Today’s album is Everybody Else is Doing It, Why Can’t We?. Cranberries. Bittersweet, melancholy, by turns spare and lush.
Today’s movie is Michael Clayton. Wow.
Today’s neurobic is GOTDT (get on the dang treadmill).
Archive for February, 2008
Lidice is a town in the modernday Czech Republic.
In 1942 the village of Lidice was erased by the Nazis. The adult men were shot and piled into a mass grave, the women and children shipped off to concentration camps, the town itself razed to the ground and salted over (according to the Czech professor of my Eastern European Communism course) to prevent anything from growing there. This was a reprisal for Operation Anthropoid, the only successful resistance assassination of a major Nazi leader.
The village was rebuilt in 1949 near the original site. There’s a monument with statues of 82 children.
“By using daily exposure and routine, your cortex and hippocampus have created a map of your desktop so that very little mental effort is required to locate your mouse, stapler, wastebasket … Arbitrarily reposition everything.”
- from Keep Your Brain Alive.
Side note: I mouse left-handed at work. Have done so for years, not for cognitive reasons but to balance the stress on my wrists.
Every ska or reggae song sounds like a near-miss to me. I want to like it, the sounds are cool, and it’s usually okay, but it never turns the corner to great.
Same experience studying linguistics. Intro to Linguistics was fun. Historical Linguistics was great. Then I declared it as my major and every course after that (phonology, semantics, etc) looked like it was going to to be great – but never was.
subtitled: Well, that stunk
Hudson (1619–1682) was a dwarf who belonged to the court of Queen Henrietta Maria of England in the years before King Charles I was deposed. He was famous as the “Queen’s dwarf”, and “Lord Minimus”, and was considered one of the “wonders of the age” because of his extreme but well-proportioned smallness. He fought with the Royalists in the English Civil War and fled with the Queen to France when they lost in 1644. When he killed a man in a duel in an apparent attempt to move beyond his mascot role, he was expelled from her court. Soon after, he was captured by Barbary pirates, and spent 25 years as a slave in North Africa before being ransomed back to England and living out the rest of his life in poverty.
The mighty engine of commerce
Published February 25, 2008 Culture , Economics , Food Leave a CommentThe Recession evidently was not invited to the so-called Natick Collection - our recently upgraded local luxury condo/upscale shopping behemoth – Saturday night. At 5:30 the PD Chang’s already had a two-hour-plus wait. The Cheesecake Factory was virtually unapproachable. The gerrymandered parking lots (specialists in obstructed sight lines since 2007!) nearly impassable.
America shops on.
I will hazard a try at a few practical recommendations. Feel free to disagree.
- Don’t be afraid of “main lines”. I spent 20+ years avoiding them because I was afraid of being out-booked. Then I saw a great quote on the Boylston Chess Club blog from Ubermaster David Vigorito, speaking to another expert: “I think you over-rate both your opponents’ preparation and the value of surprise.”
To David’s point, I have been playing the incredibly sharp, unbalanced, unsafe, bookish Alekhine’s defense for about three years now and I have never been busted in the opening. (It’s inevitable, yes, but the point is that it’s so rare as to not merit concern. Why not learn a real opening if that’s the case?)
- Get a good book. The Starting Out series is really quite excellent. I am told that Kaufman’s book is great and that Rizzitano is very good at providing clear explanations (and having seen a couple of his lectures, I am sure it’s true.) If you are, like me, a part-timer, you are going to live in this book for several years.
- But don’t memorize anything! Memorization is drudgery. What you are doing is learning about a set of positions that arise in probably four to seven major variations available to your opponent. You are learning common tactics. Common strategic ideas. Memorization is largely a by-product of this learning process. Where are the weak or strong squares for each side? Which pieces might you want to trade off, and why? You will eventually find a few lines where memorization is key. This is true in the Vorohnez line of the Exchange Alekhine. Eventually Greg K killed me and I had to finish learning theory until around move 18 to hope for equality. Not the first priority.
- Play through annotated GM and IM games in your opening. It doesn’t matter if they’re playing exactly your variation. Stop and ask a million questions. It doesn’t matter if you get all the answers right.
- Play it. You will never be completely ready. After maybe five or six months of playing a “sharp” and unusual opening online, I ventured it against a lower-rated player OTB. I won because I got a decent position from the opening and then out-played him (19 moves). After about a year, I played it against Denys Shmelov (2300 at the time). I got a decent position from the opening and the he out-played me.
Do you see what you’re doing? You can’t sit for two evenings and learn everything about the Panov Attack or the Schliemann Defense or whatever. You have to stew in it for a long time to learn anything. But you have to go ahead and play it and take your lumps.
A flywheel is a big heavy wheel that “resists changes in rotational speed”. In other words, it’s hard to get it moving, and then also hard to get it to stop. An instrument of inertia.
You might imagine that, after blogging daily for months and months, it would be refreshing and beneficial to take a break. Recharge the batteries, et cetera. That you would return to blogging with a new zeal.
My experience is that blogging is more like a flywheel. Once you stop, it’s hard to get spun up again. This is true for work in certain respects as well.
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