THE stranger the battle, the better the game, or so hopes Zygote Games of Hadley, Massachusetts, which has just introduced 鈥淏one Wars鈥�. Players take on the roles of legendary palaeontologists Edward Cope, O. C. Marsh, Charles Sternberg and Barnum Brown, all competing to find dinosaur bones, name fossils and accumulate scientific prestige in the late 19th century.
Along the way they must survive assorted natural disasters. Other players are liable to try dirty tricks, including stealing or destroying the bones.
Advertisement
Players can draw cards that give them special advantages. Among these is the ability to supply their fieldworkers with better-quality alcohol 鈥� not, as it happens, an unrealistic concern.
It is all based on history, albeit loosely. Marsh and Cope became bitter rivals after Marsh noted that Cope had mounted the head of an elasmosaur on the end of its tail 鈥� a mistake not quite as silly as it sounds because both neck and tail were very long.
Sternberg worked for each of them at different times, occasionally dodging hostile Indians in the field on their behalf. But Brown, famed for discovering Tyrannosaurus rex, wasn鈥檛 party to the epic Marsh-Cope feud, and although he and Sternberg competed for glory, it was a friendly rivalry.
Ironically, at one point the Bone Wars website confuses elasmosaurs with the whale-like mosasaurs, an error that would have riled all four scientists.
FEEDBACK is puzzled. What we thought was the world鈥檚 most famous internet search engine 鈥� which already gets far too many free plugs here 鈥� is being bashful.
When Colin Deady searched for 鈥渟earch鈥� at , the results in order were: AltaVista, Lycos Search, FamilySearch.org and Google. We checked and got the same, though things may have been rearranged while this ink was drying.
Now, the unique thing about Google is supposed to be the conclusion of the PhD thesis that kicked it all off: that you can rank web pages according to the number of pages that provide links to them, each of these weighted by the number of pages that link to them, and so on, until you get to the last page on the web.
It鈥檚 a mathematically sophisticated fame-o-meter, in other words 鈥� in a world where fame is measured in number of links. It鈥檚 also tempered by various tweaks to prevent abuse of the system, though at the time of writing a search for 鈥渇ailure鈥� still throws up a page about George W. Bush.
So is Google genuinely less famous than its competitors? Maybe. One reason may have been the generosity of AltaVista in leaving a loophole in its search engine setup.
Website-building colleagues long ago worked out how to exploit this to get AltaVista to search just their own pages. Each page making use of this had at least one link to AltaVista, and some sites had thousands of these pages 鈥� which piles up a lot of fame for AltaVista. (The loophole has changed, but lots of the links are still there.)
It鈥檚 possible, of course, that Google is being deliberately shy for some unfathomable reason. Deady, also a web designer, claims that 鈥渆nquiring minds and conspiracy theorists need to know鈥�.
THOM Smith tells us that when he visited a friend鈥檚 house he spotted a 1.2-metre-tall inflatable Dalek in the living room. (Yes, it is a student house.)
Presumably for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the Daleks鈥� catchphrase, it bore a warning label: 鈥淭his is not a life-saving device鈥�.
WE HAVE almost all seen the explanation: 鈥淭he card security code is a unique three or four-digit number printed on your debit/credit card.鈥� It took Tim Shapcott to point out that this means, if true, that there are no more than 10,000 credit cards in the world. Sorry to break it to you this way, Tim, but you鈥檙e living in The Truman Show. There aren鈥檛 that many real people who have cards. The rest are just played by extras.
BOTTLES of a certain brand of mineral water bear the claim that the contents 鈥渃apture the natural power of volcanoes in every drop鈥�. After a moment鈥檚 thought, Jamie Shaw concludes that this must be the potential power of dormant volcanoes, as drinking the stuff is a pain-free experience.
鈥淕lenda Harris spotted a sign below a screen showing a film clip in the Mary Rose Museum at Portsmouth in the south of England, claiming: 鈥淭his film lasts for 4 minutes and is repeated every 15 seconds.鈥濃��
鈥淪o drink volcanic,鈥� the blurb goes on, 鈥渢hink volcanic and unleash your natural spark today.鈥� Having first evacuated the three nearest towns, we hope.
FINALLY, apropos of something or other 鈥� polyontologias, perhaps, or complex complex complexes (Feedback, 22 October) 鈥� Guy Buncombe writes to tell us of a friend who confused his guests at a dinner party by apologising for an astringent apple-based dessert, saying: 鈥淭his pie is a trifle tart.鈥