c4countdown

Thomas Cappleman

*grumble* I swear Co:Lon starts earlier and earlier every year

Thomas Cappleman

Nice work Tom - 11 new countries in under 4 months!

Thomas Cappleman

I think I saw a post on FB about the final's con being a Supernundrum? Might be worth updating the description here and on the Focal page so that no one's taken by surprise

Thomas Cappleman

Looking forward to seeing how tonight's goes now they've got fully into the game.

Was caught out yesterday by a load of specific clues being for Alsace, and assuming the Eiffel Tower clues were just to help get to France. Should have paid more attention to how far they were travelling.

Thomas Cappleman

Year-end update: China (airport only), New Zealand and Russia, bringing to 31. Was due to add Romania on a work trip this month, but cancelled for now (may still make it later this year anyway). Well the "later that year" of 2020 went well - still not been to Romania. But since added Malt...

Thomas Cappleman

Someone I know has to do a project on an aspect of culture of her choice, and has chosen parkrun. If any of the regular parkrunners here see this by the end of the weekend, could you fill in this form please? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0OQSJZtyGi-_z09PDCk-hfQZEGH7CgNxSG0m4h3arX4In5w/...

Thomas Cappleman

Probably all countries spy on each other all the time, so isn't it hypocritical to convict and imprison the individual spies that you catch spying in your own country? You're meant to at least try and stop the others spying on you, right? And it gives you some leverage, for example if the other sid...

Thomas Cappleman

Stewart Gordon wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 8:48 pm Were DC not ELOCUTING about round 7 because they weren't given the chance?

No, but because it's not in the dictionary

Thomas Cappleman

But as I've said, in terms of a big one-off event where you have to be present on the day, we have COLIN, and that's bigger and more prestigious than the FOCAL finals. Great. That's your opinion, not a fact. I wonder if there's anybody on here who we could ask what it feels like to win each of them...

Thomas Cappleman

Star 27 is often the hardest in a given path. The guardian is generally weakest on numbers, and can have off days on conundrums, but is very solid on the letters by that point. And 27 is the last one where you don't get any of the other round types to help get a win.

Thomas Cappleman

Apparently I learned my letters from Countdown (then some time later learned lower case), so 1990-1994. Watched on and off growing up, though very rarely watch now.

Thomas Cappleman

But I know if I really cared about not having the Countdown final result "spoiled" for me, I wouldn't be reading new posts on a Countdown forum (especially the latest news about the TV show section) until I'd watched the show. Yes, in hindsight this was not a safe thread to come to, havin...

Thomas Cappleman

Callum Todd wrote: ↑Fri Dec 20, 2024 7:02 pm
Marc Meakin wrote: ↑Fri Dec 20, 2024 4:55 pm Warning spoilers for series champ result

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9dp6lv1008o
Great stuff this, as much as [REDACTED]! Thanks for sharing, Marc.

Can you edit this to not be a spoiler itself please?

Thomas Cappleman

I think it does have the problem that the cut off was meant to solve, of people feeling forced to go to more and more events if they want to make the top 8. Rob makes the top 8 this year when that incentive wasn't there, but if a couple of people find an extra event they can make then he's back out ...

Thomas Cappleman

Actually, ChatGPT was right - I'd messed up the 5th event multiplier.

Thomas Cappleman

It seems to benefit those who are a few events above the cut off at the moment (as everything counts) and those who played very well but at too few events, but hurts anyone who was at or just over the cut off (see me, Dylan and Tom S)

Thomas Cappleman

Ignore: ChatGPT was right The top 12 for this year with that system: Position Name FOCAL Points Events played 1 Jack Hurst 27602 11 2 Thomas Carey 26453 12 3 George Armstrong 25109 12 4 Adam Latchford 24522 13 5 Jonathan de Souza 24519 10 6 Tom Cappleman 24247 9 7 Rob Foster 23239 6 8 Dylan Taylor 2...

Thomas Cappleman

What do the double and treble mean in the badges page? Looks like I'll get the Centurion badge at the end of Sunday, unless I make any finals, and the 64champ if I win any game at all, so wondering how to get the other two. It's just two or three of the first 3 badgers Oh yeah, makes sense. One com...

Thomas Cappleman

What do the double and treble mean in the badges page? Looks like I'll get the Centurion badge at the end of Sunday, unless I make any finals, and the 64champ if I win any game at all, so wondering how to get the other two.

Thomas Cappleman

Appearing on Mastermind. You're only involved in the episode for your 4 and a half minutes of questions. And I was in the weird series where contestants weren't in for each other's specialist rounds, so even on set for less. So it's all camera trickery when all contestants are seated together waiti...

Thomas Cappleman

Appearing on Mastermind. You're only involved in the episode for your 4 and a half minutes of questions. And I was in the weird series where contestants weren't in for each other's specialist rounds, so even on set for less.

