NOT ABOUT JUST CHESS BUT THINKING, LEARNING
& EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY IN GENERAL
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ARTICLE
Available in its website
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN JULY 2006
The Expert Mind
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
By Philip E. Ross
EFFORTFUL STUDY
Effortful study is the key to achieving success in chess, classical music, soccer and many other fields. New research has indicated that motivation is a more important factor than innate ability. ETHAN HILL
A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is Jose Raul Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row. How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? "I see only one move ahead," Capablanca is said to have answered, "but it is always the correct one."
He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.
But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information. What is more, this research may have important implications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the classroom to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.
The Drosophila of Cognitive Science
The history of human expertise begins with hunting, a skill that was crucial to the survival of our early ancestors. The mature hunter knows not only where the lion has been; he can also infer where it will go. Tracking skill increases, as repeated studies show, from childhood onward, rising in "a linear relationship, all the way out to the mid-30s, when it tops out," says John Bock, an anthropologist at California State University, Fullerton. It takes less time to train a brain surgeon.
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.
Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists --as in, say, teaching or business management--it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.
Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking --the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called.
The measurement of chess skill has been taken further than similar attempts with any other game, sport or competitive activity. Statistical formulas weigh a player's recent results over older ones and discount successes according to the strength of one's opponents. The results are ratings that predict the outcomes of games with remarkable reliability. If player A outrates player B by 200 points, then A will on average beat B 75 percent of the time. This prediction holds true whether the players are top-ranked or merely ordinary. Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster who has a rating of 2812, will win 75 percent of his games against the 100th-ranked grandmaster, Jan Timman of the Netherlands, who has a rating of 2616. Similarly, a U.S. tournament player rated 1200 (about the median) will win 75 percent of the time against someone rated 1000 (about the 40th percentile). Ratings allow psychologists to assess expertise by performance rather than reputation and to track changes in a given player's skill over the course of his or her career.
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
Another reason why cognitive scientists chose chess as their model--and not billiards, say, or bridge-- is the game's reputation as, in German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's words, "the touchstone of the intellect." The feats of chess masters have long been ascribed to nearly magical mental powers. This magic shines brightest in the so-called blindfold games in which the players are not allowed to see the board. In 1894 French psychologist Alfred Binet, the co-inventor of the first intelligence test, asked chess masters to describe how they played such games. He began with the hypothesis that they achieved an almost photographic image of the board, but he soon concluded that the visualization was much more abstract. Rather than seeing the knight's mane or the grain of the wood from which it is made, the master calls up only a general knowledge of where the piece stands in relation to other elements of the position. It is the same kind of implicit knowledge that the commuter has of the stops on a subway line.
The blindfolded master supplements such knowledge with details of the game at hand as well as with recollections of salient aspects of past games. Let us say he has somehow forgotten the precise position of a pawn. He can find it, as it were, by considering the stereotyped strategy of the opening --a well-studied phase of the game with a relatively limited number of options. Or he can remember the logic behind one of his earlier moves--say, by reasoning: "I could not capture his bishop two moves ago; therefore, that pawn must have been standing in the way...." He does not have to remember every detail at all times, because he can reconstruct any particular detail whenever he wishes by tapping a well-organized system of connections. Of course, if the possession of such intricately structured knowledge explains not only success at blindfold play but also other abilities of chess masters, such as calculation and planning, then expertise in the game would depend not so much on innate abilities as on specialized training. Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess master, confirmed this notion in 1938, when he took advantage of the staging of a great international tournament in Holland to compare average and strong players with the world's leading grandmasters. One way he did so was to ask the players to describe their thoughts as they examined a position taken from a tournament game.
He found that although experts--the class just below master--did analyze considerably more possibilities than the very weak players, there was little further increase in analysis as playing strength rose to the master and grandmaster levels. The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones--just as Capablanca had claimed.
Recent research has shown that de Groot's findings reflected in part the nature of his chosen test positions. A position in which extensive, accurate calculation is critical will allow the grandmasters to show their stuff, as it were, and they will then search more deeply along the branching tree of possible moves than the amateur can hope to do. So, too, experienced physicists may on occasion examine more possibilities than physics students do. Yet in both cases, the expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted with a difficult position, a weaker player may calculate for half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move immediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.
De Groot also had his subjects examine a position for a limited period and then try to reconstruct it from memory. Performance at this task tracked game-playing strength all the way from novice to grandmaster. Beginners could not recall more than a very few details of the position, even after having examined it for 30 seconds, whereas grandmasters could usually get it perfectly, even if they had perused it for only a few seconds. This difference tracks a particular form of memory, specific to the kind of chess positions that commonly occur in play. The specific memory must be the result of training, because grandmasters do no better than others in general tests of memory.
Similar results have been demonstrated in bridge players (who can remember cards played in many games), computer programmers (who can reconstruct masses of computer code) and musicians (who can recall long snatches of music). Indeed, such a memory for the subject matter of a particular field is a standard test for the existence of expertise.
The conclusion that experts rely more on structured knowledge than on analysis is supported by a rare case study of an initially weak chess player, identified only by the initials D.H., who over the course of nine years rose to become one of Canada's leading masters by 1987. Neil Charness, professor of psychology at Florida State University, showed that despite the increase in the player's strength, he analyzed chess positions no more extensively than he had earlier, relying instead on a vastly improved knowledge of chess positions and associated strategies.
Chunking Theory
In the 1960s Herbert A. Simon and William Chase, both at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to get a better understand-ing of expert memory by studying its limitations. Picking up where de Groot left off, they asked players of various strengths to reconstruct chess positions that had been artificially devised--that is, with the pieces placed randomly on the board--rather than reached as the result of master play. The correlation between game-playing strength and the accuracy of the players' recall was much weak-er with the random positions than with the authentic ones.
Chess memory was thus shown to be even more specific than it had seemed, being tuned not merely to the game itself but to typical chess positions. These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.
Simon explained the masters' relative weakness in reconstructing artificial chess positions with a model based on meaningful patterns called chunks. He invoked the concept to explain how chess masters can manipulate vast amounts of stored information, a task that would seem to strain the working memory. Psychologist George Miller of Princeton University famously estimated the limits of working memory--the scratch pad of the mind--in a 1956 paper entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." Miller showed that people can contemplate only five to nine items at a time. By packing hierarchies of information into chunks, Simon argued, chess masters could get around this limitation, because by using this method, they could access five to nine chunks rather than the same number of smaller details.
Take the sentence "Mary had a little lamb." The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one's knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.
In the context of chess, the same differences can be seen between novices and grandmasters. To a beginner, a position with 20 chessmen on the board may contain far more than 20 chunks of information, because the pieces can be placed in so many configurations. A grandmaster, however, may see one part of the position as "fianchettoed bishop in the castled kingside," together with a "blockaded king's-Indian-style pawn chain," and thereby cram the entire position into perhaps five or six chunks. By measuring the time it takes to commit a new chunk to memory and the number of hours a player must study chess before reaching grandmaster strength, Simon estimated that a typical grandmaster has access to roughly 50,000 to 100,000 chunks of chess information. A grandmaster can retrieve any of these chunks from memory simply by looking at a chess position, in the same way that most native English speakers can recite the poem "Mary had a little lamb" after hearing just the first few words. Even so, there were difficulties with chunking theory. It could not fully explain some aspects of memory, such as the ability of experts to perform their feats while being distracted (a favorite tactic in the study of memory). K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and Charness argued that there must be some other mechanism that enables experts to employ long-term memory as if it, too, were a scratch pad. Says Ericsson: "The mere demonstration that highly skilled players can play at almost their normal strength under blindfold conditions is almost impossible for chunking theory to explain because you have to know the position, then you have to explore it in your memory."
Such manipulation involves changing the stored chunks, at least in some ways, a task that may be likened to reciting "Mary had a little lamb" backward. It can be done, but not easily, and certainly not without many false starts and errors. Yet grandmaster games played quickly and under blindfold conditions tend to be of surprisingly high quality.
Ericsson also cites studies of physicians who clearly put information into long-term memory and take it out again in ways that enable them to make diagnoses. Perhaps Ericsson's most homely example, though, comes from reading. In a 1995 study he and Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado found that interrupting highly proficient readers hardly slowed their reentry to a text; in the end, they lost only a few seconds. The researchers explained these findings by recourse to a structure they called long-term working memory, an almost oxymoronic coinage because it assigns to long-term memory the one thing that had always been defined as incompatible with it: thinking. But brain-imaging studies done in 2001 at the University of Konstanz in Germany provide support for the theory by showing that expert chess players activate long-term memory much more than novices do.
Fernand Gobet of Brunel University in London champions a rival theory, devised with Simon in the late 1990s. It extends the idea of chunks by invoking highly characteristic and very large patterns consisting of perhaps a dozen chess pieces. Such a template, as they call it, would have a number of slots into which the master could plug such variables as a pawn or a bishop. A template might exist, say, for the concept of "the isolated queen's-pawn position from the Nimzo-Indian Defense," and a master might change a slot by reclassifying it as the same position "minus the dark-squared bishops." To resort again to the poetic analogy, it would be a bit like memorizing a riff on "Mary had a little lamb" by substituting rhyming equivalents at certain slots, such as "Larry" for "Mary," "pool" for "school" and so on. Anyone who knows the original template should be able to fix the altered one in memory in a trice.
A Proliferation of Prodigies
The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others.
According to this view, the proliferation of chess prodigies in recent years merely reflects the advent of computer-based training methods that let children study far more master games and to play far more frequently against master-strength programs than their forerunners could typically manage. Fischer made a sensation when he achieved the grandmaster title at age 15, in 1958; today's record-holder, Sergey Karjakin of Ukraine, earned it at 12 years, seven months.
Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.
Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.
Meanwhile the standards denoting expertise grow ever more challenging. High school runners manage the four-minute mile; conservatory students play pieces once attempted only by virtuosi. Yet it is chess, again, that offers the most convincing comparison over time. John Nunn, a British mathematician who is also a grandmaster, recently used a computer to help him compare the errors committed in all the games in two international tournaments, one held in 1911, the other in 1993. The modern players played far more accurately. Nunn then examined all the games of one player in 1911 who scored in the middle of the pack and concluded that his rating today would be no better than 2100, hundreds of points below the grandmaster level--"and that was on a good day and with a following wind." The very best old-time masters were considerably stronger but still well below the level of today's leaders.
Then again, Capablanca and his contemporaries had neither computers nor game databases. They had to work things out for themselves, as did Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and if they fall
below today's masters in technique, they tower above them in creative power. The same comparison can be made between Newton and the typical newly minted Ph.D. in physics.
