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gregladen | June 6, 2016My house goes on the market for sale on Thursday. If you are looking for a place in the norther suburbs of Minneapolis, or know someone who is, I'll put you in touch with our excellent agents.
I'll post links to the info here when it is available.
jrosenhouse | June 1, 2016Time for the big finale. The Monday morning game. Since I had already requested a bye for the final round, this was my last chance to make a respectable result. Here's how it went down.
I was playing black. My opponent sported a rating of 1983. But he also had a formidable Russian name, and I figure that counts for another fifty points.
He opened with 1. Nf3. Cagey! You're not quite sure what you're going to get with this. Maybe an English. Maybe a Reti. Maybe a transposition into a standard d4 or e4 opening. I decided to steer the game toward my normal Orthodox Queen's Gambit, and…
jrosenhouse | May 31, 2016After my win in round two I was excited for round three. My opponent sported a 1952 rating, and he had white. He opened with 1. e4.
Now, over the years I've tried most of the major defenses to e4. I was an aficionado of the Dragon Sicilian for a while, until I noticed I kept getting mated on h7 against stronger opponents. Then it was the Scandinavian for many years. I had many good games with it, but eventually I lost confidence. If white knows what he's doing he can make things pretty unpleasant for black.
So I've recently turned to the open games. This is not a move (ha!) to be taken…
jrosenhouse | May 30, 2016No Sunday Chess Problem this week, but I do have a good excuse. It's because I just spent the past few days participating in the Cherry Blossom Classic chess tournament. Enough with made-up chess positions! Sometimes it's good to experience the real thing.
For about ten years now I've been mostly retired from serious chess competition. I've never given it up--I read chess magazines and follow the big events--but I haven't been studying or trying to improve my rating or anything like that. Sure, I would play in the big amateur team event every year, but that's really a social event where…
jdupuis | May 30, 2016I'll be attending upcoming Canadian Library Association National Forum, a kind of sunset conference as CLA reimagines and recreates itself. The idea is to take the pulse of Canadian librarians on the important issues in the library-related landscape. I'll be curating the session on Canada's National Digital Strategy, including presentations by me and two others, Emily Landriault and Bobby Glushko.
The details are below.
Digital Strategy and the Government of Canada
Presentation speakers
Emily Landriault: Open Government and Open Data
Bobby Glushko: Cyberbullying and Doxing
John Dupuis:…
jrosenhouse | May 24, 2016I think in the end Hillary will win in November, but I become less confident about that by the day.
Donald Trump's latest is to bring up Vince Foster. Those of us who remember the nineties will recall this as one of the many fake scandals the right-wing noise machine just invented from whole cloth. But for those millennials whose political memory starts with Obama, this is all new. And since Bernie Sanders has spent months telling them how untrustworthy she is, they are already primed to believe it.
When this election started, I had some admiration for Sanders. I liked a lot of what he…
jrosenhouse | May 23, 2016I may not blog as much as I used to, but I do still sometimes put myself out there. I just did a podcast with Jim Stein, posted over at the New Books Network. Jim is professor of mathematics at California State University at Long Beach.
The conversation was about the book I coedited with Jennifer Beineke, The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects. The book is essentially the conference proceedings of the first MOVES conference on recreational math, organized by the Museum of Mathematics.
We chatted for close to an hour about the joys of recreational mathematics, as well as the…
jrosenhouse | May 23, 2016Yes, I know it's Monday. But it's still Sunday Chess Problem. Deal with it.
One more from the files of Milan Vukcevich for you. This problem was published in 1994 and calls for selfmate in five:
Recall that in a selfmate, white plays first and tries to force black to give mate in no more than the stipulated number of moves. For his part, black does everything in his power to avoid giving mate. It's a complete inversion of normal chess logic!
