Spontaneous Updates

Finished the Tanya Huff novel, Blood Price—a good read. I believe it was the first DAW novel I’ve read. I wanted to check out what type of books they publish because I like their submission policy. DAW asks for the complete manuscript, which to me seems like the best way to go about things.

Saw The Departed this weekend—a good flick. A tad on the longish side though. I was hoping that Martin Scorsese would win an Oscar for this, but I’m not sure it’s good enough. While enjoyable, I wasn’t awed by anything in particular. The movie was well made of course, just like all his are.

Random fact about me: For four years growing up I participated in something called Odyssey of the Mind or OM. OM is a creative problem solving after school activity for children of all ages from elementary up to Military level. The program consists of a long term problem and a short term problem, called Spontaneous. The long term problem varies and there are several to choose from each year. The teams I was a part of tended to pick the technical problem, sometimes mixed with a performance. The first year, my seventh grade year, we built a robot that had to perform certain tasks. Following that, we made musical instruments that were played without directly touching them. My third year it was mainly a technical program, we had to devise a plan for certain size packages to go to different locations without our interference. The fourth and final year I participated, we had to invent a technology that would help someone with a disability, then present it’s usefulness in an entertaining way. The first year we won the much coveted Ranatra Fusca award, the highest honor that can be received, a proud day that one. My team, which changed members from year to year, advanced to the State level each year and the final year, we did the best we had yet.

Now, onto the spontaneous problem. You have a very short time to solve this one, typically a few minutes. There are physical problems, such as a pile of items with which you need to build a bridge that needs to hold a certain weight. Then there are the word problems, for instance the problem may be “Name as many kind of ships as you can.” Three minutes to think, two minutes to answer. The problems seems mundane, but you are scored based on your creativity, for instance, steamship would not garner as many points as friendship would.