At this point, many skeptics will finally lose patience. Surely, they will say, it takes more to get to Carnegie Hall than practice, practice, practice. Yet this belief in the importance of innate talent, strongest perhaps among the experts themselves and their trainers, is strangely lacking in hard evidence to substantiate it. In 2002 Gobet conducted a study of British chess players ranging from amateurs to grandmasters and found no connection at all between their playing strengths and their visual-spatial abilities, as measured by shape-memory tests. Other researchers have found that the abilities of professional handicappers to predict the results of horse races did not correlate at all with their mathematical abilities.
Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. Laszlo Polgar, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters --the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polgar, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.
The Polgar experiment proved two things: that grandmasters can be reared and that women can be grandmasters. It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after Laszlo Polgar published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier.
Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.
Furthermore, success builds on success, because each accomplishment can strengthen a child's motivation. A 1999 study of professional soccer players from several countries showed that they were much more likely than the general population to have been born at a time of year that would have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages older than the average. In their early years, these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates. Because the larger, more agile children would get more opportunities to handle the ball, they would score more often, and their success at the game would motivate them to become even better.
Teachers in sports, music and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity. There is usually no way to tell, from a recital alone, whether a young violinist's extraordinary performance stems from innate ability or from years of Suzuki-style training. Capablanca, regarded to this day as the greatest "natural" chess player, boasted that he never studied the game. In fact, he flunked out of Columbia University in part because he spent so much time playing chess. His famously quick apprehension was a product of all his training, not a substitute for it.
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing program in New York, for example, teachers test the students every three weeks and award small amounts--on the order of $10 or $20--to those who score well. The early results have been promising. Instead of perpetually pondering the question, "Why can't Johnny read?" perhaps educators should ask, "Why should there be anything in the world he can't learn to do?"
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Philip E. Ross, a contributing editor at Scientific American, is a chess player himself
and father of Laura Ross, a master who outranks him by 199 points.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
PROMISE
May 26, 2008
MORE CHESS & EDUCATION
snippets of my & other people's ideas
ONE DOES NOT LEARN BY MEMORIZING ERRORS/MISTAKES.
ONE LEARNS BY MEMORIZING WHAT IS "CORRECT/TRUE/RIGHT".
NOTE: "MEMORIZE" WITHOUT EVEN UNDERSTANDING;
EVEN IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEMORIZE BUT
IF YOU MEMORIZE ALL & ONLY THOSE THAT ARE "CORRECT" STILL THIS IS GOOD EDUCATION. THERE IS SUCH A FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE CALLED "ERROR ANALYSIS" (STAT., ENG'G) BUT GOOD LEARNING DOES NOT EVEN BOTHER ABOUT THE SLIGHTEST MISTAKE/ERROR. A SINGLE, TINY ERRONEOUS "INFO" IS A BURDEN ON ONE'S MEMORY WHICH IS A LIMITED RESOURCE. IF ONE LEARNS VIA MISTAKES THEN THAT'S LEARNING BY TRIAL & ERROR = Stupidity. OF COURSE IF YOU LEARN THRU OTHER PEOPLES' MISTAKES THAT'S BETTER.
(THERE'S ADVANTAGE IN JUST BEING A "MIRON")
EXPERIENCE IS WHAT WE CALL OUR MISTAKES IN LIFE.
I believe I have now gained enough "EXPERIENCE" or accumulated "wisdom"
to act as a useful guide or genuine teacher to young people....
CHESS ANECDOTE
Once in a lobby of the Hall of Columns of the Trade Union Center in Moscow a group of masters were analyzing an ending. They could not find the right way to go about things & there was a lot of arguing about it. Suddenly Capablanca came into the room. He was always fond of walking about when it was his opponent's turn to move. Learning the reason for the dispute the Cuban bent down to the position, said 'Si, si,' & suddenly redistributed the pieces all over the board to show what the correct formation was for the side trying to win. I haven't exaggerated. Don Jose literally pushed the pieces around the board without making moves. He just put them in fresh positions where he thought they were needed. Suddenly everything became clear. The correct scheme of things had been set up & now the win was easy. We were delighted by Capablanca's mastery. – Alexander Kotov
Comment - (CHESS PSYCHOLOGY)
This anecdote supports the view that masters rely on SCHEMATIC THINKING or PATTERN-RECOGNITION rather than CALCULATION of possibilities. Masters have an enormous database of POSITIONS stored in their memory. And they simply "weed out" what is not relevant/not needed. SELECTIVE simplification rather than BUILDING UP complication
I have known many chess players, but only one chess genius, Capablanca. – Emanuel Lasker
I think Capablanca had the greatest natural talent. – Mikhail Botvinnik
Capablanca was possibly the greatest player in the entire history of chess. – Bobby Fischer.
What others could not see in a month's study, he saw at a glance. – Reuben Fine (on Capablanca)
I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one. – Jose R. Capablanca
Capablanca invariably chose the right option, no matter how intricate the position. – Garry Kasparov.
Capablanca’s games generally take the following course: he begins with a series of extremely fine prophylactic maneuvers, which neutralize his opponent’s attempts to complicate the game; he then proceeds, slowly but surely, to set up an attacking position. This attacking position, after a series of simplifications, is transformed into a favorable endgame, which he conducts with matchless technique. – Aron Nimzowitsch
You cannot play chess unless you have studied his games. – Mikhail Botvinnik (on Capablanca)
[NOW I HAVE SOMETHING TO "WORK ON"!!!]
I did not believe I was superior to him. Perhaps the chief reason for his defeat was the overestimation of his own powers arising out of his overwhelming victory in New York, 1927, and his underestimation of mine.
– Alexander Alekhine (on Capablanca)
Capablanca is smart; Alekhine is clever. – Source Unknown
(So CLEVER beats SMART!)
COMMENT: Many overuse the term "genius" BUT if ONLY ONE person must be called such in CHESS, it was CAPABLANCA. (Alternative candidates: Morphy or Fischer. There are many "child prodigies" like Reshevsky)
===================================
From the American FOundation for Chess website:
WHY PLAY CHESS
* is fun
* is easy to learn
* is a game for everyone
* improves concentration
* develops critical thinking
* develops logical reasoning
* allows you to meet interesting people
* teaches independence and personal responsibility
* opens the world to you
* inspires self-motivation
* helps you plan ahead and foresee consequences
* develops calculating ability
* develops self-confidence
* develops memory
* is cheap
* promotes scientific thinking
* helps kids perform better and raise their grades
* helps you live a longer, healthier life
* promotes imagination and creativity
* teaches that success rewards hard work
* builds self-esteem
* increases patience
* encourages good sportsmanship
* encourages respect for ones self and others
* relates to Math, Reading, Writing,
Social Studies, Science, Technology and Art
Chess is powerful!
================================
CHESS inculcates CIRCUMSPECTION, PATIENCE, FORESIGHT, TENACITY OF PURPOSE, etc etc etc CHESS REQUIRES STRONG CHARACTER, TREMENDOUS WILL, COMPETITIVE URGE & STRONG HEALTH & MEMORY There exists THE BEST/CORRECT/PROPER way/method/technique of learning/teaching CHESS. But this knowledge is known only to an ELITE few & they can "mass produce" GRANDmasters! A child who learns the game at age 4-6 has great chances of becoming one.
My personal challenge is to train an 18-year old MOTIVATED ordinary person to become an EXPERT or even a MASTER or an older experienced player to add 100-200 points to her rating. - This includes ME! My prerequisite is she should LIKE/LOVE the GAME, really seek the GOAL & must REALLY WANT TO LEARN/IMPROVE "DO WHAT YOU LOVE LOVE WHAT YOU DO." For as long as a person LEARNS or SEEKS LEARNING there remains a chance for progress & improvement... Some claim learning ends at 18 but people like Korchnoi, von Humboldt, Fischer's mother, etc show otherwise
People are governed with the head;
kindness of heart is of little use in CHESS.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
1741-1794, French Writer, Journalist, Playwright
Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. – George Bernard Shaw
Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies.
Jamie Murphy
I'm like Bush, I see the world more like checkers than chess.
Dennis Miller
Compared to GO & SALPAKAN (GG), CHESS remains a more accurate MODEL of Struggle in Life for it involves the crucial TIME factor - everything we do involves TIME. (One cannot play BLITZ Go or GG.)
GO & SALPAKAN are STRATEGIC games. CHESS is fundamentally TACTICAL.
CHESS is "RACIST" because WHITE always moves first unlike in GO...
CHESS, GO, SALPAKAN, REVERSI (OTHELLO) are THINKING GAMES/EXCELLENT EDUCATIONAL TOOLS & can lead to SERIOUS combinatorial game theory for those interested in MATH & mathematical modelling/games programming in COMPSCI not to mention PSYCHOLOGY of thinking, Theory of Contests/War in POLITICS ECONOMICS ETC ETC
CHESS is a combined THINKING & FIGHTING game, a rare combination... The most efficient MODEL OF POWER PLAY???!!!
I cannot remember but the British have an EXACT English term for all these stuff: board games, puzzles, smart/quick thinking contests, etc (MENTAL CALISTHENICS?) I FORGOT...
"I LOVE THE VIGOR, THE HEALTHY VIGOR THAT RISKS THE UTMOST TO ATTAIN THE ATTAINABLE."
- LASKERR or BOGOLJUBOW??? I FORGOT!!!
PROMISE: THis is my LAST POSTING ON CHESS in this BLOG.
ADDENDA:
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. - Oscar Wilde
Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer. - Swami X
The Trouble with Time
The trouble with time is that it only goes forward. -chessninja.com
"Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards." - Soren Kierkegaard
http://www.scribd.com/doc/186721/1940-H-G-Wells-The-New-World-Order
http://www.increasebrainpower.com/increaseiq.html
IF YOU DON'T USE, IT YOU LOSE IT. (i.e. THE COCONUT)
MORE CHESS & EDUCATION
snippets of my & other people's ideas
ONE DOES NOT LEARN BY MEMORIZING ERRORS/MISTAKES.
ONE LEARNS BY MEMORIZING WHAT IS "CORRECT/TRUE/RIGHT".
