830!

2 comments

Earlier this month a Scrabble player named Michael Cresta, in Lexington, Mass., scored 830 points in a single game! He and his opponent scored 1,320 points, making it the highest individual score and the highest game total ever in regulation play.

Stefan Fatsis, the author of the greatest (and only) book I've ever read on Scrabble, has the complete rundown on Slate today. It's actually a great description of how a large number of improbabilities can snowball into something incredible — two mediocre players make enough unlikely choices in succession to create a highly improbable outcome. Sort of a... if an army of monkeys at a million Scrabble boards... kind of scenario... without the frightening hordes of monkeys... um, where was I?

Comments

Suzanne Long -

Only slightly on-topic, but glad you liked the Scrabble tile pillows (courtesy digg.com, no less!) http://stephenreed.net/wordplayinstallation/id3.html

Rob -

http://www.angstyblog.com

After you mentionned it a while ago, I got my hands on and read Word Freak. Great book! It made me memorize my 2 letter words and give up after a few days of trying to learn my 3 letter words. I guess I'm not the right kind of hardcore.

Regardless, there's a movie called Word Wars which is the (spiritual) movie version of the book. It follows the same people who were in the book, and Fatsis even makes an appearance.

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Daniel Burka

My name is Daniel Burka. I'm a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently, I'm the director of design with a startup called Tiny Speck and for several years I was the creative director at Digg. I grew up in PEI, Canada, where I was one of the founders of silverorange. Aside from obsessing about interface design and css selectors, I'm a frequently-falling rock climber, a lazy cyclist, and an often out-of-bounds disc golfer.

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Summary

I'm a web designer living in San Francisco, California. I sometimes get the chance to present lectures and workshops at conferences around the world, where I speak about iterative design strategies, designing for large online communities, and more broadly about interface design for web applications. I've posted many of the slides from past presentations I've done on Slideshare.

Currently, I'm the director of design at a small gaming startup called Tiny Speck. Until October 2009, I was the creative director at Digg. I was also one of the co-founders of the social content-sharing site Pownce, which is now a part (heh heh) of Six Apart. Back in 1999, I helped found silverorange, a stellar web development and design firm based in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I continue to work with silverorange, but as an inactive partner.

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I'm not currently looking for any kind of work and sometimes I take a long time to respond to email, but if you'd like to contact me please send an email to daniel [at] deltatangobravo [dot] com

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I tweet when the mood strikes at Twitter

I sometimes review products on Silverorange Stuff

I sell my amateur photography on Clustershot

I post some of my personal photos on Flickr

I used to contribute on the Digg Weblog

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The technology that powers this blog was built by silverorange on their Swat open-source web application toolkit. I'm no longer working on day-to-day projects at silverorange, but they're available for hire if you're looking for top-notch interface design or web application development.

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