Category: Uncategorized

I saw a link today for an article about work starting on the 17th Street bridge. I clicked on it because I had worked on coming up with plans for the repair. When I got to the article, there is an embedded video and the picture shows a finger pointing to the plans. I drew that!

Here’s the article.

The caption for one of the pictures says:

Georgia Department of Transportation engineers have drawn up plans to reinstall decorative fencing on the 17th Street bridge using what they say is a more secure method involving bolts secured by nuts and steel plating. Previously, the structure was attached by a fast-set epoxy.

But it wasn’t “engineers” plural, it was just me! Actually the vast majority of the plans were drawn by our consultant under the original contract for the 17th Street bridge, and all I did was modify those drawings.

Last week I looked out the back window of my house and saw a baby robin hopping around back there. I have learned that this is normal and they aren’t supposed to be in the nest, so the best thing is to leave them alone. The mom will keep feeding them while they are on the ground until they can fly and feed themselves. It hadn’t rained in a while and I thought maybe that bird could use some water. I put a cookie sheet with edges on it on the back patio and poured some water into it so that there was a shallow source of water. I would look out there but didn’t see the bird drinking. I thought maybe that the bottom of the pan would be too slick and found a pan for a paint roller that had a little traction to it and had varying depth. But it was bright orange plastic and the bird didn’t go near it either. The next day it was supposed to be even hotter and would reach an all-time record of 106 degrees. I told Carol about what I was doing and she said I should put out a sprinkler because birds love sprinklers.

I put my old-fashioned harp sprinkler back there and set the water so that it was only going up maybe a couple of feet in the air (it wouldn’t even move back and forth). When I went back inside I noticed there was a bird already eying the sprinkler and ruffling his feathers like he was imagining taking a bath. Within a half hour a juvenile robin came hopping along. He could fly, just not all that well. He and his mother came along and would drink water off of the wet grass. It is probably the same one I had seen on my patio. Then a juvenile mockingbird and its mother stopped by. The sprinkler was right next to a fig tree in the back yard and the mockingbirds seemed to hang out there. They are territorial and I think they were trying to intimidate the robins away, but the robins are little bigger and there was enough water for everyone.

Continue reading “Backyard Oasis”

While on vacation I wrote some spreadsheets that would calculate the odds for different dice variations of the board game Risk. One of the variations is to use an extra die on defense or attack which I was able to calculate, but Excel doesn’t have enough rows to run all the possible rolls if both the attacker and defender have an extra die. Plus, every spreadsheet took some work and there get to be a lot of different combinations that I didn’t want to run, though I still wound up with 27 different spreadsheets. I knew the best thing to do would be to write some kind of program that would let you input the different options and then have it calculate the odds for you. I had tried this once before, but I don’t know if I finished it. When I pulled it up, it didn’t seem to work.

Computers make this kind of thing easy. If you have 5 dice, you can do For:Next loops of 1 to 6 for each dice, then nest the loops to try out all the different combinations. If you want to do 8-sided dice, you change the loops to run from X to Y where X is 1 and Y is 8. Or any other number. Then you keep running totals and give the answers when all the iterations have run their course. But it still took a few nights of working on the project before I started making real progress.

Once I got it working, I used my spreadsheets to check the math in the program. After I got the bugs worked out, everything was agreeing perfectly except when the attackers had an additional die. I narrowed the problem down to a bad formula on the spreadsheet! So it was kind of good to have an independent check. I went back and fixed the blog posts that had the numbers wrong.

I compiled an executable that can be used in Windows, but it doesn’t do the Fighter correctly from Star Wars Risk where you can replace a 1 with a new roll (you can enter the lower limit of the dice as 2 instead of 1 and it will be kind of similar). And it might be neat to turn the program into something that would do the rolling for you when you have big masses of armies facing off. You could enter the number of attackers and defenders and let it roll a certain number of times or until one side loses and it could generate all the rolls randomly and print a tape of all the battles and results.

Anyway here is a page I made where you can download the program.

Time for an iPhone app?

I did a bunch of number crunching to figure out odds with different rolls in Risk Reinvented. But Star Wars Risk – The Original Trilogy also has some rule variations that change the odds of the typical Risk battles. When Rebels attack the Empire’s bases the Empire can defend with 8-sided dice instead of 6-sided dice. Using all the same analysis as last time and figuring out every possible combination of dice thrown by the attacker and defender, it turns out that on average the attacker would need 162 troops to successfully attack a base with 100 defending troops, rolling the dice 132 times. Actually you would need 3 more than that so that you have 3 troops to move in, plus one more to leave on the attacking country. And the luck of the dice could change that profoundly.
Continue reading “Star Wars Risk Odds”

While on vacation, I picked up the new version of Risk called Risk Reinvented (or maybe Risk Reinvention, it doesn’t actually say anything on the box except that it offers 3 ways to play), which has an optional set of rules to make the gameplay different. If you accomplish a certain objective (like controlling all of Asia at the end of your turn), you may earn the ability to attack or defend with a bonus die. So in the typical instance of 3 attacking dice vs. 2 defending dice, where the defenders win ties (this slightly favors the attackers), you might attack with 4 dice or defend with 3 dice even though only two troops are still at risk.

So I wanted to know what the odds are when you add dice to the mix. It was pretty obvious that the odds got a lot better when I earned the extra defense die. Then I got the extra attacking die and I was wondering how much of an effect it would have. I couldn’t find this on the internet (this was before I made the Risk Odds Calculator program).

So I built a spreadsheet that would generate every dice combination for six dice (3 attackers vs. 3 defending dice). This meant I had to have 6x6x6x6x6x6 or 46,656 rows. I had to check what the maximum number of rows that Excel can deal with and fortunately it was 65,536.
Continue reading “Risk Reinvented Odds”