NOTE: "MEMORIZE" WITHOUT EVEN UNDERSTANDING;
EVEN IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEMORIZE BUT
IF YOU MEMORIZE ALL & ONLY THOSE THAT ARE "CORRECT" STILL THIS IS GOOD EDUCATION. THERE IS SUCH A FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE CALLED "ERROR ANALYSIS" (STAT., ENG'G) BUT GOOD LEARNING DOES NOT EVEN BOTHER ABOUT THE SLIGHTEST MISTAKE/ERROR. A SINGLE, TINY ERRONEOUS "INFO" IS A BURDEN ON ONE'S MEMORY WHICH IS A LIMITED RESOURCE. IF ONE LEARNS VIA MISTAKES THEN THAT'S LEARNING BY TRIAL & ERROR = Stupidity. OF COURSE IF YOU LEARN THRU OTHER PEOPLES' MISTAKES THAT'S BETTER.
(THERE'S ADVANTAGE IN JUST BEING A "MIRON")
EXPERIENCE IS WHAT WE CALL OUR MISTAKES IN LIFE.
I believe I have now gained enough "EXPERIENCE" or accumulated "wisdom"
to act as a useful guide or genuine teacher to young people....
CHESS ANECDOTE
Once in a lobby of the Hall of Columns of the Trade Union Center in Moscow a group of masters were analyzing an ending. They could not find the right way to go about things & there was a lot of arguing about it. Suddenly Capablanca came into the room. He was always fond of walking about when it was his opponent's turn to move. Learning the reason for the dispute the Cuban bent down to the position, said 'Si, si,' & suddenly redistributed the pieces all over the board to show what the correct formation was for the side trying to win. I haven't exaggerated. Don Jose literally pushed the pieces around the board without making moves. He just put them in fresh positions where he thought they were needed. Suddenly everything became clear. The correct scheme of things had been set up & now the win was easy. We were delighted by Capablanca's mastery. – Alexander Kotov
Comment - (CHESS PSYCHOLOGY)
This anecdote supports the view that masters rely on SCHEMATIC THINKING or PATTERN-RECOGNITION rather than CALCULATION of possibilities. Masters have an enormous database of POSITIONS stored in their memory. And they simply "weed out" what is not relevant/not needed. SELECTIVE simplification rather than BUILDING UP complication
I have known many chess players, but only one chess genius, Capablanca. – Emanuel Lasker
I think Capablanca had the greatest natural talent. – Mikhail Botvinnik
Capablanca was possibly the greatest player in the entire history of chess. – Bobby Fischer.
What others could not see in a month's study, he saw at a glance. – Reuben Fine (on Capablanca)
I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one. – Jose R. Capablanca
Capablanca invariably chose the right option, no matter how intricate the position. – Garry Kasparov.
Capablanca’s games generally take the following course: he begins with a series of extremely fine prophylactic maneuvers, which neutralize his opponent’s attempts to complicate the game; he then proceeds, slowly but surely, to set up an attacking position. This attacking position, after a series of simplifications, is transformed into a favorable endgame, which he conducts with matchless technique. – Aron Nimzowitsch
You cannot play chess unless you have studied his games. – Mikhail Botvinnik (on Capablanca)
[NOW I HAVE SOMETHING TO "WORK ON"!!!]
I did not believe I was superior to him. Perhaps the chief reason for his defeat was the overestimation of his own powers arising out of his overwhelming victory in New York, 1927, and his underestimation of mine.
– Alexander Alekhine (on Capablanca)
Capablanca is smart; Alekhine is clever. – Source Unknown
(So CLEVER beats SMART!)
COMMENT: Many overuse the term "genius" BUT if ONLY ONE person must be called such in CHESS, it was CAPABLANCA. (Alternative candidates: Morphy or Fischer. There are many "child prodigies" like Reshevsky)
===================================
From the American FOundation for Chess website:
WHY PLAY CHESS
* is fun
* is easy to learn
* is a game for everyone
* improves concentration
* develops critical thinking
* develops logical reasoning
* allows you to meet interesting people
* teaches independence and personal responsibility
* opens the world to you
* inspires self-motivation
* helps you plan ahead and foresee consequences
* develops calculating ability
* develops self-confidence
* develops memory
* is cheap
* promotes scientific thinking
* helps kids perform better and raise their grades
* helps you live a longer, healthier life
* promotes imagination and creativity
* teaches that success rewards hard work
* builds self-esteem
* increases patience
* encourages good sportsmanship
* encourages respect for ones self and others
* relates to Math, Reading, Writing,
Social Studies, Science, Technology and Art
Chess is powerful!
================================
CHESS inculcates CIRCUMSPECTION, PATIENCE, FORESIGHT, TENACITY OF PURPOSE, etc etc etc CHESS REQUIRES STRONG CHARACTER, TREMENDOUS WILL, COMPETITIVE URGE & STRONG HEALTH & MEMORY There exists THE BEST/CORRECT/PROPER way/method/technique of learning/teaching CHESS. But this knowledge is known only to an ELITE few & they can "mass produce" GRANDmasters! A child who learns the game at age 4-6 has great chances of becoming one.
My personal challenge is to train an 18-year old MOTIVATED ordinary person to become an EXPERT or even a MASTER or an older experienced player to add 100-200 points to her rating. - This includes ME! My prerequisite is she should LIKE/LOVE the GAME, really seek the GOAL & must REALLY WANT TO LEARN/IMPROVE "DO WHAT YOU LOVE LOVE WHAT YOU DO." For as long as a person LEARNS or SEEKS LEARNING there remains a chance for progress & improvement... Some claim learning ends at 18 but people like Korchnoi, von Humboldt, Fischer's mother, etc show otherwise
People are governed with the head;
kindness of heart is of little use in CHESS.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
1741-1794, French Writer, Journalist, Playwright
Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. – George Bernard Shaw
Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies.
Jamie Murphy
I'm like Bush, I see the world more like checkers than chess.
Dennis Miller
Compared to GO & SALPAKAN (GG), CHESS remains a more accurate MODEL of Struggle in Life for it involves the crucial TIME factor - everything we do involves TIME. (One cannot play BLITZ Go or GG.)
GO & SALPAKAN are STRATEGIC games. CHESS is fundamentally TACTICAL.
CHESS is "RACIST" because WHITE always moves first unlike in GO...
CHESS, GO, SALPAKAN, REVERSI (OTHELLO) are THINKING GAMES/EXCELLENT EDUCATIONAL TOOLS & can lead to SERIOUS combinatorial game theory for those interested in MATH & mathematical modelling/games programming in COMPSCI not to mention PSYCHOLOGY of thinking, Theory of Contests/War in POLITICS ECONOMICS ETC ETC
CHESS is a combined THINKING & FIGHTING game, a rare combination... The most efficient MODEL OF POWER PLAY???!!!
I cannot remember but the British have an EXACT English term for all these stuff: board games, puzzles, smart/quick thinking contests, etc (MENTAL CALISTHENICS?) I FORGOT...
"I LOVE THE VIGOR, THE HEALTHY VIGOR THAT RISKS THE UTMOST TO ATTAIN THE ATTAINABLE."
- LASKERR or BOGOLJUBOW??? I FORGOT!!!
PROMISE: THis is my LAST POSTING ON CHESS in this BLOG.
ADDENDA:
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. - Oscar Wilde
Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer. - Swami X
The Trouble with Time
The trouble with time is that it only goes forward. -chessninja.com
"Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards." - Soren Kierkegaard
http://www.scribd.com/doc/186721/1940-H-G-Wells-The-New-World-Order
http://www.increasebrainpower.com/increaseiq.html
IF YOU DON'T USE, IT YOU LOSE IT. (i.e. THE COCONUT)
Thursday, May 22, 2008
FRIDAY (MUSLIM)
CONSTHEOrists note the following very well:
NEWS MEDIA
MERALCO issue:
Manuel "Manolo" Lopez
My brother's & My first & a front neighbor's family NAMEs
ACCIDENT??? CHANCE??? CONSPIRACY???...
RCBC Massacre then Tanauan rubout surnamed Javier
Our Javier is La Union Ilocano NOT Batangueno...
"Javier" is a Spanish or Basque FIRST name NOT a family or clan name
Internet sources claim it is derived from "Etxabier", Basque for "owner of new house"
[= Spanish "Villanueva" or French "Villeneuve"?]
St. Francis Xavier, apostle of India, Xavier Cugat. Javier Solana, etc etc
MEDIA report on incident shows chessboard & CHECKERED design...
CHANCE? CONSPIRACY?
When I was a childl & whenever I gave my name the usual reaction was... "DON MANOLO!"
the titled name of a rich man or haciendero... [Unfortunately, I grew up hating MONEY...]
There are notable "Manolos" in Manila: Manolo "Butas-Butas"/"Butch-Butch" Favis, a radio commentator in the '70s [There used to be "Dis is Manolo" peanut vendor in Hi-Top supermarket at corner of Bohol Ave. & Quezon Ave.],
Sportswriter Manolo Inigo, even Manuel "Manolo" Quezon III
A Hispanic diplomat's wife undergrad classmate told me
that my name was simply the nickname of my brother's!
My brother remarked that was why I was only second in ability!...
[I asked my mother & she told me my first yaya proposed it.]
In the Philippines some natives sometimes sport absurd foreign
names: Males carrying female names or females with male names
Males named "Jennifer" or "Joy" Females named "Erwin" or "Tony"
The unwiitting victims (marked for Life) of their parents'
ignorance about names & their meanings
COLONIAL MENTALITY status-seeking by adopting foreign names
ending up with wrong choices & funny results...
Nobody liked native names like "Paraluman", "Diwata", "Amihan",
Fortunately nobody here has yet thought of naming babies "X-7" or "6662" HAR!
[COCA-COLA's secret formula is called "X-7" meaning, 7 SECRET ingredients.
caramel (sugar plus water), carbon dioxide (CO2) to provide "fizz",
I really don't know what accounts for the BLACK color... CRUDE OIL extract? HAR!
CONSTHEOrists suspect one key ingredient of this popular beverage is COCA/cocaine(?)
Is this the reason for the COLOMBIA Drug WarS??? So price of COKE should be affected...
I asked myself a long long time ago why nobody has conducted a decades-long scientific study
on the long-term effect of COKE drinking. I'm quire sure 99% of populatioh had drunk it...
["It's the real thing" jingle in the '70s]
My conclusion (based on no rational premise or experimental hypothesis) :
It causes CANCER... CANCER OF THE POCKET!!!
I was born at a time when Hispanic double names were popular/in vogue
Succeeding decades saw different trend: English, American names, Chinese, Japanese, Indian names Usual sources: celebrities, song/movie stars
More about NAMES & NAMING later...
Actually you can call me "Saddam" or "Bush" & this won't affect me a bit
(OF course I'd prefer "Usamah" or "Moqtada") But I might call back at you, "Cheney" or "Blair" HAR!
