Overall number of Boston-area shootings down 60% in June.
It’s so rainy I don’t even feel like shooting anybody
Published July 3, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a CommentCoulda bought a Sunbeam grill for cheap, or a Char-Broil. Instead I splurged and bought a Vermont Castings. That was 5 years ago; so far it has required zero maintenance and zero replacement parts, other than a new AA battery in the ignition.
As the sayings go, “A cheap product is an expensive product”, and “You get what you pay for.”
Analogous stuff going on in the publishing world. There’s lots of debate about whether you can “charge for content” instead of giving it away.
The answer seems obvious to me. If you want to charge a premium, you have to make a premium product.
You can’t charge for any old information. You *can* charge for a service that isn’t duplicated elsewhere for free.
An interesting case in point, apparently, is Cook’s Illustrated. With a zillion recipe and cooking sites out there, how can Cook’s charge for memberships? The answer is that Cook’s invests tons of research (= money) into their information product. You can’t afford to re-create all their tests in your home kitchen. In essence, it’s a testing service.
Now lots of newspapers & magazines & websites are probably going to try charging for their content online. But that’s after spending the last several years stripping every possible expense out of their operations.
So the attempt to charge is going to fail.
Not because you can’t charge, but because people won’t pay a premium price for low-end goods.
You can’t build crappy grills and then ask for Vermont Castings prices.
The pre-Columbian Maya people were good at math.
Why were they good at math?
They had two calendars: One, the Haab’, was roughly equivalent to our 365-day solar calendar. The other, the Tzolk’in (or Sacred Round), was a 260-day calendar delineating the spiritual year.
According to one textbook, anyway, they developed advanced math skills in the process of trying to synchronize their two calendars.
Side note: Why 260 days? Read the fascinating theories in wikipedia under the heading Origin of the Tzolk’in.
Q. What is contain it everything?
A. Wisdom.
I am evidently not profound enough to understand my dessert.
Reassembler comes up on page one for:
Great love songs Heaven help any man who takes my post seriously and serenades his love with Invincible or Battleship Chains.
The incorruptible cashier The nickname of the early cash register.
Dispatch war rocket Ajax (#1 result!). Repeat random pop culture phrases and become famous!
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto (#1 result!) Repeat random pop culture phrases and become famous!
Worst wikipedia articles Of course, as soon as an article goes on somebody’s “worst” list, somebody else improves it. That’s no fun.
e4 versus d4 Again, I was kidding.
Drilling a safe Great.
English as a foreign language
Published June 21, 2009 Academia , Brain , Chess , Culture , Language 3 CommentsI have two chess opening books:
- Starting Out: Alekhine’s Defense, by FM John Cox
- Starting Out: Queen’s Gambit Accepted, by GMs A Raetsky and M Chetverik
I started playing the Alekhine and scoring points right off the bat. I started playing the QGA online and did not start scoring points, and many months later I still don’t. In the QGA, for the most part, I get crushed in every manner imaginable by players of all strengths.
Here are possible explanations, or factors at any rate:
- The Alekhine is a very concrete attempt to confuse your opponent with weird imbalances and antipositional moves. I am relatively good at this kind of play. The QGA is an attempt to gradually equalize by putting your pieces on good squares. I am not good at that.
Okay, that might be the whole story. But:
- John Cox is an FM; the other guys are GMs. Maybe the FM, as a weaker player, is better at anticipating the really basic questions that people like me need to address. The GMs might automatically write for a higher-level audience.
Yeah, maybe, but:
- The really interesting question is whether Cox as a so-called Westerner (he’s English) fundamentally writes in a manner that’s easier for me as a Westerner to grasp. Have you read Russian or Ukrainian or Georgian literature and history etc? Is it possible that there’s a barrier not of language per se but rather of East-versus-West world view or cognitive style? That even though they’re writing in perfectly good English, I don’t really understand their points?
(Here’s betting if Denys weighs in as a Ukrainian living in the US, he finds a nice way to say “Your first theory was best - you just suck positionally.” :)
A master-level player recently said: “I probably shouldn’t admit this but I don’t want to have to mate somebody with bishop and knight!” He wasn’t sure he could do it.
I replied that I also don’t want to play either side of R+B v. R , or R+N v. R . The most likely result is that I’m going to embarass myself.
Now the interesting thing about this is the “I shouldn’t admit this” part. Checkmate with B+N – so elementary! Shouldn’t any decent player be able to do this “by hand” as blogger DK Transformation would say? (p.s. where are ya, DK?!)
You’d think so. But
A) I wonder if there are actually more people like this master and me – self-taught players who never bothered with some allegedly important fundamentals. And
B) I started playing in 1982 and in tens of thousands of tournament and blitz games since, I don’t recall EVER having to mate with B+N. EVER. So even if it arises once or twice before I kick the bucket, would it be worth the time investment to study?
You know of the duckbilled platypus but may (like me) be unfamiliar with its relative the Long-Beaked Echidna, AKA spiny anteater, which is cute in a dorky way, totally avoids humans, has offspring called “puggles”, lives for 50 years, and yes, lays eggs.
Are they smart? The New York Times article that brought these little dudes to my attention says “Among humans, the neocortex that allows us to reason and remember accounts for 30 percent of the brain; in echidnas, that figure is 50 percent.”
No word on whether they play chess. If they don’t, that’s another indication of how smart they are.
Echidna takes their name from the “Mother of All Monsters” in Greek mythology. Man, some zoologist had a sense of humor.
Recent Comments