Okay, here's the new plan. Open with the English, preferring g3, a reversed Sicilian Dragon. Against e4, play the Alekhine. Against d4, play the Benoni. I'll probably get killed with all of them, but they're all offbeat and aggressive, which is very different from my old Caro-Kann/Slav/Queen's Pawn complex.
|W|P|80958112|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhy We Oppose Votes for Men
- Because man's place is the armory.
- Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.
- Because if men should adopt peaceable methods women will no longer look up to them.
- Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.
- Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them peculiarly unfit for the task of government.
—Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times (1915)
|W|P|80954435|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
A 1964 Charger looks dated. A 1964 pine tree doesn't. Why? If fractals describe "natural" forms, does that mean fractal art will never look tacky or out of date? Why?
|W|P|80932241|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBring on the 10-room houses! And here's how they'll be used!
Living room
Kitchen
Dining room
Family room
Master bedroom
Kid's room
Other kid's room
Study
Storage
Giant abattoir for converting the flesh of third-worlders into sausage
Jumpin' catfish. A poll finds that 49 percent of Americans think the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees. 48 percent said the government should be able to monitor religious groups, even if it means infringing on their consititutional freedoms. Only seven in 10 thought newspapers should publish freely. "Those less likely to support newspaper rights included people without a college education, Republicans, and evangelicals."
I thought conservatives believed in the conservative use of government? What happened to no-new-taxes, land-of-the-free, pry-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands conservatism? How does a worldview based in Christian values rationalize intolerance, hawkishness, and judgment?
What's the ratio of college-educated Republicans to college-educated Democrats?
|W|P|80917330|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHow gay are you?
|W|P|80928733|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comGood lord. Wired is reporting the results of the 11th Annual World Memory Championships.
"Many of the competitors in this year's competition qualify for International Grand Master status, meaning that they can remember the sequence of a deck of cards in under three minutes, seven decks in an hour and a written number 700 digits long."
"On his way to the title, Bell memorized 2,643 random digits in 30 minutes, a record-breaking 1,197 playing cards in one hour and 280 spoken digits in five minutes."
Interestingly, they say that the strongest competitors tend to be 40 to 50 years old. "I believe that the memory goes down a little bit with age but can be balanced easily with more training," says this year's third-place finisher.
|W|P|80873456|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comJust read a very interesting piece in the Economist about demographic trends revealed in the 2000 census. As in many Western countries, the U.S. fertility rate had been dropping steadily, well below the "replacement rate" of 2.1 children per woman. But apparently it has zoomed back up again recently, largely because of our high immigration rate (and high fertility rates among immigrants). At this rate, the U.S. will pass Europe in population by 2040.
|W|P|80886492|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDesign and animate your own Shockwave zoo with The Puppet Tool.
|W|P|80818890|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"There is something precious in our being mysteries to ourselves, in our being unable ever to see through even the person who is closest to our heart and to reckon with him as though he were a logical proposition or a problem in accounting."—Rudolf Bultmann
|W|P|80818235|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSadly, the national epidemic of unimaginative headline writers has claimed another victim. The Onion, second only to The Daily Show for news-format social satire, now ruins each insightful story with an almost verbatim echo in the headline.
"Search For Public Restroom An Epic Ordeal Of Alienation, Humiliation, Human Cruelty," reads a head in today's issue. Hey, that sounds good, I'll read that. "A local resident's search for a public bathroom became an epic odyssey of alienation, humiliation, and human cruelty Monday." Ha ha ha ... ha ... Hey, that would have been pretty funny if I hadn't just read it less than one second ago.
The only way to make this worse is to print the same language a third time, in a photo caption. That creates an intriguing echo effect that keeps readers hooked for hours. Don't editors read what their copyeditors are writing? Doesn't anyone consider user experience? Come on, people!
|W|P|80789435|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMy FICS rating has been dropping ever since I adopted a new policy:
- No bullet, no blitz, no bughouse. Just standard time controls, at least G/30.