Wednesday, I went my usual roving exercise. [I really feel my brain is shrinking due to insufficient oxygenation.] In Katipunan Avenue there were PNP(?) or SAF(?) wearing their high-tech light-green camouflage uniform. This camouflage is worn by U.S & even Australian military as shown in MEDIA. This camouflage is different from usual ones - It has finer/more sophisticated design.
I remember years back in KSA when I was taken cared of by my good MORO friends when I fell ill with pneumonia. One of our simple pleasures there was of course, preparing delicious meals
& eating together at their "villa". We usually bought Coca-Cola litre (an allegedly Jewish product patronized in Muslim KSA See note below) that featured a VISUAL PUZZLE. A different puzzle for every few bottles. We competed as to who'll see the hidden image first. This was & is a new high-tech art [I forgot its name.] that should be available in the Internet.
It is actually based on scientific research findings on lasers & human vision which I believe
is also exploited in high-tech computer games.
The camouflage worn by these "anti-terrorist" small but highly-mobile forces is I believe also
based on the high-tech art form. It is scientifically-designed & therefore truly effective...
Again, I noticed many "For Rent" signs, closed business establishments, "For Sale" vehicles...
Economic Signs of the Times... Truly INTELLIGENT persons should know what to do/expect/plan for... Yet there are also new constructions: e.g. SM project along Katipunan Ave... I can no longer travel/rove far because of the increased transportation fares.
Years ago I could go as far as Rizal, BUlacan or Cavite & Laguna on a mere side-trip/spur-of-the-moment basis. One time in the late '80's while walking along Buendia or another main thoroughfare, I saw an incoming bus with sign "Cavite City". I felt the urge to flag the bus and there & then went to "Etivac Ytic" - to eat my lunch!
On the way I dropped first to Aguinaldo's Kawit house & saw his bowling alley, family tree
& other museum highlights & befriended elements of the Philippine Navy who were acting as museum caretakers. In the city I saw the main thoroughfare & noticed its similarity to Olongapo's - Sangley Point was also a former Spanish & US Naval Base.
Then, visited university classmates' homes but they were all either working abroad or in the metropolis...
Now (2008) at P100 peso budget I can only go as far as Pritil Tondo or Marikina public market to eat P15 HALU-HALO plus P5 Gulaman Sago or Buko juice... [Months ago I could afford P10 TAHO everyday + Buko Juice. Now I have to give this up!]
My usual hangouts a decade ago were air-conditioned malls. Now I only go to public markets!!! HAR! How does one explain my losing taste & form? Senility? Poverty?...
Can anyone blame me if I feel the price increases around me are designed to prevent me from moving about... or worse, that "THEY" are now out to GET ME???????!!!!!!!
Has anyone provided or given free to the public via website a simple-as-possible but accurate account of the POLITIX OF OIL? ALso POLITIX OF ELECTRIC POWER (WHO controls the hydroelectric dams in the world, or wind-powered generators, or solar panels?)
CONSTHEO would say only one core group controls DAM & POWER technology (Libya's Great River Project, China's Twin Rivers project etc, Communication Systems (ZTE!), I.T. devices etc etc CAPITALISM... CONSPIRACY...
I have my own proposed big-time project:
I imagine I am the Sole Proprietor Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of my private global corporation(?) masquerading as a humanitarian philanthropic NGO (& yet listed in all global stock markets: NY, Tokyo, London etc etc)
Its acronym: FGUGGTP - The FIRST GREAT UNIVERSAL GRAND GLOBAL TAG-GUTOM PROJECT!
Street-level Metro Manila implementation:
FREE lunch packs of GMO rice + fried TOKWA/TOFU + Munggo soup & BOTTLED Water
distributed to kilometer-long queues of hungry "PEOPLE"
Nobody should go hungry... I'm candidating(?) for PWESIDENT...
TMNP (Have to EAT)
TYPED THURSDAY EVENING
SENT FRIDAY, 11:18 A.M.
UP CAMPUS
NEWS MEDIA
MERALCO issue:
Manuel "Manolo" Lopez
My brother's & My first & a front neighbor's family NAMEs
ACCIDENT??? CHANCE??? CONSPIRACY???...
RCBC Massacre then Tanauan rubout surnamed Javier
Our Javier is La Union Ilocano NOT Batangueno...
"Javier" is a Spanish or Basque FIRST name NOT a family or clan name
Internet sources claim it is derived from "Etxabier", Basque for "owner of new house"
[= Spanish "Villanueva" or French "Villeneuve"?]
St. Francis Xavier, apostle of India, Xavier Cugat. Javier Solana, etc etc
MEDIA report on incident shows chessboard & CHECKERED design...
CHANCE? CONSPIRACY?
When I was a childl & whenever I gave my name the usual reaction was... "DON MANOLO!"
the titled name of a rich man or haciendero... [Unfortunately, I grew up hating MONEY...]
There are notable "Manolos" in Manila: Manolo "Butas-Butas"/"Butch-Butch" Favis, a radio commentator in the '70s [There used to be "Dis is Manolo" peanut vendor in Hi-Top supermarket at corner of Bohol Ave. & Quezon Ave.],
Sportswriter Manolo Inigo, even Manuel "Manolo" Quezon III
A Hispanic diplomat's wife undergrad classmate told me
that my name was simply the nickname of my brother's!
My brother remarked that was why I was only second in ability!...
[I asked my mother & she told me my first yaya proposed it.]
In the Philippines some natives sometimes sport absurd foreign
names: Males carrying female names or females with male names
Males named "Jennifer" or "Joy" Females named "Erwin" or "Tony"
The unwiitting victims (marked for Life) of their parents'
ignorance about names & their meanings
COLONIAL MENTALITY status-seeking by adopting foreign names
ending up with wrong choices & funny results...
Nobody liked native names like "Paraluman", "Diwata", "Amihan",
Fortunately nobody here has yet thought of naming babies "X-7" or "6662" HAR!
[COCA-COLA's secret formula is called "X-7" meaning, 7 SECRET ingredients.
caramel (sugar plus water), carbon dioxide (CO2) to provide "fizz",
I really don't know what accounts for the BLACK color... CRUDE OIL extract? HAR!
CONSTHEOrists suspect one key ingredient of this popular beverage is COCA/cocaine(?)
Is this the reason for the COLOMBIA Drug WarS??? So price of COKE should be affected...
I asked myself a long long time ago why nobody has conducted a decades-long scientific study
on the long-term effect of COKE drinking. I'm quire sure 99% of populatioh had drunk it...
["It's the real thing" jingle in the '70s]
My conclusion (based on no rational premise or experimental hypothesis) :
It causes CANCER... CANCER OF THE POCKET!!!
I was born at a time when Hispanic double names were popular/in vogue
Succeeding decades saw different trend: English, American names, Chinese, Japanese, Indian names Usual sources: celebrities, song/movie stars
More about NAMES & NAMING later...
Actually you can call me "Saddam" or "Bush" & this won't affect me a bit
(OF course I'd prefer "Usamah" or "Moqtada") But I might call back at you, "Cheney" or "Blair" HAR!
Wednesday, I went my usual roving exercise. [I really feel my brain is shrinking due to insufficient oxygenation.] In Katipunan Avenue there were PNP(?) or SAF(?) wearing their high-tech light-green camouflage uniform. This camouflage is worn by U.S & even Australian military as shown in MEDIA. This camouflage is different from usual ones - It has finer/more sophisticated design.
I remember years back in KSA when I was taken cared of by my good MORO friends when I fell ill with pneumonia. One of our simple pleasures there was of course, preparing delicious meals
& eating together at their "villa". We usually bought Coca-Cola litre (an allegedly Jewish product patronized in Muslim KSA See note below) that featured a VISUAL PUZZLE. A different puzzle for every few bottles. We competed as to who'll see the hidden image first. This was & is a new high-tech art [I forgot its name.] that should be available in the Internet.
It is actually based on scientific research findings on lasers & human vision which I believe
is also exploited in high-tech computer games.
The camouflage worn by these "anti-terrorist" small but highly-mobile forces is I believe also
based on the high-tech art form. It is scientifically-designed & therefore truly effective...
Again, I noticed many "For Rent" signs, closed business establishments, "For Sale" vehicles...
Economic Signs of the Times... Truly INTELLIGENT persons should know what to do/expect/plan for... Yet there are also new constructions: e.g. SM project along Katipunan Ave... I can no longer travel/rove far because of the increased transportation fares.
Years ago I could go as far as Rizal, BUlacan or Cavite & Laguna on a mere side-trip/spur-of-the-moment basis. One time in the late '80's while walking along Buendia or another main thoroughfare, I saw an incoming bus with sign "Cavite City". I felt the urge to flag the bus and there & then went to "Etivac Ytic" - to eat my lunch!
On the way I dropped first to Aguinaldo's Kawit house & saw his bowling alley, family tree
& other museum highlights & befriended elements of the Philippine Navy who were acting as museum caretakers. In the city I saw the main thoroughfare & noticed its similarity to Olongapo's - Sangley Point was also a former Spanish & US Naval Base.
Then, visited university classmates' homes but they were all either working abroad or in the metropolis...
Now (2008) at P100 peso budget I can only go as far as Pritil Tondo or Marikina public market to eat P15 HALU-HALO plus P5 Gulaman Sago or Buko juice... [Months ago I could afford P10 TAHO everyday + Buko Juice. Now I have to give this up!]
My usual hangouts a decade ago were air-conditioned malls. Now I only go to public markets!!! HAR! How does one explain my losing taste & form? Senility? Poverty?...
Can anyone blame me if I feel the price increases around me are designed to prevent me from moving about... or worse, that "THEY" are now out to GET ME???????!!!!!!!
Has anyone provided or given free to the public via website a simple-as-possible but accurate account of the POLITIX OF OIL? ALso POLITIX OF ELECTRIC POWER (WHO controls the hydroelectric dams in the world, or wind-powered generators, or solar panels?)
CONSTHEO would say only one core group controls DAM & POWER technology (Libya's Great River Project, China's Twin Rivers project etc, Communication Systems (ZTE!), I.T. devices etc etc CAPITALISM... CONSPIRACY...
I have my own proposed big-time project:
I imagine I am the Sole Proprietor Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of my private global corporation(?) masquerading as a humanitarian philanthropic NGO (& yet listed in all global stock markets: NY, Tokyo, London etc etc)
Its acronym: FGUGGTP - The FIRST GREAT UNIVERSAL GRAND GLOBAL TAG-GUTOM PROJECT!
