Elegaic

Let me first offer a big thank you to all those who have so far joined in the game I proposed yesterday. It's been absolutely fascinating to get your responses. I'm really looking forward to reporting back on Friday. You have until midnight on Thursday to send me your simple decision of Defect or Cooperate. The more people who enter the bigger the prize pool. I only wish I had the funds to make this real. You just have to pretend that I do. I do encourage you to save ten minutes or so to have a read, although you might be kept up half the night working out what to do!

I've spent most of the day trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. After two days of trying to redesign the hole and reconfigure the peg, I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to resort to brute force and just hammer it home and live with the ugliness. Sometimes a problem just doesn't have a perfect solution. This actually reminds me of something that I discovered at university studying mathematics. All the most interesting problems don't have perfect solutions.

All those fascinating questions of calculus which I loved solving at school were contrived to yield unambiguous answers. I loved working them out to get a unique solution. I was devastated then to realise that in the real world it was almost always necessary to make assumptions and use approximations to get any kind of answer. Nowadays, though, I feel quite the opposite. The most interesting problems are actually the ones that have no right or wrong answer at all!

So, I've been stuck in the office all day, a little frustrated, but at least warm compared to outside where the freezing temperatures have continued. I took shot this en route (somewhat indirectly) to the office this morning. The morning light was fantastic. That's one aspect of winter I will be missing as we go into Spring. The only one!