- Play a new opening every game.
- Don't look at the opponent's rating.
- Don't focus on my rating, i.e. on winning or losing. Just find good moves.
My rating has dropped from 1694 to 1653 in the week or so since I started doing this. I think this is almost entirely due to the openings. That might be a copout, though. No one at this level plays very organized openings; that's one reason I don't study that part of the game. (It is amazing how few people understand even very basic opening principles, though; that's why I want to vary my own experience.)
Anyway, I know my tactics are reasonably strong, although somehow every game goes down to a king-and-pawn endgame. Maybe I'm not being aggressive enough?
|W|P|80791417|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPhilip John of southern Wales bested 90 competitors Monday to win the 17th World Bog-Snorkeling Championship.
"To cheers from bog-snorkeling enthusiasts and local onlookers," John took 1.45 minutes to traverse a 60-yard-long, 4-foot-deep trench cut in a peat bog outside Llanwrtyd Wells in central Wales. Contestants are allowed snorkels and flippers, but may not use conventional swimming strokes.
In completely unrelated news, the owner of a Bangkok cooking-gas company has been forbidden to dress his delivery men in Spider-Man suits.
Narongwit Suthiviriyakul said the gimmick had nearly doubled his business in 10 days.
"We don't want to take legal action against anyone who violates our intellectual copyrights," said Bongkoch Publishing Company licensing manager Sirijan Phipitrangsee. "We are all Thai, but we can't let them do it because we are the authorized agent on behalf of Marvel Enterprises. We advised the owner to use monkey suits because monkeys don't have intellectual property rights."
|W|P|80780701|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence."—Howard Eves, In Mathematical Circles
|W|P|80733845|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Genius is eternal patience."—Michelangelo Buonarroti
|W|P|80733799|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature. ... The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war."—James Madison
"The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure."—George Washington
"Considering that Congress alone is constitutionally invested with the power of changing our condition from peace to war, I have thought it my duty to await their authority for using force in any degree which could be avoided."—Thomas Jefferson
|W|P|80730902|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"There is only one nature—the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole."—Bill Wulf
|W|P|80733824|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBeyond an apparent editorial policy favoring anecdote journalism, National Public Radio has been embarrassing itself for several months now with a legal policy requiring permission to link to its site. Recently they've reformed this policy, but still reserve the right "to withdraw permission for any link."
If you're that paranoid about your IP, why put it on the web? "They don't have the right to grant permission for any link, and they in fact don't have the right to withdraw the right," says Tim Berners-Lee, who I think most of us would agree has an opinion worth considering. "The real problem is that NPR, a credible news agency, promulgates something that is utterly untrue. And that this chills speech. NPR owes the Internet an apology, not a minor revision to its policy."
|W|P|80737232|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Here's a low-tech image of me. Note the haunted stare, the flood-victim fashion sense, the inescapable air of squandered potential ...
|W|P|80738174|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAdding archives to the blog today. This has become quite the fixer-upper.
|W|P|80698391|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTired of poor returns in your socially responsible mutual fund? The Vice Fund sees a tidy profit in gambling, tobacco, alcohol and aerospace. It beats the S&P 500 fivefold!
|W|P|80698356|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comValley of the Geeks has posted a great series of banner ad parodies. "Merrill Lynch: Where Ethics and Compromise Go Hand in Hand."
|W|P|80698213|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president's spouse. I wish him well!"—Barbara Pierce Bush, remarks at Wellesley College Commencement, June 1, 1990
|W|P|80697571|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Where should you aim? When diving and crashing on to a ship, aim for a point between the bridge tower and the smoke stack(s)." So reads a training manual for kamikaze pilots, recently translated and published by The Guardian. "Entering the stack is also effective."
|W|P|80623407|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWow, this is cool. Omnipresent media overlords Clear Channel Entertainment have compiled a list of acts available for college gigs, complete with their fees. Cheap Trick costs $25,000. P. Diddy is $125,000. Pork Tornado? "Call for pricing."