Street-level Metro Manila implementation:
FREE lunch packs of GMO rice + fried TOKWA/TOFU + Munggo soup & BOTTLED Water
distributed to kilometer-long queues of hungry "PEOPLE"
Nobody should go hungry... I'm candidating(?) for PWESIDENT...
TMNP (Have to EAT)
TYPED THURSDAY EVENING
SENT FRIDAY, 11:18 A.M.
UP CAMPUS
Monday, May 19, 2008
Saturday, May 17, 2008
LASKER BOOK
I'M VERY VERY SURE THIS IS FROM LASKER's BOOK MANUAL OF CHESS:
==========================================
FINAL REFLECTIONS ON EDUCATION IN CHESS.
Education in Chess goes on in a most haphazard fashion. Most Chess players slowly climb to a certain rather low level and stay there. Of players to whom a master can give odds of a Queen there are millions; players of greater skill number probably no more than a quarter of a million. If we reckon the number of Rook players as a hundred and fifty thousand, of Knight players as fifty thousand, of Pawn and two-move players as forty thousand, of pawn and move players as nine thousand, and the number of those to whom no master can allow odds, as one thousand, we are possibly not very far wrong. Now let us consider the efforts made to attain this result: a literature of many thousand volumes, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chess columns in widely read newspapers and magazines, lectures, tournaments, tournament books, courses of instruction, matches in the clubs and between clubs and cities and countries, by correspondence, by telegraph and telephone, thousands of coffee - houses, where spectators, amid lively gossip, look on, make notes, analyze - truly an imposing expenditure.
One should not take these facts too easily. Certainly, in spite of its capacities, Chess is only a game and not to be classed with business, science, technology, not to speak of religion, philosophy or the arts. No one desires to see players devote to Chess such time as they need for serious purposes. The waste of time in Chess would not matter, were it not a symptom of a sickness that has befallen our culture.
We have learnt how to organise manufacturing plants, but our general education, our mental work, our economy of ideals are not better than our education in Chess.
I will here not wail. I will only illuminate a connection, even though rapidly. Chess, from its very inception, has had coherence with Life.
Let us assume that a master who follows a good method, say, the method of this book, strives to educate a young man ignorant of Chess to the level of one who, if conceded any odds, would surely come out the winner. How much time would the teacher need for this achievement? I think that I am correct in making the following calculation:
Rules of Play and Exercises 5 hrs.
Elementary Endings 5 hrs.
Some Openings 10 hrs.
Combination 20 hrs.
Position Play 40 hrs.
Play and Analysis 120 hrs.
Even if the young man has no talent at all, by following the above course he would advance to the class specified. Compare with this possibility, the reality. In fact, there are a quarter of a million Chess amateurs who devote to Chess at least two hundred hours ever year and of these only a thousand, after a lifetime of study, attain the end. Without losing myself in calculations, I believe I am safe in voicing the opinion that our efforts in Chess attain only a hundredth of one per cent of their rightful result.
Our education, in all domains of endeavour, is frightfully wasteful of time and values. In Mathematics and in Physics the results arrived at are still worse than in Chess. Is there a tendency to keep the bulk of the people stupid? For governments of an autocratic type the foolishness of the multitude has always been an asset. Possibly, also the mediocre who happen to be in authority follow the same policy. This motif, it is true, is not predominating in Chess. The bad state of education in Chess is due entirely to our backwardness.
Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judging. Chess must not be memorized, simply because it is not important enough. If you load your memory, you should know why. Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. If need be, I can increase my skill in Chess, if need be I can do that of which I have no idea at present. I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of good use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight.
You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods. The method is plastic. It is applicable in every situation. The result, the isolated incident, is rigid, because bound to wholly individual conditions. The method produces numerous results; a few of these will remain in our memory, and as long as they remain few, they are useful to illustrate and to keep alive the rules which order a thousand results. Such useful results must be renewed from time to time just as fresh food has to be supplied to a living organism to keep it strong and healthy. But results useful in this manner have a living connection with rules, and these again are discovered by applying a live method: the whole of this organisation must have life, more than that -- a harmonious life.
This harmonious life stems from life; life is generated only by life. He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess -- artificial theories, supported by few instances and unheld by an excess of human wit; the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to a standstill or to anarchy.
Acquisition of harmonious education is comparable to the production and the elevation of an organism harmoniously built. The one is fed by blood, the other one by the spirit; but Life, equally mysterious, creative, powerful, flows through either. This comparison is no mere rhetorical imagery; it is a programme.
True, this programme, valid for all education, is in no way restricted to Chess; only a second postulate added to the above singles out Chess among all other things to be taught. It is this: to lead the pupil along the paths of the theory of Steinitz.
This theory has a history which the pupil should strive to understand because it lifts the veil a little from the mystery of human character; this theory has a meaning which became manifest after a hard contest with competing theories and won authority through a celebrated world's championship match; this theory has connections with profound problems; this theory asks the pupil to think for himself and to construct his own table of values and to keep it constantly, vigilantly, in order; this theory demands of him boldness and caution and force and economy and thus becomes to him a model for actions outside of Chess.
The road to this education requires good teachers -- masters of Chess who at the same time are geniuses of teaching. But it pays to go along this road for it leads to a country of men who judge independently, act boldly and aspire after noble ideals.
How should these teachers follow their avocation? In introducing young men into the game in the right manner by lectures, good books, by live play with their pupils, by assisting at matches of the pupils and making notes and comments on the good and weak points of the games played; in short, by thus facilitating the thinking of their pupil without doing violence to it. The ways in which a good teacher may do efficient work are manifold and varied.
The Chess world has the task of breeding such teachers and, as soon as this is accomplished, to support them in their efforts. Thus the Chess-world would ease the hard life of the Chess-masters who must make a profession of Chess provided they want to do their best for Chess. But who wants to stop half-way? Who would want these Chess-masters who have the capacity for excellent teaching in them to become mediocre in Chess only in order to make them mediocre in some other profession? The function of a Chess-master, who would be principally a Chess-teacher, is useful and pleasing. It is to the individual credit of Chess that in other domains of human activity, at least up to the present, teachers of the above type are not even possible.
On the Future of the Theory of Steinitz.
It is easy to mould the theory of Steinitz into mathematical symbols by inventing a kind of Chess, the rules and regulations of which are themselves expressed by mathematical symbols. The Japanese game of Go is very nearly what I mean. In such a game the question, whether thorough analysis would confirm the theory of Steinitz or not, presumably could be quickly solved because the power of modern mathematics is exceedingly great.
The instant that this solution is worked out, humanity stands before the gate of an immense new science which prophetic philosophers have called the mathematics or the physics of contest.
The contests fought nowadays by men -- war, diplomatic negotiation, competition in manufacture, disputes in the press, to name just a few -- are conducted very amateurishly. That wars should appear to us a necessity is proof of our stupidity. True, humanity has need of a test for progress, for right, for soundness of ethics in human affairs, but that need can be satisfied in other and more efficient ways than by war. To make this evident is difficult only because men do not want to know the truth. But this task will be an easy one as soon as the science of contest attains recognition.
To outlaw war will be possible because humanity has a wealth of efficient and useful means to fill the gap that would be left. The competition between research workers, inventors, discoverers, artists, statesmen causes the flow of blood in the body of culture. And this competition will retain its vigour till many centuries after the time that Victor Hugo pictures, when cannons will have been stored in museums alongside of the instruments of torture to serve as memorials of a vanished barbaric epoch.
The mathematics of Chess does not, it is true, solve the problem of comprehending the contests of Life, but it sets that problem in precise terms and points to a solution. There the leverage will be supported whence investigators will set scientific research into motion. The first step is always the essential one. With the law of the lever by Archimedes came statics, with the law of the falling stone by Galileo arose dynamics, and their course, though their entry into the world was so modest, led them to revolutionise all science and all modes of living irrespective of the obstacles that hatred and stupidity heaped into their path. The science of contest will progress irresistibly, as soon as its first modest success has been scored.
It is desirable that institutes to further these ends should be erected. Such institutes would have to work upon a mass of material already extant: theory of mathematical games, of organisation, of the conduct of business, of dispute, of negotiation; they would have to breed teachers capable of elevating the multitude from its terrible dilettantism in matters of contest; they would have to produce books of instruction and for reading as plain, as intelligible, as valuable as Knigge's _Social Intercourse Amongst Mankind_. (_Umgang mit Menschen_) or Labruyere's _Characters_.
Such an institute should be founded by every people who want to make themselves fit for a sturdier future and at the same time to aid the progress and the happiness of all humankind.
These plans are not at all fantastic; they will certainly be realised at some time. Why not now? Let us hope that also in these days of all-round mediocrity Reason is not wholly without partisans."
===================================
==========================================
FINAL REFLECTIONS ON EDUCATION IN CHESS.
Education in Chess goes on in a most haphazard fashion. Most Chess players slowly climb to a certain rather low level and stay there. Of players to whom a master can give odds of a Queen there are millions; players of greater skill number probably no more than a quarter of a million. If we reckon the number of Rook players as a hundred and fifty thousand, of Knight players as fifty thousand, of Pawn and two-move players as forty thousand, of pawn and move players as nine thousand, and the number of those to whom no master can allow odds, as one thousand, we are possibly not very far wrong. Now let us consider the efforts made to attain this result: a literature of many thousand volumes, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chess columns in widely read newspapers and magazines, lectures, tournaments, tournament books, courses of instruction, matches in the clubs and between clubs and cities and countries, by correspondence, by telegraph and telephone, thousands of coffee - houses, where spectators, amid lively gossip, look on, make notes, analyze - truly an imposing expenditure.
One should not take these facts too easily. Certainly, in spite of its capacities, Chess is only a game and not to be classed with business, science, technology, not to speak of religion, philosophy or the arts. No one desires to see players devote to Chess such time as they need for serious purposes. The waste of time in Chess would not matter, were it not a symptom of a sickness that has befallen our culture.
We have learnt how to organise manufacturing plants, but our general education, our mental work, our economy of ideals are not better than our education in Chess.
I will here not wail. I will only illuminate a connection, even though rapidly. Chess, from its very inception, has had coherence with Life.
Let us assume that a master who follows a good method, say, the method of this book, strives to educate a young man ignorant of Chess to the level of one who, if conceded any odds, would surely come out the winner. How much time would the teacher need for this achievement? I think that I am correct in making the following calculation:
Rules of Play and Exercises 5 hrs.
Elementary Endings 5 hrs.
