Musings on chess, and lesser things
Non-chess posts
The worst thing about taking a long hiatus from a blog is all the spam. That aside, I’m back, and looking forward to a big year. It’s always nice when the chess and regular olympics coincide, and in a leap year no less. I was trying to find something more mathematically special about the number 2016 …
The fact that I knew every single movie reference does suggest I should be spending more time on my studies…
Three strange pirate-related things happened to me last week. Now there’s a sentence you don’t see every day. Admittedly, some of the links to buccaneering are a little tenuous, but it still makes for an unusual theme. It started when I found out about some trouble one of my German friends had gotten into. Having …
I can’t believe I haven’t come across this before. Over a century old, a minute’s worth of chess-related slapstick, and now I really want to buy a hat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sjoyeCtMF8
My ten-word review of the much-hyped Wachowski brothers’ sci-fi flick Jupiter Ascending: Expectation: The Matrix meets Star Wars. Reality: Sharknado meets Frozen.
SUMMARY: Short’s article was not as controversial as it has been made out to be Short based his claims on two recent academic contributions – one statistical comment and one study on FIDE data – that suggested that gender gaps cannot be explained away by participation rates There are several technical issues with these papers …
(See also the second, more technical follow-up: Men, Women and Nigel Short 2: An academic response) Much to my amazement, chess has hit the front pages of the mainstream media for the third time in a fortnight. This time, however, it’s more a case of old wine in a new bottle. The always controversial English GM …
A while ago, I wrote a post about tie-breaks in chess. It was inspired by a research proposal I submitted on social network formation as applied to round-robin chess, which basically consisted of a lot of mathematics. One point to come out of it was that no matter which tie-break system one chooses in chess, …
Many people are surprised to hear that I come from a family of extremely talented artists. They are usually even more surprised to discover that I cannot draw so much as a realistic stick figure. I think I made flip-book once that made some sense, if you squinted hard enough. My Dad was an acclaimed …