Now, what's going on here? The first thing to notice is that black is pretty well tied up in knots just now. On the other hand, if either the b6…
jrosenhouse | May 18, 2016I was going to write a real barn burner of a post about the big election, but then I came across this:
Folks, sometimes you just have to focus on the good things in life.
jrosenhouse | May 15, 2016Sunday Chess Problem is taking this week off. We do have a topic for conversation, however.
Richard Weikart is an historian at California State University, Stanislaus. He has made something of a cottage industry of blaming Darwin and evolution for the ills of the world, most famously in his book From Darwin to Hitler. His argument, apparently, is that poor Adolf Hitler was trying to understand the cause of Germany's decline, then he read Darwin and realized it was the Jews. The book was, understandably, savaged by more serious historians.
If Weikart's intent was simply to elucidate the…
jrosenhouse | May 13, 2016A copy of the Japanese edition of Taking Sudoku Seriously showed up in the mail today:
Cool! The little bit of English on the cover is the only part I can understand, but it looks like they did a real good job. The diagrams all look good, at any rate.
And while I'm at it, The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects just picked up a nice review in the Newsletter of the London Mathematical Society.
Not a bad way to end the week. Alas, my summer course starts on Monday, so next week's likely to be less fun.
jrosenhouse | May 8, 2016This week I have one more problem from Milan Vukcevich for you. This one was published in Chess Life magazine in 1986. It later won first prize in the tourney. It caught my eye when the award was published, and it was one of the problems that got me interested in composing in the first place. The diagram calls for mate in eight:
Loyal readers of this series might remember the term “Nowotny.” It is one of the main interference themes employed by problem composers. A Nowtony occurs when one side plays a move that simultaneously interferes with two line pieces, usually the rook and bishop…
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2016Here's a a charming story:
On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.
Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.
The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he'd brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater--a look he would later…
gregladen | May 6, 2016....
And I must say, this is a perfect name. It is totally appropriate to christen this scientific research ship ...
Sir David Attenborough
jrosenhouse | May 2, 2016Did you hear the one about how Charles Darwin wasn't the creator of natural selection? Did you know that other people had had the idea before him?
Oh, you did know that? Because anyone who has ever spent five minutes learning about the history of evolutionary thought knows that? Well, tell that to Daniel Engber over at five thirty-eight. Apparently a big-time crackpot named Mike Sutton has made the astonishing discovery that Patrick Matthew, a Scottish farmer, anticipated Darwin in an appendix to an obscure book called Naval Timber and Arboriculture, published in 1831. Of course, the…
jrosenhouse | May 1, 2016It's been a busy few weeks. I hosted a Passover seder. (What? Atheists can't have seders?) Actually, I run a pretty laid back seder, all the more so this year considering there were goyim in attendance. It's mostly just a big dinner with some Hebrew and matzoh and charoset thrown in for fun. But if I go a year without doing the four questions then I go through withdrawal, so a seder it is. My parents drove down from New Jersey for the big event, and since I can't let them see the squalor I actually live in this meant a fair amount of cleaning. It's good that they visit from time to…
jdupuis | April 29, 2016And by blame, I mean "blame."
Yesterday the flagship journal of the AAAS, Science, published a series of feature and editorial articles on Sci-Hub, the unauthorized article sharing site.
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
The frustrated science student behind Sci-Hub
My love-hate of Sci-Hub
It's a Sci-Hub world data set
Overall, the articles are pretty good descriptions of the Sci-Hub phenomenon and relatively even-handed, especially coming from one of the big society publishers like AAAS.
There was one bit in the main article, Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone, that really…
gregladen | April 29, 2016
This is a guest posts by Claire Cohen Cortright.
Claire Cohen Cortright is a mother, climate activist, and biology teacher living in upstate New York. She
is an active member of Citizens Climate Lobby and moderator at Global Warming Fact of the Day.
______________________________________________
It is time, now, for climate activists to get vocal.
As it becomes more clear that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, there is increasing talk about the importance of unifying the party. Negotiations are on the horizon … for Vice President and for the Party’s…