Viking Chess: Playing Kubb on a Cool Summer Day
Kubb, pronounced “kobb”, is a traditional Swedish game of patience, tactics, and beer. At least, that’s how I learned how to play it a few weeks ago with buddy Peter Ulrich of natural born friedrichshainer fame.
Kubb can look more complicated than it really is. The set up is quite simple. First you need a grassy area roughly 8 x 10 meters. Then you’ll have to have a set of wooden game pieces:
- 4 pegs (to mark the boundaries)
- 6 batons, ca. 30cm long (to throw)
- 10 stumpy square wooden blocks, ca. 15cm tall (to knock over)
- 1 king-sized block, ca. 30cm tall (to conquer!)
Line up the stumpy blocks, five on each side. One team starts off with the six batons and throws them one by one across the playing field. The goal is to topple over each of the stumpy wooden blocks before ultimately knocking over the king. The only really tricky part is that you can only throw the batons underhand, so that while thrown, the baton flips over itself end-to-end, not sideways or what Peter called “helicopter style”.
Also, when you’ve knocked over a stumpy block, your team wins the piece and throws it up to midfield on your side. Your team can then start the next round from where the block lands, rather than from the initial baseline. Plus, to make the game a little more exciting, the opposing team must knock over that newly conquered blocks before finishing off the original five and finally getting to the KING!
So, that’s all there is to this summery Viking lawn game. You can buy a Kubb set or make your own; either way, it’ll be good fun.
Images: Kubb in Friedrichshain. Michelle Thorne. CC BY SA 3.0 US; Kubb. Public Domain. Contributed by Xerxes minor.
Kiss and Drive
After visiting the post-apocalyptic haunt of Louvain-la-Neuve, it was refreshing to see Belgians with a sense of humor. The “Kiss and Drive” signs at Brussels National Airport guide visitors to the passenger drop-off point, where families and lovers bid farewell with a kiss.
In a time of hyper-paranoia and over-regulation in airports, it’s charming to see a security sign that instead makes you smile.
Global Creative Commons Case Studies Launched
When all is said and done, case studies are a rather modern method of information sampling. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century during the Golden Age of the Social Sciences that case studies became accepted as a major research methodology. It took the clout of academic trendsetters like Freud to give this type of qualitative research its standing of The Empirical Method of Modern Day.
Nowadays conducting case studies is standard fare. Harvard Business School latched onto the idea of building its curriculum based almost exclusively on case study analysis. Since then, the method has become a staple for academics, psychologists, and MBAs alike. Interestingly, Harvard Business School now refers to its case studies method as “participant-centered learning,” which hopefully alludes to the active role students take in the learning process, rather than Harvard’s aspirations to score high in Business Buzzword Bingo.
In any event, Harvard BS aside, I am quite thrilled to be part of participant-centered initiative myself, namely the global Creative Commons Case Studies Project. This wiki-based collaboration was incubated by Creative Commons Australia, who methodically collected the first iteration of data (pdf) and presented it last January at ACIA, the international workshop on Asia and Commons. Since then, Creative Commons (the org) and other CC jurisdictions have joined the collaboration, and the CC Case Studies project has grown to over 100 entries. Currently its features a superb sampling of exemplary CC licensing in a range of fields and formats.
Some of the most impressive studies out so far are Global Voices Online, Blender Foundation, Architecture for Humanity, and A Swarm of Angels. All the studies can be sorted and searched by a variety of terms, such as country, language, profession, and media. And in true wiki fashion, anyone can edit and add to the database.
You can get your hands on a copy of the most recent edition of the Case Studies here [coming soon], which was announced at the recent conference by CC Australia, Building an Australasian Commons.
If you or your friends have got a CC story to share, come pick up a shovel and dig it! We’d love to hear about it.
Other folks talking about the case studies project:
images: Screenshot from Creative Commons; CC BY 3.0 Unported. Big Buck Bunny Poster by Blender Foundation. CC BY 3.0 Unported.
Wordle: Cloudy Biz Cards
Here’s webby way to make design-tastic business cards. As suggestes take a visit to Wordle, the strangely named word cloud service that generates impressive typographic layouts from any text. Paste in your blog URL, RSS feed, or whathaveyou, and let Wordle do its word clouding magic. Upload the textual cumulus to Flickr and use the image to order youself some “tiny wonderful calling cards” from MOO. If you really want to geek out DIY-style, you could consider toting the cards in a rigged Muji ashtray.
I tried out Wordle with =thronet= posts. Despite the applet taking ages to load, I had fun seeing which words popped up and where. It seems “sousvellance” took center stage, but who knew “PowerPoint” would be so dominant?
By the way, another cool things about Wordle? All the tag clouds are CC BY 3.0, just like the image above (which is CC BY 3.0 US by Jonathan Feinberg).