Some surprises here. Huey Lewis still commands $100,000 per show, even for a college crowd. Steven Wright gets only $15,000; Drew Carey gets $100,000. Sort of like a celebrity stock market.
|W|P|80627524|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comYow! The Washington Post is putting the entire paper online, formatted like the print edition. Some newspapers and magazines are doing this now, too. This will be the test of the little niche I've carved for myself. Will people want to read a "literal" copy of the print product online? Or will they want a different, more web-friendly format? We'll soon see ...
|W|P|80609679|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comkuro5hin examines whether a war against Iraq would be just. A "just-war" argument examines whether a military action is justifiable in light of five criteria:
- Your country has just cause.
- The war is being declared by a proper authority.
- Your war is driven by the right intentions.
- Your war has a reasonable chance of success.
- The ends will be proportional to the means used.
They conclude that in the case of a U.S. action against Iraq, all of these are uncertain, except perhaps #4 ...
|W|P|80609998|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNote to self: Don't go to the dentist two days after seeing Marathon Man.
|W|P|80569987|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBoth The Sydney Morning Herald and The Washington Post are reporting that a $253 million American wargame was rigged to favor U.S. chances in a war with Iraq.
As leader of the "Red" force, which was to represent an "unspecified" Middle Eastern country, Gen. Paul Van Riper used motorcycle couriers in order to evade electronic eavesdropping equipment.
When the "Blue" (U.S.) fleet arrived at the Persian Gulf, he ordered small boats and planes to move in apparently aimless circles before launching a surprise attack, which sank a substantial part of the U.S. Navy, which had to be "refloated."
Van Riper quit when he learned that the script was being doctored to favor the Blue forces. "We were directed ... to move air defenses so that the Army and Marine units could successfully land," he said. They were also ordered to turn off or move air defense systems.
He said he fears the results of the exercise could lead to an unrealistically optimistic assessment of U.S. prospects in a real conflict.
It's still not clear to me why we're after Iraq. Why now, particularly? It just seems fishy, especially after both Bushes got huge approval ratings when responding to Mideast aggressors ...
|W|P|80579396|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHordes of Googlenauts are working on a puzzle posed by a Microsoft Games Studio employee. Over the last 20 months (!) his boss has been revealing a list of states, starting with Delaware. The question is, by what criteria are they listed? The prize is now more than $2,000. Hints:
- The answer is available on the Internet.
- The answer may be either 48 or 50 states.
- The answer was published in a publication "with many colorful pictures."
Order of statehood and average elevation have already been eliminated as possibilities.
|W|P|80576894|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThings are getting ugly in the P2P file-sharing world. An ISP called Information Wave has banned all access from and to RIAA's website for its users. "We feel the RIAA will abuse software vulerabilities in a client's browser after the browser accesses its site, potentially allowing the RIAA to access and/or tamper with your data," IW said in a press release. That seems kind of paranoid, though I agree with them in spirit. I wonder whether the big media companies, like journalism and everything else, are just being disintermediated. What's left? Who's not a middleman?
|W|P|80544263|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBoing Boing reports that a group of New Yorkers are planning to jog through Manhattan with WiFi-equipped laptops in a race to see who can cover the most mileage while logging the most wireless access points. You get one point for every five nodes that your scanner logs between Bryant Park and Bowling Green.
What strikes me about this is that New York looks very different to these people, but in a completely invisible way. They will be traveling among millions of superficially similar people, but their perceptions and actions will be incomprehensible to those around them. Sort of shows how wide the divide is getting.
|W|P|80543624|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWatched Marathon Man the other night. It's a good movie, but the backstory makes absolutely no sense. Someone is killing diamond couriers in order to flush Szell out of hiding. Why does Roy Scheider accuse Szell himself of doing this? What's with the ominous bouncing soccer ball? If Szell's not doing it (and why would he?), who is?