Some Openings 10 hrs.
Combination 20 hrs.
Position Play 40 hrs.
Play and Analysis 120 hrs.
Even if the young man has no talent at all, by following the above course he would advance to the class specified. Compare with this possibility, the reality. In fact, there are a quarter of a million Chess amateurs who devote to Chess at least two hundred hours ever year and of these only a thousand, after a lifetime of study, attain the end. Without losing myself in calculations, I believe I am safe in voicing the opinion that our efforts in Chess attain only a hundredth of one per cent of their rightful result.
Our education, in all domains of endeavour, is frightfully wasteful of time and values. In Mathematics and in Physics the results arrived at are still worse than in Chess. Is there a tendency to keep the bulk of the people stupid? For governments of an autocratic type the foolishness of the multitude has always been an asset. Possibly, also the mediocre who happen to be in authority follow the same policy. This motif, it is true, is not predominating in Chess. The bad state of education in Chess is due entirely to our backwardness.
Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judging. Chess must not be memorized, simply because it is not important enough. If you load your memory, you should know why. Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. If need be, I can increase my skill in Chess, if need be I can do that of which I have no idea at present. I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of good use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight.
You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods. The method is plastic. It is applicable in every situation. The result, the isolated incident, is rigid, because bound to wholly individual conditions. The method produces numerous results; a few of these will remain in our memory, and as long as they remain few, they are useful to illustrate and to keep alive the rules which order a thousand results. Such useful results must be renewed from time to time just as fresh food has to be supplied to a living organism to keep it strong and healthy. But results useful in this manner have a living connection with rules, and these again are discovered by applying a live method: the whole of this organisation must have life, more than that -- a harmonious life.
This harmonious life stems from life; life is generated only by life. He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess -- artificial theories, supported by few instances and unheld by an excess of human wit; the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to a standstill or to anarchy.
Acquisition of harmonious education is comparable to the production and the elevation of an organism harmoniously built. The one is fed by blood, the other one by the spirit; but Life, equally mysterious, creative, powerful, flows through either. This comparison is no mere rhetorical imagery; it is a programme.
True, this programme, valid for all education, is in no way restricted to Chess; only a second postulate added to the above singles out Chess among all other things to be taught. It is this: to lead the pupil along the paths of the theory of Steinitz.
This theory has a history which the pupil should strive to understand because it lifts the veil a little from the mystery of human character; this theory has a meaning which became manifest after a hard contest with competing theories and won authority through a celebrated world's championship match; this theory has connections with profound problems; this theory asks the pupil to think for himself and to construct his own table of values and to keep it constantly, vigilantly, in order; this theory demands of him boldness and caution and force and economy and thus becomes to him a model for actions outside of Chess.
The road to this education requires good teachers -- masters of Chess who at the same time are geniuses of teaching. But it pays to go along this road for it leads to a country of men who judge independently, act boldly and aspire after noble ideals.
How should these teachers follow their avocation? In introducing young men into the game in the right manner by lectures, good books, by live play with their pupils, by assisting at matches of the pupils and making notes and comments on the good and weak points of the games played; in short, by thus facilitating the thinking of their pupil without doing violence to it. The ways in which a good teacher may do efficient work are manifold and varied.
The Chess world has the task of breeding such teachers and, as soon as this is accomplished, to support them in their efforts. Thus the Chess-world would ease the hard life of the Chess-masters who must make a profession of Chess provided they want to do their best for Chess. But who wants to stop half-way? Who would want these Chess-masters who have the capacity for excellent teaching in them to become mediocre in Chess only in order to make them mediocre in some other profession? The function of a Chess-master, who would be principally a Chess-teacher, is useful and pleasing. It is to the individual credit of Chess that in other domains of human activity, at least up to the present, teachers of the above type are not even possible.
On the Future of the Theory of Steinitz.
It is easy to mould the theory of Steinitz into mathematical symbols by inventing a kind of Chess, the rules and regulations of which are themselves expressed by mathematical symbols. The Japanese game of Go is very nearly what I mean. In such a game the question, whether thorough analysis would confirm the theory of Steinitz or not, presumably could be quickly solved because the power of modern mathematics is exceedingly great.
The instant that this solution is worked out, humanity stands before the gate of an immense new science which prophetic philosophers have called the mathematics or the physics of contest.
The contests fought nowadays by men -- war, diplomatic negotiation, competition in manufacture, disputes in the press, to name just a few -- are conducted very amateurishly. That wars should appear to us a necessity is proof of our stupidity. True, humanity has need of a test for progress, for right, for soundness of ethics in human affairs, but that need can be satisfied in other and more efficient ways than by war. To make this evident is difficult only because men do not want to know the truth. But this task will be an easy one as soon as the science of contest attains recognition.
To outlaw war will be possible because humanity has a wealth of efficient and useful means to fill the gap that would be left. The competition between research workers, inventors, discoverers, artists, statesmen causes the flow of blood in the body of culture. And this competition will retain its vigour till many centuries after the time that Victor Hugo pictures, when cannons will have been stored in museums alongside of the instruments of torture to serve as memorials of a vanished barbaric epoch.
The mathematics of Chess does not, it is true, solve the problem of comprehending the contests of Life, but it sets that problem in precise terms and points to a solution. There the leverage will be supported whence investigators will set scientific research into motion. The first step is always the essential one. With the law of the lever by Archimedes came statics, with the law of the falling stone by Galileo arose dynamics, and their course, though their entry into the world was so modest, led them to revolutionise all science and all modes of living irrespective of the obstacles that hatred and stupidity heaped into their path. The science of contest will progress irresistibly, as soon as its first modest success has been scored.
It is desirable that institutes to further these ends should be erected. Such institutes would have to work upon a mass of material already extant: theory of mathematical games, of organisation, of the conduct of business, of dispute, of negotiation; they would have to breed teachers capable of elevating the multitude from its terrible dilettantism in matters of contest; they would have to produce books of instruction and for reading as plain, as intelligible, as valuable as Knigge's _Social Intercourse Amongst Mankind_. (_Umgang mit Menschen_) or Labruyere's _Characters_.
Such an institute should be founded by every people who want to make themselves fit for a sturdier future and at the same time to aid the progress and the happiness of all humankind.
These plans are not at all fantastic; they will certainly be realised at some time. Why not now? Let us hope that also in these days of all-round mediocrity Reason is not wholly without partisans."
===================================
MYGOODNESS(LAZINESS & STUPIDITY!)
I should remove & fix the previous terrible post...
But I'd leave it as such to remind me of my laziness & stupidity...
Have not really solved the problem of spaces/"returns"in this blog...
"Chess is good for the brain - even for adults - no one has ever seen a senile chess player!"
Just decided to play again CHESS to fight dementia/softening of my brain...
I feel my brain (which was fist-sized before) is now half-fist...
Hey! INTELLIGENCE IS HOW EFFICIENTLY YOU USE YOUR BRAIN!
SHAQ O NEIL's BRAIN IS MUCH MUCH BIGGER THAN MINE
BUT I'LL FIGHT HIM IN ANY BRAIN GAME (NOT BASKETBALL!)
ADDENDUM:
=======================
The Seven Intelligences
=======================
Type of Intelligence/Possible Occupation/Core Components
1) LOGICAL-MATHEMATICAL
Scientist, Mathematician
Sensitivity to and capacity to discern logical
or numerical patterns;
ability to handle long chains of reasoning
2) LINGUISTIC
Poet, Journalist
Sensitivity to the sounds, rhythms, and meanings of words;
sensitivity to the different functions of language
3) MUSICAL
Composer, Violinist
Abilities to produce and appreciate rhythm, pitch, and timbre;
appreciation of the forms of musical expressiveness
4) SPATIAL
Navigator, Sculptor
Capacities to perceive the visual-spatial world accurately
and to manipulate the mental representations that result
5) BODILY-KINESTHETIC
Dancer, Athlete
Abilities to control one’s body movements
and to handle objects skillfully
6) INTERPERSONAL
Therapist, Salesperson
Capacities to discern and respond
appropriately to the moods, temperaments,
motivations, and desires of other people
7) INTRAPERSONAL
Person with detailed access to one’s own feelings
and the accurate self-knowledge
ability to discriminate among them
and draw upon them to guide behavior;
knowledge of one’s own strengths,
weaknesses, desires, and intelligences
Source: “Multiple Intelligences Go to School:
Education Implication of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences,”
by H. Gardner and T. Hatch, 1989.
Educational Researcher, 18, (8), pp. 4–10.
as quoted from: rtyuytrtyriuy
But I'd leave it as such to remind me of my laziness & stupidity...
Have not really solved the problem of spaces/"returns"in this blog...
"Chess is good for the brain - even for adults - no one has ever seen a senile chess player!"
Just decided to play again CHESS to fight dementia/softening of my brain...
I feel my brain (which was fist-sized before) is now half-fist...
Hey! INTELLIGENCE IS HOW EFFICIENTLY YOU USE YOUR BRAIN!
SHAQ O NEIL's BRAIN IS MUCH MUCH BIGGER THAN MINE
BUT I'LL FIGHT HIM IN ANY BRAIN GAME (NOT BASKETBALL!)
ADDENDUM:
=======================
The Seven Intelligences
=======================
Type of Intelligence/Possible Occupation/Core Components
1) LOGICAL-MATHEMATICAL
Scientist, Mathematician
Sensitivity to and capacity to discern logical
or numerical patterns;
ability to handle long chains of reasoning
2) LINGUISTIC
Poet, Journalist
Sensitivity to the sounds, rhythms, and meanings of words;
sensitivity to the different functions of language
3) MUSICAL
Composer, Violinist
Abilities to produce and appreciate rhythm, pitch, and timbre;
appreciation of the forms of musical expressiveness
4) SPATIAL
Navigator, Sculptor
Capacities to perceive the visual-spatial world accurately
and to manipulate the mental representations that result
5) BODILY-KINESTHETIC
Dancer, Athlete
Abilities to control one’s body movements
and to handle objects skillfully
6) INTERPERSONAL
Therapist, Salesperson
Capacities to discern and respond
appropriately to the moods, temperaments,
motivations, and desires of other people
7) INTRAPERSONAL
Person with detailed access to one’s own feelings
and the accurate self-knowledge
ability to discriminate among them
and draw upon them to guide behavior;
knowledge of one’s own strengths,
weaknesses, desires, and intelligences
Source: “Multiple Intelligences Go to School:
Education Implication of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences,”
by H. Gardner and T. Hatch, 1989.