Thomas Cappleman

If anyone wants a nicer option than the Travelodge, Best Western (who own the hotel across the roundabout) are doing a 2 for 1 sale for the next 3 days, for stays up until March. Currently £125 for 1 person or £134 for 2, including breakfast.

https://www.bestwestern.co.uk/2for1

Thomas Cappleman

Ben beat me to the specific examples. (Related, Martin May had 2 games in one series, withdrew for personal reasons, then carried on with that count next series) Was surprised with Helen's case to see that they specifically overturned the dodgy result and included it in her count, rather than just w...

Thomas Cappleman

Braintree 2022 fit in 7 14-rounders which is only 7 rounds shorter. Surely once a year starting an hour earlier or finishing an hour later wouldn’t be that much of an issue? It is a special occasion after all! Opinions may differ on this, but these are mine . Pushing the start time earlier makes it...

Thomas Cappleman

No other results for MOTTIE on the Apterous wiki, so looks like you're the first to try it.

POTEENS was allowed twice in 2010 (and disallowed before), but no one's even declared it since, which is surprising.

Thomas Cappleman

Ray's comment there is " potentially bringing the word count from the ODO's ~140000 entries to the ODE's whopping ~600000 entries" - if they'd taken everything from the full OED. But it was just some (semi-)random selection of it, and then partially reverted in some instances. If it had be...

Thomas Cappleman

I eventually tried on a private window, which worked, then it also worked again on my regular one

Thomas Cappleman

Orangefield is a lovely scramble - good one for when 10 letter cons become too easy and someone moves on to 11

Thomas Cappleman

Surely Hawk-Eye was robust enough anyway since they used it for challenges, so I'm not sure why they needed tis new system that needed extra testing. The regular version of Hawkeye takes a few seconds to get the result through, so not good enough for live use. You want to be confident that a new sy...

Thomas Cappleman

"The decision to introduce Live Electronic Line Calling at The Championships was made following a significant period of consideration and consultation," the All England Club chief executive Sally Bolton said. "Having reviewed the results of the testing undertaken at The Championships...

Thomas Cappleman

Adam Latchford popping up in one of my education videos at work: https://youtu.be/WBYOWeFZqQ4?si=Ah0PzEs8Bs873wzJ&t=269

Thomas Cappleman

I ran the Focal scoresheet generator for the standings as they currently are for counting each number of results from 10 down to 5 (covering all the top 12 as potentially relevant): 10: Jack Hurst Thomas Carey George Armstrong Adam Latchford Jonathan de Souza Dylan Taylor Dan Byrom Tom Cappleman 9: ...

Thomas Cappleman

Interesting interview here with the winner of an Ig Noble prize, who basically found that clusters of large numbers of extremely old people are all due to e.g. bad record keeping: https://gizmodo.com/data-on-extreme-hum ... 2000499381

Thomas Cappleman

According to this that took him up to 34th on the English all time money list for poker (overtaking a certain Victoria Coren Mitchell among others): https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/201/#340

Thomas Cappleman

Looks like I've got 8 Lincoln, 8 London, 8 Reading, 4 Birmingham, 4 MK, 3 Bristol, 3 Braintree (and some smaller ones). So 4 so far, hopefully up to 5 next year

Thomas Cappleman

Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Sun Aug 25, 2024 2:42 pm What happened to Matthew Tassier? I don't think I imagined talking to him but he's not in any results.

Good question! He and Lynne were definitely there near the start, and they were announced as sign ups on the Facebook event, but then seem to have disappeared without playing.

Thomas Cappleman

Occams Razor didn't help the sub-postmasters much Indeed. Can anyone explain to me in simple terms what was wrong with the Horizon system. If you sell someone £10 worth of stamps, there is £10 more in the till, and £10 worth fewer stamps. If the system is telling you there should be £20 in the till...

Thomas Cappleman

Generous of you Jon, but I'd put your 813 solution even higher. It's just such an extreme version of the 937.5, and to even think of it in 30 seconds yet alone execute it. I'd give myself some chance of getting one like the 952 in time, but I'm never getting your one. (Obviously Jack's actually righ...

Thomas Cappleman

Perhaps tournaments that have fewer than 6 rounds should use points scored to rank players rather than wins - for all rounds, so when a draw is done, you're matched by points. Wins are still more important than points scored though - tight games shouldn't be punished The final table would presumabl...

Thomas Cappleman

Some absolutely batshit crazy final standings from this event https://greem.co.uk/cgi-bin/colive/tourney.py?tourney=CoRea2024 Helen Harding 87 pts per game 42nd Place Paul Talmey 81 pts per game 10th Place Tom Stevenson 112 pts per game 26th Place Martyn Pegram 73 pts per game 25th Place With a lar...

