Canfield, part of Mike Casteel’s Klondike, is the game I play most on computers. Klondike is one of the oldest shareware games for Macintosh. [wikipedia article] I have been thinking about why I play for a while, but this morning I recognized that version 8 which I have been using under OS X 10.4.8 was not quite keeping up on the iBook I got in August. Version 10 is now installed. Thanks Mike!
If you play with cards or a computer version, one of the first things you have to come to terms with after learning the rules is that you are likely to lose most games even if your play is flawless. For some folks this can be frustrating, especially those who like to try recipes or other procedures which guarantee success if you just follow the directions properly. I used to write documentation for lab procedures and computer support and feel I got pretty good at it. It is something the late Elizabeth Zimmerman described as writing knitting directions for who she called blind followers. It is a lot like writing a computer program.
Unlike with gambling, the precise rate at which you can expect to lose in solitaire has so far evaded mathematical description (see Wikipedia article link above). This could lead to a entirely different discussion of why gambling and casinos are poplar when the management and any intelligent player should know the odds exactly. For me gambling is not entertaining, have to do too much of it for real. If you have raised children, tried to start a business, or drive an automobile you will know about taking chances. Anyway, lets not go there today.
I used to say (rather cynically) that solitaire was good practice for real life because you get used to losing frequently with grace. I suppose high frequency of losing tempts some folks to cheat, again lets not go there.
My background in science and technology lead to an early realization that in research and development most of the ideas you come up with won’t work. You “lose” when you run out of new ideas to try. In fact, if success in inventing new equipment or trying to understand Mother Nature’s secrets were just a matter of following a set procedure, it wouldn’t have been much fun — discovering or inventing your own procedures can provide a real rush.
I think one of the major failings of our educational system is that many otherwise well educated specialists don’t understand science and how scientists work. Keep this in mind when you hear discussions of global climate change.
Now we are hearing (flash back to the early 1960s and baby boomers being educated because of Sputnik) that we need to “train” more scientists and engineers.
Unfortunately citizens are to believe that “the market” needs to drive things with yet more government abdication of leadership. Innovation is not efficient because you are still trying to figure things out. Until an idea is mature you will often end up doing a lot of things “by hand” or making your own equipment from scratch (machine shop and glassblowing skills were quite helpful for me). This can be a hard sell when the needs of stockholders take precedence over the needs of the scientific community and citizens in general.
That has spilled over into academics too. One of the more shocking experiences in my scientific career was a meeting with a new faculty member when I was managing a lab. We talked over his research interests and discovered that we already had the lab and field equipment necessary to collect data that would have major enviromental significance. Despite my initial misgivings (I was getting pretty jaded with the department politics necessary to achieve tenure) things were looking good. We began to make a list of resources and an outline for the research proposal. “But wait, this is a lot of work. It won’t be easy.” That ended the meeting and any illusions that this guy was a serious scientist.
Scientific discoveries need to be shared with the community. For scientists this is kind of a “doh” thing, you need to research what others have done before starting a project. When your community is a business organization, the tendency is to hide discoveries from competitive organizations or even others in your own organization. Have you had an adverse reaction to medication? Part of the glamour of having a defective metabolism is that most of the serious drug interactions I have experienced could have been easily avoided had better understanding of the mechanism by which drugs work been a major component of the marketing instead of proprietary information.
Back in the 1980s I had the opportunity to visit the lab of a very gifted scientist who had emigrated to USA from the former Soviet Union. One of the things he said was, “In USSR I couldn’t publish because of politics. In USA I can’t publish because of business.”
Think about it. Is it lack of scientists and engineers or expecting them to work in a hostile environment?
Time to randomize the deck and deal out a new Canfield game. It isn’t likely I will win, but sorting the cards and knowing that the computer will enforce the rules is soothing.
