c4countdown

David Williams

Remember this guy? Won €69,832 by winning 116 consecutive games on the Spanish version, which given the random effect of those rules is nothing short of astonishing.

David Williams

Or MAUVES when there is no S in the selection? Or declares SPECIE when he has SPECIES written down (two completely different meanings, and SPECIE is a mass noun)? Personally, for MAUVE I'd allow MAUVE(S), and disallow MAUVES, and probably disallow MAUVES? as well. Just as an aside, in the whole hist...

David Williams

It would just be a case of pointing to the appropriate position in a continuous stream of letters. Player needs to draw the last letters game. He writes down MAUVES. His opponent declares five, so he declares five as well. Opponent says MAUVE, player says "Same" and shows him the piece of paper. Yo...

David Williams

David O'Donnell wrote: ↑
Tue Feb 26, 2013 7:24 pm
1. Apterous has spoiled Countdown (Craig Beevers and David Williams have explained this to me)

While I'm more than flattered to figure in such illustrious company, I have no recollection of where this came from.

David Williams

I think the one thing you mustn't do is hesitate. When you're asked for a word, you give it. I once had UNCLAD and UNCOOL written down, both 99.9% certain, saw UNTOLD too late to write it down but that was the one I gave. The thing I've never been totally happy with is people who have RELACQUER and ...

David Williams

Would a vacuum even work? Presumably you lose the cooling effect of convection, and conduction and radiation remain the same. But the lower pressure will cause evaporation. I would have thought putting it in the freezer would be more effective.

David Williams

Having used public transport with a compulsory mask on a suitable way of eating and drinking with a mask on needs to be invented. I would have said someone should invent something to prevent people eating and drinking on public transport, but it looks as if Chinese scientists have already done so. ...

David Williams

Marc Meakin wrote: ↑
Tue Jun 16, 2020 5:40 am
Having used public transport with a compulsory mask on a suitable way of eating and drinking with a mask on needs to be invented.

I would have said someone should invent something to prevent people eating and drinking on public transport, but it looks as if Chinese scientists have already done so.

David Williams

Rhys Benjamin wrote: ↑
Sun Jun 14, 2020 10:25 pm
Amazed CORONAS was left in.

Amazed? Really? So they should have bleeped it out as if it was highly offensive? Or pulled the whole programme? Presumably when everyone else thought people who stopped buying Corona beer were idiots, you were amazed that anyone was still buying it at all.

David Williams

The actual game situation in my case was 62-55 with the final letters round, selection MIFGOSEMV, and he said "six". I had FOGIES (dodgy 6) and some 5, I can't remember what it was now. Saying FOGIES kept it 68-61, and after the final numbers that was 68-68. So if I'd said 5 I'd have lost. I don't ...

David Williams

Declaring second is an advantage. It can be an advantage even if it gives you a lower expected score. You're 21 points behind. Last letters game. You're looking at a safe seven or a dodgy eight. He goes eight, you go seven, and vice versa. He goes six, you go seven. In the long run it costs you poin...

David Williams

It'd be the best thing ever if OUP had a massive review of their count and mass noun labelling so she could just say "Yep, mass noun, so you can't pluralise it" rather than being put on the spot so often. http://wiki.apterous.org/Contestant_Guidelines#Pluralisable_mass_noun_categories Maybe they ha...

David Williams

David Williams wrote: ↑
Fri Feb 01, 2008 2:38 pm
Surely the whole essence of the original problem was that the numbers were selected randomly from a boundless selection. If there is some sort of probability distribution it's a different matter altogether.

I knew I should have read at least some of this before I started again.

David Williams

I'm not convinced that a valid answer to picking a number is to say that your number is a normal distribution with mean of x and standard deviation of y, but even if it is, the best you can say is that your method produces a chance higher than zero of winning, and I have shown that the chance is low...

David Williams

I know what a normal distribution is. It was you that brought it up and it's got nothing to do with the question.

David Williams

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the two numbers are picked at random, but from a large but finite range, and that they differ by 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Let's call that number X. Let's also have a very small number, say 0.0000000000000000000000001, which we call Y. If the ...

David Williams

But the difference between the two numbers is finite, so the probability of the number you pick being between them is zero. Not necessarily. In particular, if you choose your own random number according to, e.g. a normal distribution, then it has a non-zero probability of landing in any given finit...

David Williams

We will go into lockdown any time anyone sneezes in China. If coronavirus had happened before bird flu and ebola, SARS and MERS, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have blithely ignored them in this country.

