Leadership lessons in Shogun, #1

Remember, this is set in feudal Japan, where absolute obedience to authority was expected, on penalty of death.

Toranaga: “[Another person] says that the Netherlands were vassals of the Spanish king until just a few years ago. Is that true?”

Blackthorne: “Yes.”

Toranaga: “Therefore, the Netherlands – your allies – are in a state of rebellion against their lawful king?”

Blackthorne: “They’re fighting against the Spaniard, yes, but – “

Toranaga: “Isn’t that rebellion? Yes or no?”

Blackthorne: “Yes. But there are mitigating circumstances. Serious miti- “

Toranaga: “There are no ‘mitigating circumstances’ when it comes to rebellion against a sovereign lord!”

Blackthorne: “Unless you win.”

Toranaga looked at him intently. Then laughed uproariously. “Yes, Mister Foreigner…you have named the one mitigating factor.”

Highly applicable in professional settings. You can go always go ahead with the idea that you think is great, but everyone else tells you is stupid.

You just better be right.

Craftbar

Went there this week – one of Tom Collichio’s joints. When in NYC, what else could a Top Chef fan do? (Well, Perilla, but that’s for another day.)

Appetizer: Rabbit Ballotine with cherries and pine nuts, on the waiter’s suggestion. It was that, the veal sweetbreads or the braised octopus – I’m not going all the way to New York and ordering a salad. I didn’t know what a ballotine was and will let wikipedia describe it rather than bluff my way through.

Entree: Daurade Royale (that’s a mild white fish) with truffle-honey glazed turnips and charred onion tortelloni.

Here’s the thing. You go to any of a hundred expensive restaurants and you get clever-sounding recipes, with inconsistent quality. This stuff at Craftbar wasn’t like that. The ballotine was so simple and delicious and served with two pieces of toast. Delicious, charred, perfectly seasoned, perfectly crunchy toast that worked so beautifully with the meat. Yes – exciting toast.

Then the fish really only had three components in evidence – fish, turnips, pasta – and it was undoubtedly the most perfectly cooked piece of fish I have ever eaten. Not fussy, not swimming in sauce, no fancy presentation.

Simple. Perfect.

Dear Mr Crabby Old Chessplayer 4

“Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! ” – Mugatu

I’m late to the party as usual, but over at the Boylston Chess Club blog they’re having a merry time discussing tournament re-entry. That’s where you lose a game and pay a re-entry fee to have that loss wiped from your record.

Kudos to the Boyles (is that what you call the members?) for holding such a civil discussion. Nobody has called anybody an idiot yet. Let me go first.

Re-entry is an INCREDIBLY MORONIC BASTARDIZATION of sporting rules.

Say the Yankees have chemistry problems early and go 0-and-10. They toss the league a few Benjamins and get their record changed to 5 and 5. At the end of the season they knock the Rays out of the playoffs by 1.5 games. You understand this fully – they PLAYED THE GAMES AND LOST, but they pay to change their record. Jeff Gordon blows a tire on lap six of the Pocono 500, falling to last place; he wires the commish 5k and at the first pit stop, they re-insert him in 12th place. Federer gets knocked out of Wimbledon by a qualifier in round one, but wait wait, he’s back in. Tiger Woods buys a mulligan. Mitt Romney gets a recount in Iowa.

Let’s say I ever manage to show up at my club again, and an IM also enters. The IM has a minor car accident before round one, blunders on adrenaline and gets back-ranked plays well but falls victim to an extraordinary twelve-move sacrificial combo by Howard G. Meanwhile I have the tournament of my life and go to 3-0. The IM re-enters, wins two games, beats me in round 4 and wins first place by virtue of the half-point he bought back.

This is legitimate in any way? This makes sense? This is fair? Did he not play and lose a game in this tournament? I don’t get to pay a little extra now and wipe out my loss to be declared co-champion?

I don’t care that your club can make a little extra money with this nonsense. It’s utterly stupid and unjustifiable horse pucky.

New Norwegian Standard English

Norway has, roughly, two languages.

One is Bokmal, book language, sort of the educated Norwegian’s Norwegian, actually based on Danish (’cause they got conquered by the Danes once upon a time).

The other is Nynorsk, new Norwegian, more like a common man’s language.

Norwegians learn both. Apparently most of them use Bokmal for written/formal purposes but more people use Nynorsk for speaking.

I’m glossing over a lot of details here; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language for more. My own connection to this subject is that I enrolled briefly in first-semester Norwegian in college, although I had too many hours that semester and wisely dropped this course. (Retaining only the first five sentences of this post.)

It strikes me though that English could be headed for a mushy situation like this, though for completely different reasons. 

Forces accelerating the rate of change in English and/or loosening the shackles of the grammarian:

- Search engine optimization – it is in the commercial interest of various companies to be found even when the searcher has misspelled something

- Similarly, commercial pressures on publishers of dictionaries – it’s in their interest to have the language change rapidly, making last year’s edition out of date

- TXTING. Texting works like a pseudo-Occam’s Razor, shaving words down to abbreviated and/or more phonetic spellings. Twitter might contribute here too.

I’ll hazard a guess that tomorrow’s college students will write Bok-english for academic and career purposes but use Ny-english for real life.

That’s how I roll

My wife’s traveling, so I’m gonna do the typical cat’s-away man-stuff: The chessboard is staying on the kitchen table all weekend, and I’m having Hormel chili for lunch.

The man

Finally something about the pilot of the plane that landed in the Hudson:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28683246/

I/O

Input/output – in the computing world, how information flows into and out of a system. They have all kinds of fun characterizations of the sequence and nature of such transactions: FIFO is first in, first out, like soda cans in a vending machine. FILO is first in, last out, like soda cans in your refrigerator. GIGO is garbage in, garbage out. If your data is inaccurate or nonsensical, it doesn’t matter how you process it – you’re still going to get bad answers.

The quality of my chessplaying and my blogging are both heavily dependent on continual, new, quality inputs. If I’m reading chess books and doing analysis, I play well – even if the game at hand seems unrelated to whatever I’ve been studying. Conversely, in periods where Reassembler is particularly dull and dry (yes, like now), it usually means I’m overly focused on work and not reading books or wikipedia or otherwise canvassing the world.

It’s all about the inputs.

Ur iPhone 3G – I has it

I’m not a gadget enthusiast. My pulse does not change when an Apple ad, or a BMW ad for that matter, flashes on the TV screen. While it makes me less hip (if that’s possible), it’s definitely a cheaper way to live.

However, we were overdue for new phones (and the attendant sign-in-blood new contract), and on my wife’s initiative we got two iPhones. And it’s pretty dang cool. There’s an app called “Around Me” which my wife immediately installed; because it’s got built-in GPS, you can click exactly twice and find the nearest hotel, coffee shop, etc. Would have saved us from wandering across the northern perimeter of Syracuse in the wee hours of our return trip from Michigan.