Intermezzo: Linked in

First of all, I’m not blogging. I’m on vacation. Got that? :) Thanks for the well-wishes and comments on various posts – I’ll be back Thursday in all likelihood.

Something I’ve been entertaining myself with on vacation is LinkedIn (wow, am I an incredibly fun Dad or what!!1!?). LinkedIn asks you to write a professional summary, and it’s good to occasionally stop and think in macro terms like that. So here’s my LinkedIn summary:

I get a huge kick out of the service part of service journalism. It’s vastly rewarding when a reader responds with some variation of “You made my job easier.”We get a lot of those emails and calls at CSO. In learning to achieve that goal of making readers successful, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with some of the very best editors, writers and managers in B2B media: Rick Pastore, Abbie Lundberg, Lew McCreary, Scott Berinato, Sarah Scalet, Michael Goldberg and many, many others. Their presence on my list doesn’t imply that they endorse my work, but whether they like me or not, I’ve borrowed/stolen something specific from each of them.

I also find that this focus on reader success helps cut through a lot of the noise surrounding media at this time. Multimedia, blogs, feeds, citizen journalism, user generated content – it’s not nearly as confusing as all the bickering and bombast would seem to indicate. If it’s a tool for providing information your audience wants, use it.

Meanwhile, thanks to USATE teammate / co-beerdrinker Matt Phelps for tagging me in this blog-tag-thingie. I’ll get to it on my return. It strikes me that in some sense the tag questions ask the blogger to write a LinkedIn summary, only for chess instead of work.

Down time

I will now attempt vacation.

If it works, the blog will be dark for a week. Aside from whatever entertaining comments you should choose to leave in my absence.

Hope you are also finding time to enjoy the summer!

The chess crucible

I have some serious holes in my chess game.

This is true for almost everybody below master strength. Whether it’s tactics, strategy, openings, endgames, time management, memorization, bad nerves, or a generally confused move-selection algorithm, we all have problems that need fixing.

Something really unfortunate happens along the road of chess development: You figure out what your weaknesses are, and perhaps you try to fix them, and you take some more beatings, and then … you start trying to cover them up. To avoid dry positions, you take up gambits. To avoid endgames, you go for cheap swindles. To avoid tactics and memorization you open all your games with 1.d4 2.Nf3 3.Bf4 4.h3 etc.

Tim Newman says the same thing happens in golf (if I can paraphrase a bit) – you have trouble with the wedge so you start making funky adjustments with some other club. And you learn the funky shot and you stabilize your handicap at 20 and there you sit for the rest of your life, rationalizing that “at least I’m not making myself look like an idiot with that wedge.”

I really am convinced that the only way forward is to end the cover-up and intentionally play the types of position where you stink. To burn the weaknesses and impurities out of your game in the fires of struggle, defeat and relentless analysis, preferably with the help of a coach and/or some friends.

So this is where I’m headed. Classical chess, balanced positions, symmetrical pawns. Bring it on. Positional binds, patient maneuvering, slight endgame advantages. The type of chess I’ve always hated and found boring and derided as “+0.001 chess”. 

Of course if I can learn to win that way, my attitude will change immediately. And I’m delighted to already have the help of friends like Tim, Mark La Rocca, Petr Jirovsky.

Crucible, here I come.

CERN and the God particle

[Previously on Reassembler: Dorigo's fantastic chess sacrifice and subsequent analytical exchange drew my attention to the world of particle physics.]

In particle physics, it seems that all roads lead to Switzerland and CERN, home of the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider, a vast buried high-tech ring of concrete and steel used for smashing tiny bits into each other to see what happens. CERN is near Geneva; the LHC ring (pictured) actually crosses the border and much of its 17-mile circumference lies in France.

The LHC should be up and running in 08. Many physicists are hoping that LHC experiments will help prove or disprove the existence of the so-called God particle (more formally known as the Higgs boson particle) which is believed to bestow mass on all other particles. It’s apparently a kind of missing link in theoretical physics right now.

Interesting stuff. But the culture (not just the science) of that endeavor is also quite fascinating. Here’s a well-done ‘05 article from Symmetry Magazine about the nature and the sociological challenges of collaboration on four proposed massive research projects that will use the LHC. (Theoretical physicists aren’t all one big happy family: See this, and this.)

Incidentally, Symmetry is ”a magazine about particle physics and its connections to other aspects of life and science, from interdisciplinary collaborations to policy to culture” and it looks very accessible to the layman. I think I’ll tuck into their feature on Dark Energy next. 

* Any actual physicists who’d like to correct or contest anything in this post, please do.

Word of the day: Misericord

A narrow dagger used in medieval times to dispatch a seriously wounded knight.

From a Latin word for mercy. Has a couple of other meanings: a relaxation of monastic rules, and a sort of leaning post in a cathedral. The leaning post one is the only definition given in a 2006 Miriam Webster dictionary; the other two can still be found in my 1982 American Heritage. No, I don’t collect dictionaries. The point is, over time we occasionally lose these nuances of language that offer a window into history.

Mr. Beckham is on the right

At least I think that’s where the traffic is coming from.

WordPress is a bit coy at times.

Survival mashup

Digital Headbutt mashes up Survivorman and Man vs. Wild. If you drop both guys into identical situations, who survives first? (Or should that be survives most? Or best?) Anyway, an astonishingly detailed analysis follows…

Mr. Beckham comes to America

I like football* on a casual basis. However, the more hype Mr. B gets, the more I’m inclined to tune it out.

So it was by pure chance that I plopped down on the couch and turned on the telly just before the Chelsea – LA game.

Two funny bits. One: the camera crush surrounding Beckham on the pregame, um, pitch. Hilarious. Two: The guy standing to the left (her right) in the occasional, okay frequent, shots of Posh and Eva Longoria in the box. When they smiled, he smiled. When they clapped, he clapped. Like a puppet on a string. Double hilarious. Much more entertaining than the actual game.

* aka Soccer. See, I’m trying to get in the spirit here.

** I created a David Beckham tag just to see what happens to my traffic today/tomorrow. I’ll post a graph if it’s interesting.