David Williams

I imagine she thought "Oh God, it's that weird kid in my daughter's class, just standing there, waiting to get past. Should I just ignore him? Would that be rude? I've got to say something. But what?"

David Williams

I should probably read all this again, because it all seems too simple now. The strategy is to pick your own number first, then go lower if it is lower than the number you see, higher if it's higher. You win every time if your number is between the other two, it's 50/50 if it isn't. But the differen...

David Williams

A more consistent and even saltiness is exactly what many uses of salt are trying not to achieve. Good examples that you must (but obviously won't) be able to appreciate would be chocolate stuff - a bar of dark chocolate with sea salt or sea salt in a brownie or something. You don't want to make th...

David Williams

It's a discussion that I've seen come up a few times recently. It makes sense that it might have been a thing with mechanical typewriters. I can't see it. With a mechanical typewriter, the full stop occupies a whole space. With two more empty spaces, that's three spaces between the last word of the...

David Williams

Have there not been similar debates about Countdown auditions in the past? Didn't they have to change some of the letters selections because someone posted the ones they used in his audition? I scrambled through an audition with mainly sevens, but would have done a whole lot better if I'd realised y...

David Williams

Not often I get one that someone hasn't beaten me to, but FROIDEUR in Round 1.

David Williams

At least in those long-distant days the chances of any individual actually having the virus was probably (literally) a million to one. Frequent hand-washing seemed a good idea when it was first advised. It's a sobering thought that any random individual who crosses your path today is maybe a hundred...

David Williams

I think it's valid. Suppose it was established that having a meal in a restaurant with an infected person gave you a 50% chance of being infected. Sheer chance, different immune systems, whatever. How many people would you expect to be infected if that person spent the same amount of time at a speed...

David Williams

Suppose you have a bottle of poison with five lethal doses in it, and another bottle of 100 pills, five of which are poisonous. If one person consumes the whole bottle they die. If two people share the whole bottle, both of them die. Up to five people it's essentially the same. But if 100 people sha...

David Williams

The report in today's Times is headlined "Woman fined £660 for a crime that 'doesn't exist'".

David Williams

I'd very much hope she was actually fined for doing something against the law, which was aggravated by her refusal to give her name. If the police ask for your name and what you are doing, you are perfectly entitled to respond "Going about my lawful business, officer". (Do not try this at home, or ...

David Williams

I'd very much hope she was actually fined for doing something against the law, which was aggravated by her refusal to give her name. If the police ask for your name and what you are doing, you are perfectly entitled to respond "Going about my lawful business, officer". (Do not try this at home, or i...

David Williams

Johnny Canuck wrote: ↑
Wed Apr 01, 2020 10:38 pm
Don't we want stuff to be avirulent?

But who know's what Nick's throwaway line was when he revealed the answer? Not hard to envisage something inconsequential at the time that would be offensive now.

David Williams

Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑
Tue Mar 31, 2020 2:41 pm
The police dyed a blue lagoon black to deter visitors. Talk about police state.

Fake news.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-n ... e-22843481

David Williams

But if you were ordering, perhaps you'd say "One beef and two muttons"? And them's the rules. I think the restaurant rule does go too far, and you get some very contrived plurals. It was brought in because words like LAGER were only given as mass nouns, which is simply a deficiency of the dictionary...

David Williams

The trouble with knowing how to solve the tactical positions you will see in a newspaper is that you will only get to one of those positions very rarely, and only if you have outplayed your opponent up to that point. In any case a game between two beginners is usually just a succession of blunders, ...

David Williams

I don't know if the definition of woe is well known, but it's in the NODE so it dates back at least 20 years. Liverpool fan at the OUP?

Lexico wrote:‘the Everton tale of woe continued’

David Williams

Has anyone ever scored less points than a member of the audience before?

David Williams

But so what? That's like saying that Coronation Street is the most popular TV soap, so everyone is expected to know all about it. So, if you expect some clarification as to what the Champions League is, you would also expect some clarification about Coronation Street? I thought the general idea was...

David Williams

Newsreaders assuming knowledge of this sort of stuff is annoying. Also quizmasters. On Pointless Richard Osman says things like "teams in the 2018-19 Champions League" and I have no idea what that means. I know the names of some football teams, so I could have a wild guess, but I have no idea wheth...

