Retail Therapy

Every so often, when something goes badly in my life and there's nothing I can do about it but accept it, I buy myself something nice so I can feel better and take my mind off of whatever it is that's bothering me.

This time it was a patiche. I finally ordered it, and got the 40mm one.

I'm such an archaeological dork. Words cannot express how archaeologically dorky I am. It's beyond measure. (Normal people buy clothes or jewelry or something.)

So hopefully when I get back from Sukkot, or in the middle of next week, the patiche will be in. And then I'll be a real archaeologist (TM).

(Though I'm already doing a good job holding my own in my Historical Archaeology class, despite me not being a historical archaeologist. My very basic knowledge of Biblical/Near Eastern stuff is still more than Dr. S.'s. The first week he showed us a pot with a depiction of Rebecca at the well, and he didn't know what the biblical story was! So I told him at the end of class. And yesterday he asked me about when Hebrew inscriptions started. That I'm less familiar with, but at least I know that Hebrew is older than Aramaic and that they use the same characters. [At least in Jewish use of Aramaic. Maybe other people wrote it with different characters. I need to look into that.] And just in general I'm good with the whole common sense thing, and can take part in the discussions even when I haven't done the reading. [Maybe I have an archaeological mindset, if there is such a thing...] Go me!)

Rock, Paper, Scissors

At some point in high school a group of people from my shul were going to a NFTY event. There were 2 cars and 3 groups of people who wanted to be together, so one of the groups had to be split up. So we did rocks, paper, scissors to determine who would be in what car.

My friend L.K. did the rocks, paper, scissoring on our behalf. I forget how the game played out, but in the end she lost.

But at the time, based on the first move, I predicted what the opponent was going to do, and would have done something differently than her, and would have won for us.

Somehow my mind today wandered on the topic of predicting the moves of others.

So let's take a look at rock, paper, scissors, in a best out of 3 scenario. The key here is that I'm assuming that you have a worthy opponent, who is both thinking ahead and thinking that you'll think ahead. If this is not true then my strategy probably doesn't work (like if they beat you and think you'll just do what they just did. I'm not counting that as a possibility here):

And Basic Rules: Rock crushes scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock. Thus each of the 3 moves can beat something, lose to something, and tie itself.

( I'm not a CSE person, nor do I pretend to be... )

I guess my general rule is that you shouldn't go for the thing that will beat what they just did, if they're being simple and think you'll do that. Then of the other 2, do the one that can beat the other. If they think you're thinking ahead, then find the obvious move, rule it out as something they'd think you'd do, since they won't think it. But then it actually works out that the obvious move is the one that can either beat or tie the counter-moves to the non-obvious moves. So then do the obvious. Somehow this all works out in my head in the flow of the game, but I'm doing a terrible job of explaining it, even with the examples behind the cut.

But yeah, that's my logic. Anyone up for a game of rocks, paper, scissors?

(Wow, scissors is another one of those weird words to write...)