to Nick Carter who was just elected President of the American Philatelic Society! Couldn’t have happened to a nicer or more deserving person.

Oh yeah – he’s my Dad.

My Boss is a ……..

Many people secretly harbor the desire to denigrate their boss in public, but few actually get to do so. Recently, a staffer at NASA got to do just that – thanks in large part to the fact that he has the Global Warming Gang behind him.

The boss of NASA, Michael Griffin, made the cardinal sin of speaking common sense when discussing global warming during an interview on NPR.  The key points of the interview can be found here, but the contentious comments were as follows:

“I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change. First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Of course, a comment like that from the head of NASA didn’t sit well with the global warming crowd. They were quickly calling for Griffin to be fired.  Just read this article. But James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, really went off:

“It’s an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement. It indicates a complete ignorance of understand of climate change. It’s unbelievable. I thought he had been misquoted. It’s so unbelievable.”

Pretty brave to call your boss arrogant and ignorant to the national news media. But given that global warming deniers are pariahs, he seems to be on safe ground.

Fortunately, there were some scientists who applauded Mr. Griffin’s comments.

And in case you really think that there is a huge consensus on global warming, check out this article by a National Post reporter who set out to profile some global warming deniers, thinking them all to be nut cases. Surprise surprise!  He found out that the consensus is far from it (Sorry Sheryl Crow and Laurie David!), and not everyone who is skeptical about global warming is a nutjob, on the margin of science or in the back pocket of the oil companies.

Shhh… Don’t tell Al Gore…..