Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand where that 3.9 g expected weight comes from.
A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
#42Is a 155 throws enough to evaluate bias? Seems more times than I'd like to roll some dice, but not enough to gain enough measurement confidence. By what criteria is the person assigning the traffic light ratings? What about face coplanarity? Get this enthusiast in a metrology lab.!
No, it's not enough. Maybe if the bias is 10% or more.
Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
#43Dice aren't assigned to players in this game so even if they were ridiculously biased it wouldn't give any one player and advantage, even if you did roll them more than 3 times in the entire game.
Maybe a player can learn which dice are biased then choose those dice to throw depending on what result would be best for them at that moment? So they gain a slight edge.
No, you don't choose dice to throw. The dice are all thrown and then you choose.
Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
#44Just in case anyone else nerd-sniped themselves this morning... if things fall at the same rate in a vacuum, regardless of their mass, why does it matter if one side of a die is heavier than the rest? I didn't know, and I had to look it up. It's correct that a biased die will fall without bias. But when it hits the surface and starts tumbling, it tends to rotate around the center of gravity, which will be closer to t…
Ironically, for me it was the “Weebil toy” that isn't part of my lexicon. (I've looked it up now. They're actually called Weebles and we don't seem to have that in Germany.)
Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
#45Just in case anyone else nerd-sniped themselves this morning... if things fall at the same rate in a vacuum, regardless of their mass, why does it matter if one side of a die is heavier than the rest? I didn't know, and I had to look it up. It's correct that a biased die will fall without bias. But when it hits the surface and starts tumbling, it tends to rotate around the center of gravity, which will be closer to t…
I’m not sure how much of an effect it has, but dice aren’t rolled in a vacuum. There is buoyancy from the air that can roll the dice heavy side down. Which is what the saline water test is testing.
Not just bouyancy but friction. An off-center mass moving through anything but vacuum is a dart with fins.
Or is bouyancy just used as a shorthand term for the effect of fins? Because literal bouyancy would also be a thing here. But the literal bouyancy points away from the center of the Earth while the friction points away from the direction of travel.
Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
#46Just in case anyone else nerd-sniped themselves this morning... if things fall at the same rate in a vacuum, regardless of their mass, why does it matter if one side of a die is heavier than the rest? I didn't know, and I had to look it up. It's correct that a biased die will fall without bias. But when it hits the surface and starts tumbling, it tends to rotate around the center of gravity, which will be closer to t…
Ironically, for me it was the “Weebil toy” that isn't part of my lexicon. (I've looked it up now. They're actually called Weebles and we don't seem to have that in Germany.)
:) I'm not sure I ever saw the word in print! But I loved the ones I had as a kid.
Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
#47Cute, but dreadfully silly. The giveaway is the handling of uncertainty. That's too many decimal places for some of these measurements: 10um (0.01mm) is not reliably measurable by a cheapo caliper, and even trying to do it with a good caliper or micrometer, you'll find that everyday objects simply cannot be reliably straightforwardly measured with that level of precision. (You need cleaning procedures, standardized h…
This reply is smug but dreadfully silly.
The giveaway is the handling of information and curiosity. You argue for throwing both away, and it's not clear why. When the author takes away more decimals than they should, the article becomes useless. When the author leaves in more decimals than they should, I round "with my eyes" to my desired precision. As a bonus, I can take their numbers and spot-check them easily.
The author put up a fun piece on a board game review website and summarized that the dice are fine. You ask what the threshold is, I say use your brain and eyes to pick one. We only need to read this once, not grade 200, so we don't need to invent an arbitrary cutoff.
If you treat students or coworkers in this way, I hope it is clear to them that you respect rubrics more than the actual "Ask a question, gather data, answer it in public" scientific process and that they do not mistake stodgy rules for must-follow procedures. It would be a shame to scare people off from rolling dice on the internet because someone may say there are too few p-values or too many decimal places.
Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe a player can learn which dice are biased then choose those dice to throw depending on what result would be best for them at that moment? So they gain a slight edge.
No, you don't choose dice to throw. The dice are all thrown and then you choose.
Thank you. I didn’t know that.
Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)
#49Cute, but dreadfully silly. The giveaway is the handling of uncertainty. That's too many decimal places for some of these measurements: 10um (0.01mm) is not reliably measurable by a cheapo caliper, and even trying to do it with a good caliper or micrometer, you'll find that everyday objects simply cannot be reliably straightforwardly measured with that level of precision. (You need cleaning procedures, standardized h…
This reply is smug but dreadfully silly. The giveaway is the handling of information and curiosity. You argue for throwing both away, and it's not clear why. When the author takes away more decimals than they should, the article becomes useless. When the author leaves in more decimals than they should, I round "with my eyes" to my desired precision. As a bonus, I can take their numbers and spot-check them easily. The…
I'm actually the anti-rubric guy! What matters to me is whether your arguments are appropriate to support your conclusions. Not whether you jump through the right hoops.
This guy played it straight: these measurements, this result, that conclusion. But the evidence chain was bad: results couldn't be derived from those measurements, and conclusion couldn't be derived from those results. So I called it out.
This is literally my day job, so I don't really like seeing poorly reasoned research, and maybe I'm more sensitive than most. But if you're going to play it straight, I think you should get it right. If that means you use a lot more weasel words, so be it -- if something is your opinion I can't argue with it. But when you state it as a fact, you better be able to back it up.