Q. What is contain it everything?
A. Wisdom.
I am evidently not profound enough to understand my dessert.
Archive for June, 2009
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 4 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.
There are two things I can’t stand: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch.
- Austin Powers
I previously mentioned the state of industrial regression known as Dutch disease.
If you are familiar with English and German, you can read a fair bit of Dutch.
You’ve also heard the phrase ‘Dutch courage’, i.e. the bravery that comes from being drunk. Turns out that’s one of many disparaging terms developed by, surprise surprise, the English (who apparently hadn’t yet learned that you can’t make yourself look smart by mocking other people).
In chess, I used to play the Dutch defense (1.d4 f5), which got its name not as a perjorative but which is widely regarded as positionally suspect. It’s like a lot of positionally suspect openings – fun when you’re winning, but more often you aren’t.
In 1985 I lived in Germany for five weeks. This was part of an exchange program (of sorts) that took one or two high-school students from each US state. Four with a host family, the Gschwendtners, in Nurnberg. Then for the final week we went and toured West Berlin.
The trick is that to go there, we took a train, which necessarily involved traveling through East Germany.
At the border the train stopped to be inspected. Several East German guards came aboard to check everyone’s passports. Steeped in cold war rhetoric as we were, we were (at least most of us) utterly petrified by these nine-foot-tall, trench-coated, gun-toting Communist monsters.
I was 18. The guy sitting next to me was a 16-year-old sophomore. And as such, he didn’t qualify as an adult under East Germany’s border-crossing rules – so the guard arbitrarily assigned him to me.
Thus I have a visa stamped in my old passport indicating that at this tender age, I crossed into East Germany “mit einem Kind” (with one child).
Did the guard wink at this notion? I’ll never know for sure, but that’s how I remember it.
That’s what I write about.
This is fun – scroll down to the video embedded in this article & follow along for a ‘vulnerability assessment’ of a building near our office.
Unfortunately the camera wasn’t rolling when the facilities guy came out and confronted the video crew.
Apparently Nickerson demonstrated an amazing ability to lie creatively and without batting an eyelash.
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