William Devane's character in particular is just ridiculously contrary. He leads the Division, but he supports Szell even in torturing an American citizen, and willingly participates in a ruse to get Hoffman to talk. ("Everything we do cuts both ways," ostensibly because Szell can lead them to other Nazis.)
But Devane is the last to understand what any of his agents are doing. He shoots his own agents, offers Szell to Hoffman "in exchange for your brother," tells him honestly and precisely where Szell can be found, then immediately shoots Elsa and takes off after Hoffman again. It's just baffling. The performances are so good you don't realize how nonsensical the plot is. William Goldman's usually much better than this.
|W|P|80491988|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me."—W.H. Auden (1907-1973), The Dyer's Hand (1962)
|W|P|80371109|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAh, the Internet. Someone in England has glued 20 pence to the street and trained a "Trampcam" on it. View the hall of fame.
|W|P|80353959|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Kartoo is a relational search engine interface. Instead of displaying a list of links, in ranked order, it displays the results of a given search in a graphical, networked format. Nodes are linked to each other by common terms, which you can add and remove to further restrict the search graphically. The links between the nodes are color coded, allowing you to, with minimal effort, see how terms relate different sites, and nodes are displayed by size, according to relevance to the search term." (Thanks, memepool.)
|W|P|80326461|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comConceptual artist Jonathon Keats is sponsoring a petition to get Berkeley, Calif., to acknowledge Aristotle's identity law, commonly expressed as A=A. He says that a simplistic law challenges society's notion of what laws are, why they are made, and why we follow them. Although his law can't be broken, a misdemeanor fine of up to one-tenth of a cent would be imposed on anyone or anything caught being unidentical to itself within city limits.
|W|P|80330219|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAfter a suitably sensitive post-9/11 hiatus, Slate is posting Bushisms again. This batch is from Waco, Aug. 13. I think it's a healthy sign of returning normalcy when we can once again mock our commander-in-chief:
- "There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we're going to do it again."
- "I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here."
- "I can assure you that, even though I won't be sitting through every single moment of the seminars, nor will the vice president, we will look at the summaries."
- "Tommy [Thompson, Health and Human Services Secretary] is a good listener, and he's a pretty good actor, too."
- "The trial lawyers are very politically powerful. ... But here in Texas we took them on and got some good medical-medical malpractice."
- "I firmly believe the death tax is good for people from all walks of life all throughout our society."
"Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency."—Raymond Chandler
|W|P|80314750|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThank goodness someone's thinking ahead. This Is True has started printing "Get Out of Hell Free" cards ("Sin All You Want, We'll Print More"). "They're being passed around in every U.S. state, most Canadian provinces, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bermuda, England, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, South Korea and Taiwan."
|W|P|80289778|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comForbes has released its annual list of top-earning dead celebrities. Elvis tops the list at $37 million—not bad for a guy who's been dead 25 years—followed by Charles Schulz ($28 million) and John Lennon ($20 million). The text notes that James Dean, who died in 1955, was bumped off the list this year after making $3 million last year. Where's that money coming from? He made only three movies, the last one, Giant, released posthumously.
|W|P|80289152|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comYow! You thought Enron's corporate officers were unscrupulous, but they're only number 9! Fortune Magazine just posted a list of the 25 companies with the greediest executives. Between January 1999 and May 2000, AOL's officers and directors sold $1.79 billion in stock! Qwest's leaders, led by Philip Anschutz, sold $2.26 billion!
|W|P|80278125|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPictorial history of Michael Jackson's face on Anomalies Unlimited.
|W|P|80233698|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comToday's NYT reports that heat waves kill more people in the United States than all other natural disasters combined. According to the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware, an average of 1,500 American city dwellers die each year because of the heat. Annual deaths from tornadoes, earthquakes and floods together total fewer than 200.
|W|P|80233485|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The right side of the brain plays a bigger role in identifying brand names" than the left, says New Scientist. Good to know. Is it me, or did we cross some marketing Rubicon when radio ads started including fine print? Before, the goal was to find a likely customer for your product. Now, it's to sell anything to anyone and evade liability claims in the process.