Educational Researcher, 18, (8), pp. 4–10.
as quoted from: rtyuytrtyriuy
CHESSTHINK
TREE OF POSSIBILITIES/VARIATIONS
I
I
___________I__________
/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\
12 34 5 6 7 8 9 10 1112 1314 1516
===========================================
IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHESS THINKING
OF MASTER & PATZER
===========================================
TYRO
I
I
_______I_______
/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\
NOTE:Numerous (many) considerations but SHALLOW
SAME NUMBER OF POSSIBILITIES
UNDER CONSIDERATION(=16)
SAME NUMBER OF TOTAL BRANCHES
OF TREE OF POSSIBILITES
GRANDMASTER
I
I
I
/\
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/\ /\
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/\ /\ /\ /\
/ \ / \ / \ / \
/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\
NOTE: Few choices but Deep (DEPTH)
A LAZY &/OR procrastinating person
(one who does not want to THINK things
through & thouroughly, immediately)
is AUTOMATICALLY OUT! CHESS IS NOT FOR YOU (US!)
It is not that masters have to think through all the possibilities
On the contrary, they have very few/limited choices
to make or choose from based on their knowledge & experience
but these are deeper/finer
Tyros are cruder, grosser. Masters are sophisticated...
Masters do not at all take into consideration the irrelevant/insignificant/erroneous
When they see the board they have a GRASP of what is IMPORTANT or of WHAT MATTERS
It is intelligent discernment ("intelligere") or better intelligent NON-CONCERN
THey know precisely what to disregard! And these NOISE never enter into their minds!
SO a CLEAR MIND is ESSENTIAL...
CLARITY, PRECISION, DEPTH, SOPHISTICATION...
Chess masters are good at ANALYZING positions.
Masters play consistently (not erratically) with minimal or no error
Even if they commit an error they are able to recover quickly or take corrective action
They have MASTERED the fundamentals (ABC's) & basic techniques, short-cuts, rules-of-thumb
THey are able to apply/do all these in REAL-TIME
under intense PSYCHOLOGICAL pressure...
CORRECT training & PROPER education
makes the difference between successful players
& unsuccessful ones given the same TALENT
Just like in other fields of knowledge, skill etc
MISEDUCATION is WORSE than IGNORANCE
"MEN ARE BORN IGNORANT, NOT STUPID.
IT IS EDUCATION THAT MAKES THEM STUPID."
-Bertrand Russell
My Comment: MISeducation as in conspiracy theory
of mass mind manipulation & stupidification...
I
I
___________I__________
/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\
12 34 5 6 7 8 9 10 1112 1314 1516
===========================================
IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHESS THINKING
OF MASTER & PATZER
===========================================
TYRO
I
I
_______I_______
/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\
NOTE:Numerous (many) considerations but SHALLOW
SAME NUMBER OF POSSIBILITIES
UNDER CONSIDERATION(=16)
SAME NUMBER OF TOTAL BRANCHES
OF TREE OF POSSIBILITES
GRANDMASTER
I
I
I
/\
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/\ /\
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/\ /\ /\ /\
/ \ / \ / \ / \
/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\
NOTE: Few choices but Deep (DEPTH)
A LAZY &/OR procrastinating person
(one who does not want to THINK things
through & thouroughly, immediately)
is AUTOMATICALLY OUT! CHESS IS NOT FOR YOU (US!)
It is not that masters have to think through all the possibilities
On the contrary, they have very few/limited choices
to make or choose from based on their knowledge & experience
but these are deeper/finer
Tyros are cruder, grosser. Masters are sophisticated...
Masters do not at all take into consideration the irrelevant/insignificant/erroneous
When they see the board they have a GRASP of what is IMPORTANT or of WHAT MATTERS
It is intelligent discernment ("intelligere") or better intelligent NON-CONCERN
THey know precisely what to disregard! And these NOISE never enter into their minds!
SO a CLEAR MIND is ESSENTIAL...
CLARITY, PRECISION, DEPTH, SOPHISTICATION...
Chess masters are good at ANALYZING positions.
Masters play consistently (not erratically) with minimal or no error
Even if they commit an error they are able to recover quickly or take corrective action
They have MASTERED the fundamentals (ABC's) & basic techniques, short-cuts, rules-of-thumb
THey are able to apply/do all these in REAL-TIME
under intense PSYCHOLOGICAL pressure...
CORRECT training & PROPER education
makes the difference between successful players
& unsuccessful ones given the same TALENT
Just like in other fields of knowledge, skill etc
MISEDUCATION is WORSE than IGNORANCE
"MEN ARE BORN IGNORANT, NOT STUPID.
IT IS EDUCATION THAT MAKES THEM STUPID."
-Bertrand Russell
My Comment: MISeducation as in conspiracy theory
of mass mind manipulation & stupidification...
Thursday, May 15, 2008
AND MORE CHATUR
Some more educational links:
MALAY CHESS
http://history.chess.free.fr/mainchator.htm
CAMBODIAN CHESS
http://history.chess.free.fr/cambodian.htm
CHATRANG (NOT SHAHTRANG PALA!)
http://history.chess.free.fr/chatrang.htm
TMNP
MALAY CHESS
http://history.chess.free.fr/mainchator.htm
CAMBODIAN CHESS
http://history.chess.free.fr/cambodian.htm
CHATRANG (NOT SHAHTRANG PALA!)
http://history.chess.free.fr/chatrang.htm
TMNP
CHATUR AGAIN + ISLAAM
MUSLIMS & CHATUR/SHATRANJ
Remember: THe MUSLIMS HAD THEIR OWN FORM OF CHESS...
MUSLIMS READ THE FF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As-Suli
Abu-Bakr Muhammad ben Yahya as-Suli & As-Suli's Diamond problem
ALSO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_Sultan_Khan
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=23857
http://www.bcmchess.co.uk/britbase/arch30.htm
http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/sultankhan.html
About MIR SULTAN KHAN
(NB: He WAS NOT a sultan but a houseboy HAR!)
He became British chess champion & even beat CAPABLANCA,
the Cuban CHESS MACHINE in their personal encounter!!!
"Kitab Ash-Shatranj (Book of Chess),
which was the first scientific book ever written on chess strategy"
MUSLIIIIIIIMS PLEEEEEEEZZZZZZZ NAMAAAAAAAN USE YOUR COCONUTS!!!
Aren't you ashamed to be told by a weakie revert???
Don't you have HIYA, SIPPUG, MARATABAT ETC ETC???
YOUR ENEMY HATES MOST WHAT IS BEST FOR YOU. - SEZ ME
Remember: THe MUSLIMS HAD THEIR OWN FORM OF CHESS...
MUSLIMS READ THE FF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As-Suli
Abu-Bakr Muhammad ben Yahya as-Suli & As-Suli's Diamond problem
ALSO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_Sultan_Khan
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=23857
http://www.bcmchess.co.uk/britbase/arch30.htm
http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/sultankhan.html
About MIR SULTAN KHAN
(NB: He WAS NOT a sultan but a houseboy HAR!)
He became British chess champion & even beat CAPABLANCA,
the Cuban CHESS MACHINE in their personal encounter!!!
"Kitab Ash-Shatranj (Book of Chess),
which was the first scientific book ever written on chess strategy"
MUSLIIIIIIIMS PLEEEEEEEZZZZZZZ NAMAAAAAAAN USE YOUR COCONUTS!!!
Aren't you ashamed to be told by a weakie revert???
Don't you have HIYA, SIPPUG, MARATABAT ETC ETC???
YOUR ENEMY HATES MOST WHAT IS BEST FOR YOU. - SEZ ME
STILL CHATUR!
May 16, 2008
MUSLIMS READ THIS & STUDY/NOTE VERY WELL:
Fatawa: Playing Chess: Permissible?
Contemporary Fatawa
Question: Playing Chess: Permissible?
Answer:
Wa `alaykum As-Salamu wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
Dear sister in Islam, thanks a lot for your question which reflects your care
to have a clear view of the teachings of Islam. Allah commands Muslims to refer
to people of knowledge to get themselves well-acquainted with the teachings of Islam.
In his well-known book, The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam,
the prominent Muslim scholar, Sheik Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, states:
"Chess is a very popular game, and the opinion of jurists concerning it varies.
Some scholars consider it halal (permissible), others consider it makruh (reprehensible),
and still others consider it haram (unlawful).
Those who consider it haram cite some hadiths in support of their view,
but researchers have proved that chess did not appear
until after the death of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him).
Thus all such hadiths must have been fabricated.
The Companions of the Prophet (may Allah be pleased with them all) themselves
held different views about playing chess. Ibn `Umar (may Allah be pleased with him)
said that it is worse than backgammon and `Ali (may Allah be pleased with him)
regarded it as gambling (perhaps meaning when it is played for money),
while some others merely expressed disapproval of it.
However, some Companions and some of the second generation of scholars allowed it.
Among those were Ibn `Abbas, Abu Hurayrah, Ibn Sirin, Hisham bin `Umrah, and Sa`id Ibn Al-Musayyib.
We agree with those great jurists, since the original principle is the permissibility of acts
and no text is to be found prohibiting it.
Moreover, in addition to being a game and a recreation,
chess is also a mental exercise which requires thought and planning.
In this respect, it is the opposite of backgammon,
for while backgammon is a game of chance and therefore comparable to divining with arrows,
chess is a game of skill and strategy, which may be compared to archery.
However, playing chess is permissible only if the following conditions are met:
1- One should not get so absorbed in it that he delays his prayer;
chess is well-known to be a stealer of time.
2- There should be no gambling involved.
3- The players should not utter obscenities or vulgarities.
If any of these conditions are not met it should be considered as haram."
You can also read:
Islam and Recreation
May Allah guide you to the straight path, and direct you to that which pleases Him, Amen.
Country Of Origin : Morocco
Fatawa Issuing Body : Islam Online
Author/Scholar : Yusuf Al-Qaradawi
Date Of Issue : 25/Dec/2003
Note: http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?pagename=IslamOnline-English-Ask_Scholar/FatwaE/FatwaE&cid=1119503543132
=======
My Comment:
"Fatawa" or "Fatwa"?
Qaradawi writes another item that seems correct to me...
But one Islaamic website says that Qaradawi is one writer who should not be believed...
Now WHO is telling the TRUTH & WHO is TRULY ISLAAMIC???
"researchers have proved that chess did not appear
until after the death of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him).
Thus all such hadiths must have been fabricated."
MY SUSPICION: THE ENEMIES OF ISLAAM DID NOT WANT MUSLIMS TO
RELEARN CHESS FOR FEAR OF ISLAAM'S "JIHAAD" TEACHING...
