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This is what Silk Road looked like during its heyday. (credit: US DOJ)

Nearly five months after convicted Silk Road druglord Ross Ulbricht filed his opening brief in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the government finally responded with its own brief late Friday evening. The government included over 200 pages of exhibits from the trial.

The 186-page reply rebuts, point-for-point, defense attorney Joshua Dratel’s claims that

• his client wasn’t the primary operator of the notorious underground website,
• that Ulbricht’s defense was hampered by two corrupt federal agents,
• that Dratel was not adequately able to cross-examine government witnesses, and
• that two witnesses were unable to testify on Ulbricht’s behalf, denying him constitutional rights, among other arguments.

After a lengthy recap of the entire case, United States Attorney Preet Bharara opened his arguments with a notable flaw in Ulbricht’s logic:

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

Richard Garfield, the mad genius behind complex games like Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner, has seen renewed success in the last few years with family-oriented titles like the terrific monster-fest King of Tokyo and its sequel, King of New York. So it's perhaps not surprising that Garfield has gotten even lighter and more chaotic with his new board game, Greedy, Greedy Goblins, which ditches turns altogether.

You, as one of the titular goblins, are encouraged to delve deeply into the eight mines open at the start of every round. Gameplay is simple enough: pick a tile from the pool in the center of the table and place it facedown on any one of the mines. Then pick up another tile and repeat. Meanwhile, everyone else at the table does the same simultaneously (and as quickly or slowly as they like), so mines steadily fill with hidden monsters, treasures, and explosives. When you wish to claim a mine, simply play one of your three goblin tokens on it; no one can add any further tiles. Once all mines are claimed, the tiles get flipped over and their effects are applied to whoever owns that mine. Gain enough gold coins across multiple rounds and you win.

(credit: Penguin Random House)

The title of physicist Sean Carroll’s latest book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, is proof of its ambition. This book wants to tie together, well, everything. That’s no surprise; many popular science books have wide scopes and aim to tie together disparate scientific information.

But The Big Picture is more philosophical than scientific, which is a bit of a departure for Dr. Carroll. Another of his books, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, is equally ambitious but heavy on the science. That book was largely about examining and weighing various scientific possibilities. His new book takes a step back and asks how we should be thinking about these possibilities in the first place.

But don’t be discouraged if you prefer science over philosophy: Carroll seamlessly weaves the two together. The Big Picture lives up to its title. It starts at the Big Bang, explains how time works (drawing on ideas from Carroll's previous book), passes through chemistry, biology, computer science, evolution, abiogenesis (the study of how life on Earth started), quantum mechanics, and neuroscience, all before finally arriving at a discussion of how consciousness is possible.

If I were to summarize the ideal scientific paper in four sentences, it would look like this:

• Look at this cool thing we did.
• This is how we did the cool thing.
• This is the cool thing.
• Wasn't that cool?

We like to think that the standard format (not to be confused with the Standard Model) was beautifully followed in days of yore. Nowadays, of course, it is not. Because things always get worse, right? In reality, scientific papers have always looked more like this:

• Look at this cool thing we did, IT IS REALLY COOL, BE INTERESTED.
• This is how we did the cool thing (apart from this bit that we "forgot" to mention, the other thing that we didn't think was important, and that bit that a company contributed and wants to keep a secret. Have fun replicating the results!).
• This is the cool thing.
• This thing we did is not only cool, but is totally going to cure cancer, even if we never mentioned cancer and, in fact, are studying the ecology of the lesser spotted physicist.

Call me cynical, but missing information in the methods section, as described in the parenthetical in item two, really, really bugs me. I think it bugs me more now than it did ten years ago, even though I'm no longer the student in the lab who's stuck with filling in the missing methods himself.