“Solstice”: a card game invented on the 2013 winter solstice

This game builds in intensity and has lots of opportunities for vengeance, laughing, and monkey noises.

• 2 or 3 players, 2 decks shuffled together
• Setup: Place the deck face down in the middle, or in several piles. These are the draw piles. Make room for a single discard pile. Players start with no cards.
• Object: To get a perfect hand and go out first, or have a near perfect hand when some other player goes out. A perfect hand consists of a straight of six to thirteen cards of the same suit (any suit, wrap-arounds not permitted, Aces are high), plus an optional number of pairs, and no other cards. A pair may only be opposite color to the straight’s color. For example, a perfect hand with a spades straight may contain no clubs, and may contain any number of red pairs (pair of 2s, 3s, etc). A perfect hand with a red straight may contain only black pairs and vice versa. However, a perfect hand cannot have more than one pair of the same number (cannot have two pairs of 3s for example).
• To begin, when the dealer says “go”, everyone take as many cards as they wish from any draw pile.
• To play, any player may do any of these actions, at any time, without taking turns:
  • (1) Discard a single card face up using one hand onto the discard pile. The first card to be discarded can be any card from any player. The subsequent cards must be one higher or one lower than the top card showing. For example, if a 10 is showing, only a J or 9 may be discarded next, regardless of suit. Aces are both high and low for discarding only, so the sequence may wrap around.
  • (2) Draw one card at a time from any draw pile.
  • (3) Draw any number of cards from the top of the discard pile. (not out of the middle of the pile though)
  • (4) Wait
• To go out, the first player to achieve a perfect hand covers the discard pile and says “done”.
• Additional notes
  • “No lefties” – right-handed players must discard with the right hand throughout the game (and lefties with left)
  • “Forced draw” – If no player wishes to draw and the game comes to a stop, any player may say “draw” to force all players to draw.
  • Reshuffle – When the draw piles are exhausted, play stops while the discard pile, except its top card, is shuffled and returned to become the draw piles.
  • “Leafing” – Splaying out the discard pile to view cards is acceptable, but picking up any part of the pile requires the player to take the lifted cards.
• Scoring
  • Every player gets one point for each card in their longest straight and one point for each card in legal pairs, and loses one point for all other cards (deadweight).
  • The player to go out gets an additional point for every other players’ deadweight cards.
  • The player to go out gets no points if they have gone out illegally, i.e. their hand is not perfect.

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A few things about an intersection

These are some comments on a local street upgrade project.

Summary of the scope for people not familiar with the project: The Indian School property is one of the only pieces of sovereign native land inside a city, and it is being redeveloped into some huge office buildings and hotels and retail. The city has agreed to do street improvements outside of the land. Traffic growth is projected, and so this project’s scope is to improve the two arterial streets that border the Indian School property and the intersection of those two streets.

The main question is what are we trying to achieve? A lot of people seem to be wondering why we should do anything. My answer (which is not exactly the official reason) is that the following problems exist, which should be remedied:

• Pedestrian access is incomplete and treacherous in places; in the worst case there is a bus stop in a place where there is no pedestrian access at all.
• The roads are designed without modern traffic calming and management techniques, meaning no medians, and so wide in places that it promotes speeding. (safety in general)
• The area is dilapidated in spots, and some well placed repair of streets and other public spaces could help in the general realm of urban revitalization – making it more pleasant to be in.
• There will be an estimated 40% increase in traffic which needs to be accommodated (maybe – see below).

Here are a few problems in the current thinking that the plan should address:

Problem 1: Demand increase is suspicious justification

The valley has quite low traffic levels generally, and the engineers predict about a 40% growth in the segments studied. It’s not clear where that growth is from. For example, they project growth on the segment leading away from the new employment center in the AM peak (from 520 to 700 cars/hr), which obviously cannot be explained by the employment center itself (because it generates no origin traffic in the morning), so therefore it must be explained by an estimate of area-wide growth trends. But I doubt whether the valley will experienced trends of that scale because it is bounded and already fully built out, and has been very slow to change.

The Indian School land (blue with heavy outline – partially developed) and the larger high intensity employment center (pink with thin outline). The green arrow shows one of the legs with increased projected travel demand.

The streets in question are apparently underused at present, so even if you believe the growth prediction, it’s hard to believe that they can’t accommodate the increase. For example, in peak hours at that intersection, you virtually never have to wait more than one light cycle and rarely have to queue more than 2-3 cars. So the whole idea that capacity increases underpin the need to rebuild the whole intersection is suspect.