David Williams

Reminded by the Dictionary Revival thread. Helen Wrigglesworth, who lost by two points having suffered a 15 point swing through having ROADSIDE disallowed, because the COD10 economised on space by omitting compound words whose meaning was clear. They did give her another go, and dropped COD10 after ...

David Williams

There's more than one way to be unlucky. You can get drawn against a top player in the heats. You can have a valid word disallowed (or your opponent can have an invalid word allowed). You can get an 'impossible' crucial conundrum when you are behind, or a trivial one (50/50 shot) when you're ahead. ...

David Williams

Any clue to be derived from the baby's initials?

David Williams

I'm sure we're all relieved that Chris Evans ensures there is no Bevins number discontinuity.

David Williams

It's very strange though. It used to be in, so someone has taken a conscious decision to take it out. They have noticed that people nowadays are more gouty, not goutier like they used to be.

And I may not have been concentrating all that hard, but did both contestants get 500 as 50/10*100?

David Williams

It may be your (and my) opinion that you can't pluralise an exclamation, but the point at issue is where this is laid down. And the usage in the example sentence could be pluralised. On balance I agree with you, but I'm not seeing quite enough to overrule the onfield decision.

David Williams

Does it say anywhere that you can't pluralise an exclamation? In fact it's being used as a count noun in the example sentence "A big cheerio to Bill, who's not been in the best of health of late." (Haven't watched the programme, so I don't know what was actually said.)

David Williams

Let's not forget that in the second half of the 1970s the top income tax rate was 83% on incomes over £20,000 and the basic rate was 33%. It's not as if a 75% rate is a complete leap into the unknown. The top rate was reduced to 40% in two stages in the 1980s, and the basic rate to 20% over a longer...

David Williams

Didn't think anything of it myself, but the editing didn't do him any favours when he had COOTED disallowed, Jenny Eclair spoke up and said something like "I'm doing my best for you" in his direction, they panned over, and it looked as if he wasn't even listening.

David Williams

Never understood why people are so against Inheritance Tax, even people who are never going to pay it. One objection is that it's supposedly being taxed twice on the same money, yet typically it's someone leaving a million pound house they paid half a crown for during the war, a profit that's comple...

David Williams

If tax rates are very low, increasing them generates more revenue. Keep increasing them, and if you reach a point when a rate increase doesn't increase the revenue, you conclude that going above that point would actually reduce the revenue. There's a rate that maximises the return. Lengthy theorisin...

David Williams

What assumptions have you made about changes in behaviour of those affected? I imagine it's pretty well-documented as to what happened when the top rate went up from 40% to 50% and down to 45%. (I have a feeling it didn't change the total tax take very much, but I haven't checked it out.) The troubl...

David Williams

It's probably always been like this and I've only just noticed, but I see that the budget extends to four of the posher poppies, but contestants have to make do with the basic model. Saves buying new ones every year, I suppose.

David Williams

My first appearance coincided with Susie's first appearance after the birth of her daughter, who would have been about four months old at the time. She had brought the baby with her, and I think her sister was looking after her in the dressing room while filming went on. I mentioned this to her when...

David Williams

Or (25-7)*(50-7+1)

Can anyone tell me if Gloria Hunniford is really good at Countdown or a shameless cheat. Most people I think I can read, but not her.

David Williams

I awarded myself seven points for CAGEFUL without a moment's doubt. Wrongly. Comes up a lot more in daily life than RODENTIAN, I would have thought.

David Williams

One thing I don't understand is why being a committed Christian is a source of comfort. I don't imagine God has changed his views much in the last couple of thousand years, so pretty much everyone in this country is going to hell.

David Williams

Johnny Canuck wrote: ↑
Tue Aug 13, 2019 9:08 pm

David Williams wrote: ↑
Tue Aug 13, 2019 8:44 pm
Did she actually say "Eight eights are ninety-one"? Was I dreaming?
Agreed, pretty amusing. All I can speculate is that she must have remembered that 9 9s are 81 and "spoonerised" that.

Astonishingly, that is a logical explanation of the completely inexplicable!

David Williams

Did she actually say "Eight eights are ninety-one"? Was I dreaming?

David Williams

I rather liked (5+2) x (6+1) x 7 + 100

David Williams

There are severe penalties for selling underweight bread. Your scales are not consistent. So for an order of 12 loaves you throw in an extra 8.33% which gives you what you deem to be a decent confidence level of being within the law. For an order of 144 loaves, for that level of confidence you do no...

David Williams

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