Thomas Cappleman

It's possible I was aware of this at the time but forgot, but India apparently overtook China as the most populous country last year. Both countries combined constituting more than a third of the world population is insane Similarly, the US still being third if you added another billion people to it

Thomas Cappleman

I make Conor as being 23/31 or 74.2%, so an initial beater

Thomas Cappleman

Enfield council do it for free, seemingly based on concerns about fly tipping (source: https://www.enfield.gov.uk/news-and-eve ... o-strength). But a brief Google search suggests that's rare even among London boroughs.

Thomas Cappleman

How is it that a poem or song written in a foreign language is translated into English it still seems to rhyme Because the translator has chosen to make it rhyme (because that's "how poems are" in English), almost certainly meaning it's not what you'd have got if they just translated it n...

Thomas Cappleman

That's incredibly unlikely to happen - and looking through a selection of recent events with full round results confirms that. Tom, I'm not sure where you are getting your data from to make this claim of "incredibly unlikely to happen" from, but I think you are just wrong here. It literal...

Thomas Cappleman

It's unlikely though that the top 3 after 1 round of Lincoln style will be the actual strongest 3 (given different random rounds to play), so most likely 2 of the very top players will still be on the top table for the following round. I'm inclined to disagree with this. Any single combination isn'...

Thomas Cappleman

- The final round of games should most likely pit the best players against each other. Which, if any, of those 5/6 principles does the current system fail on? The Swiss system used at COLIN and other players doesn't really do this. As far as I understand the top players after round 1 go against eac...

Thomas Cappleman

Tim finally found a way to break the Tim Down curse and get an actual good seeding then

Thomas Cappleman

Having the players turn away/close eyes while the host sets up would help with most of them. Then they're free to set it up without having to do some complicated manoeuvre to get it in the right place while never being visible along the way.

Thomas Cappleman

Note: In async gameplay, both players play from the same set of rounds but don't see each other's solutions until the entire game is completed and a high score is submitted. Standard round-by-round scoring applies, so the single player leaderboard scores seen in the app are not what counts. If both...

Thomas Cappleman

[*] FLOWERAGE: Too easy for finalists. :( (Spotting this would have got me into the final, and I had basically all the time to do so because George only buzzed with it on about 28 seconds) [*] ASYNDETON: Good pick! It missable, but if you know it it's quite a fast solve, and most players at finals ...

Thomas Cappleman

I would have thought there were a lot more words ending in -OUS than starting in OUT-. So why is it that if you have O U and T there's nearly always an OUT- word, but if you have O U and S there's almost never an -OUS word? A couple of thoughts: - The larger number of -OUS words (if it's even true)...

Thomas Cappleman

Thanks Jeff, was a fun day, and some good imagination in the quiz.

Thomas Cappleman

Ruth's approach at London was initially to play a bunch of cons on your app and save off some interesting ones, but they tended too easy. As she's not a current member, my next suggestions was to look at past games on Apterous from a random date ages ago, and use those. She then made her own scrambl...

Thomas Cappleman

Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Tue Sep 12, 2023 10:21 am The Duke of Edinburgh Award.

Care to expand? As awards you can get when you're young go, seems reasonably on the non-joke side

Thomas Cappleman

Reuslts: Round 1: Steven Turnbull 31 58 Jonathan Wynn Jonathan Wynn 62 34 Jonathan Seal Jonathan Seal 54 55 Steven Turnbull Phil Stanton 32 67 Tom Cappleman Tom Cappleman 67 44 Eeshan Malhotra Eeshan Malhotra 68 33 Phil Stanton Matthew Tassier 54 46 Coral Heath Coral Heath 31 72 Ronan Higginson Rona...

Thomas Cappleman

Final standings: 1 Ahmed Mohamed W 6 6 0 406 2 Ronan Higginson L 6 5 0 407 3 Jack Hurst 6 5 0 389 4 Jonathan de Souza 6 5 0 372 5 Adam Latchford 6 4 0 398 6 Jonathan Wynn 6 4 0 386 7 Tom Carey 6 4 0 381 8 Tom Cappleman 6 4 0 365 9 Dan Byrom 6 4 0 363 10 Eeshan Malhotra 6 4 0 331 11 Matthew Tassier 6...

Thomas Cappleman

Ronan M Higginson wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 3:24 pm
Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Mon Aug 14, 2023 2:37 pm
dan spinks wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 5:34 pm RMT have just announced a strike for the 26th
This is a bummer.
Not coming then?

Are you?

Thomas Cappleman

Do you know which letters sets will be in use? If it's the Board Game sets, do you know when you'll have them from? The consistency in the letter packs was because I sat down and sorted through every one of them in the weeks beforehand and gave them equal distribution (yes, I'm sad). I kid you not,...

Thomas Cappleman

Rob already in the lead not even counting his results since covid - will be interesting to see how that grows

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