Worst offender so far: Advertising Age reports that Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications pays actors to pose as "tourists" in major U.S. cities. They ask people to take photos of them using a mobile phone that doubles as a digital camera and then extol the device. Bloomberg News columnist Matthew Lynn calls them "human spam."
|W|P|80241050|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI'm starting to wonder what people must think of North Carolina. There are two national news stories currently associated with this state, and both make us look kind of stupid. One is the UNC Qu'ran scandal. (Isn't exposure to new ideas the whole point of college?) The other is the Miss North Carolina scandal.
Rebekah Revels, a 24-year-old high school English teacher, won the Miss Fayetteville title (woo!), then Miss North Carolina. She and took a year off to ... do ... whatever ... Miss North Carolina does, and to prepare for the Miss America pageant. She had to resign when an ex-boyfriend revealed that he had nude photos of her, taken while she was changing clothes.
Now, what's the lesson here? That Tarheels prefer women who don't change their clothes? That Revels is unworthy of a "scholarship" because she has more than one shirt? How do these pageants keep rationalizing their decisions? Do the contestants themselves believe this? If not, what's the point?
|W|P|80246269|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWoo-hoo! Notepad 2000 supports Ctrl-A! A giant leap for mankind!
|W|P|80200760|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."—John Ciardi
|W|P|80185542|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLos Angeles police just issued an "amber alert" regarding 4-year-old Jessica Cortez, who disappeared from a city park on Sunday. CNN reports that more than 208 L.A. County officers have joined the search. Gee, that sounds like kind of a big number. A quick visit to the National Center for Missing And Exploited Children turns up the following:
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) there were 840,279 missing-person entries (adults and juveniles) in the year 2001. A review of NCIC data shows that that approximately 85-90 percent of those entries were juveniles. Thus, in approximately 725,000 cases (or on average 2,000 per day) the disappearance of a child was serious enough that a parent called law enforcement and the law-enforcement agency took a report and entered it into NCIC."
NCMEC notes that many of these are solved quickly, but that still leaves many thousands of missing children who aren't cute enough to be profiled in national media. Burns me up.
|W|P|80194025|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn a GameSpy interview, Dave Arneson describes the birth of role-playing games, and eventually Dungeons & Dragons.
|W|P|80150587|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Listen, folks, there's no magic formula. I just follow the three C's: clean living, chewing thoroughly and a daily dose of vitamin church." Christianity Today writes up Ned Flanders.
|W|P|80150578|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDavid Morgan: Was there ever any consideration given during the writing process to how an audience would respond to the material [on Monty Python's Flying Circus]?
Eric Idle: None whatsoever.
|W|P|80154696|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comB3ta calls this "one of the best animations we've ever seen."
|W|P|80064298|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I have no desire to prove anything by dancing. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance. I just put my feet in the air and move them around."—Fred Astaire
|W|P|80064281|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWell, here's a good idea. Millions of people confront identical problems every day, right? So why not build a giant expert system that learns from our collective experience? Enter Life's Difficult Decisions. Eventually it will dispense flawless advice for any situation. Try it—if your particular difficulty is not in the database, you can contribute your own solution for the benefit of generations yet unborn.
|W|P|80048543|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLately I seem to be channeling a Yale philosophy lecturer. Nick Bostrom's name comes up in every interesting place I look. Founder of the World Transhumanist Association, Bostrom suggests we might be living in a computer simulation, predicts the consequences of human-level machine intelligence, and even knows why cars in the other lane really do go faster.
|W|P|79959460|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."—Thomas Carlyle
|W|P|79868558|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com