SO THEY INSTILLED THE IDEA AMONG MUSLIMS THAT CHESS IS HARAAM!!!
I WAS SO DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED WHEN I FOUND OUT THAT ALMOST ALL
MORO MUSLIM YOUTH I KNEW EITHER DID NOT KNOW CHESS OR CONSIDERED
IT HARAAM... JUST LIKE MUSIC, CHESS CAN BE EXTREMELY USEFUL FOR
JIHAADISTS!!! (I WAS TOLD PLAYING CHESS WAS LIKE WASHING ONE'S
HAND IN PIG'S BLOOD!!!)
I DARE MUSLIMS (THOSE WHO CONSIDER THEMSELVES AS ONE)
TO FIND A TRULY MUSLIM ARAB OR NON-ARAB WHO IS
OF WORLD-CLASS CALIBRE... (SEIRAWAN IS HALF-BRITISH)
NOW YOU KNOW HOW FAR MUSLIMS ARE FROM THE BY-GONE GLORIOUS TIMES
WHEN THE MUSLIMS RULED THE WORLD & LED OVER THEIR ENEMIES IN
SUCH FIELDS AS ASTRONOMY, NAVIGATION, CHESS, MUSIC, STATE ADMINISTRATION, ARCHITECTURE, URBAN PLANNING, ETC ETC
I THINK ONE OF THE PHILIPPINES' ORDINARY KANTO CLUB HABITUE
WOULD MAKE ABSOLUTE CHESS CHAMPION OF KSA HAR HAR HAR
"Chess is well-known to be a stealer of time."
NOTHING CAN BE "TRUER"!!!
2- There should be no gambling involved.
3- The players should not utter obscenities or vulgarities.
YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH ACTUAL CLUB/COMPETITIVE CHESS
& CHESS PERSONALITIES!!! HAR!
I HAVE OTHER PROFOUND THOUGHTS ABOUT THE MATTER
WHICH I SHALL APPEND LATER...
MUSLIMS READ THIS & STUDY/NOTE VERY WELL:
Fatawa: Playing Chess: Permissible?
Contemporary Fatawa
Question: Playing Chess: Permissible?
Answer:
Wa `alaykum As-Salamu wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
Dear sister in Islam, thanks a lot for your question which reflects your care
to have a clear view of the teachings of Islam. Allah commands Muslims to refer
to people of knowledge to get themselves well-acquainted with the teachings of Islam.
In his well-known book, The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam,
the prominent Muslim scholar, Sheik Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, states:
"Chess is a very popular game, and the opinion of jurists concerning it varies.
Some scholars consider it halal (permissible), others consider it makruh (reprehensible),
and still others consider it haram (unlawful).
Those who consider it haram cite some hadiths in support of their view,
but researchers have proved that chess did not appear
until after the death of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him).
Thus all such hadiths must have been fabricated.
The Companions of the Prophet (may Allah be pleased with them all) themselves
held different views about playing chess. Ibn `Umar (may Allah be pleased with him)
said that it is worse than backgammon and `Ali (may Allah be pleased with him)
regarded it as gambling (perhaps meaning when it is played for money),
while some others merely expressed disapproval of it.
However, some Companions and some of the second generation of scholars allowed it.
Among those were Ibn `Abbas, Abu Hurayrah, Ibn Sirin, Hisham bin `Umrah, and Sa`id Ibn Al-Musayyib.
We agree with those great jurists, since the original principle is the permissibility of acts
and no text is to be found prohibiting it.
Moreover, in addition to being a game and a recreation,
chess is also a mental exercise which requires thought and planning.
In this respect, it is the opposite of backgammon,
for while backgammon is a game of chance and therefore comparable to divining with arrows,
chess is a game of skill and strategy, which may be compared to archery.
However, playing chess is permissible only if the following conditions are met:
1- One should not get so absorbed in it that he delays his prayer;
chess is well-known to be a stealer of time.
2- There should be no gambling involved.
3- The players should not utter obscenities or vulgarities.
If any of these conditions are not met it should be considered as haram."
You can also read:
Islam and Recreation
May Allah guide you to the straight path, and direct you to that which pleases Him, Amen.
Country Of Origin : Morocco
Fatawa Issuing Body : Islam Online
Author/Scholar : Yusuf Al-Qaradawi
Date Of Issue : 25/Dec/2003
Note: http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?pagename=IslamOnline-English-Ask_Scholar/FatwaE/FatwaE&cid=1119503543132
=======
My Comment:
"Fatawa" or "Fatwa"?
Qaradawi writes another item that seems correct to me...
But one Islaamic website says that Qaradawi is one writer who should not be believed...
Now WHO is telling the TRUTH & WHO is TRULY ISLAAMIC???
"researchers have proved that chess did not appear
until after the death of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him).
Thus all such hadiths must have been fabricated."
MY SUSPICION: THE ENEMIES OF ISLAAM DID NOT WANT MUSLIMS TO
RELEARN CHESS FOR FEAR OF ISLAAM'S "JIHAAD" TEACHING...
SO THEY INSTILLED THE IDEA AMONG MUSLIMS THAT CHESS IS HARAAM!!!
I WAS SO DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED WHEN I FOUND OUT THAT ALMOST ALL
MORO MUSLIM YOUTH I KNEW EITHER DID NOT KNOW CHESS OR CONSIDERED
IT HARAAM... JUST LIKE MUSIC, CHESS CAN BE EXTREMELY USEFUL FOR
JIHAADISTS!!! (I WAS TOLD PLAYING CHESS WAS LIKE WASHING ONE'S
HAND IN PIG'S BLOOD!!!)
I DARE MUSLIMS (THOSE WHO CONSIDER THEMSELVES AS ONE)
TO FIND A TRULY MUSLIM ARAB OR NON-ARAB WHO IS
OF WORLD-CLASS CALIBRE... (SEIRAWAN IS HALF-BRITISH)
NOW YOU KNOW HOW FAR MUSLIMS ARE FROM THE BY-GONE GLORIOUS TIMES
WHEN THE MUSLIMS RULED THE WORLD & LED OVER THEIR ENEMIES IN
SUCH FIELDS AS ASTRONOMY, NAVIGATION, CHESS, MUSIC, STATE ADMINISTRATION, ARCHITECTURE, URBAN PLANNING, ETC ETC
I THINK ONE OF THE PHILIPPINES' ORDINARY KANTO CLUB HABITUE
WOULD MAKE ABSOLUTE CHESS CHAMPION OF KSA HAR HAR HAR
"Chess is well-known to be a stealer of time."
NOTHING CAN BE "TRUER"!!!
2- There should be no gambling involved.
3- The players should not utter obscenities or vulgarities.
YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH ACTUAL CLUB/COMPETITIVE CHESS
& CHESS PERSONALITIES!!! HAR!
I HAVE OTHER PROFOUND THOUGHTS ABOUT THE MATTER
WHICH I SHALL APPEND LATER...
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
COMPETITIONS
May 14, 2008
@Home
NEWS: Myanmar Cyclone - Number of Dead unbelievable...
China Earthquake... How does one know the TRUTH when the ONLY source is MEDIA...
Maybe if one had friends in those places, then one may ask them... But still this knowledge would be LIMITED... One has to have a BIG VIEW (GOD'S-POINT-OF-VIEW)...
While surfing I found the following item from SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN magazine, one of my very important readings/sources of knowledge as a youth... Now I wonder its difference from the AMERICAN SCIENTIST magazine...
Brought back to my memory a description of civil exams in old CHINA as related by my Asian Civilizations teacher who was a Filipina-Chinese... She must have read this item.
OURCE: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. 841
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 13, 1892
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Scientific American Supplement, No. 841,
February 13, 1892, by Various
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15193/15193-h/15193-h.htm#art14
================================
CHINESE COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS
================================
Wuchang, on the Yangtsze opposite Hankow, is the capital of the two provinces Hupeh and Hunan. Here, every third year, the examination for competitors from both provinces is held, and a correspondent of the North China Herald, of Shanghai, describes the scene at the examination at the beginning of September last. The streets, he says, are thronged with long-robed, large-spectacled gentlemen, who inform the world at large by every fold of drapery, every swagger of gait, every curve of nail, that they are the aristocracy of the most ancient empire of the world. Wuchang had from 12,000 to 15,000 bachelors of arts within its walls, who came from the far borders of the province for the examination for the provincial degree. About one-half per cent. will be successful; thousands of them know they have not the shadow of a chance, but literary etiquette binds them to appear. In the wake of these Confucian scholars come a rout of traders, painters, scroll sellers, teapot venders, candle merchants, spectacle mongers, etc.; servants and friends swell the number, so that the examination makes a difference of some 40,000 or 50,000 to the resident population. In the great examination hall, which is composed of a series of pens shut off from each other in little rows of 20 or 30, and the view of which is suggestive of a huge cattle market, there is accommodation for over 10,000 candidates. The observance of rules of academic propriety is very strict. A candidate may be excluded, not only for incompetence, but for writing his name in the wrong place, for tearing or blotting his examination paper, etc. After the examination of each batch a list of those allowed to compete for honors is published, and the essay forms for each district are prepared with proper names and particulars. The ancestors of the candidate for three generations must be recorded, they must be free from taint of yamen service, prostitution, the barber's trade and the theater, or the candidate would not have obtained his first degree. With the forms 300 cash (about 1s.) are presented to each candidate for food during the ordeal. The lists being thus prepared, on the sixth day of the eighth moon (Tuesday, the 8th of September, in 1891), the city takes a holiday to witness the ceremony of "entering the curtain," i.e., opening the examination hall. For days coolies have been pumping water into great tanks, droves of pigs have been driven into the inclosure, doctors, tailors, cooks, coffins, printers, etc., have been massed within the hall for possible needs. The imperial commissioners are escorted by the examination officials to the place. A dozen district magistrates have been appointed to superintend within the walls, and as many more outside, two prefects have office inside, and the governor of the province has also to be locked up during the eight days of examination. The whole company is first entertained to breakfast at the yamen, and then the procession forms; the ordinary umbrellas, lictors, gongs, feathers, and ragamuffins are there in force; the examiners and the highest officers are carried in open chairs draped in scarlet and covered with tiger skins. The dead silence that falls on the crowd betokens the approach of the governor, who brings up the rear. Then the bustle of the actual examination begins. The hall is a miniature city. Practically martial law is proclaimed. In the central tower is a sword, and misdemeanor within the limits is punished with instant death. The mandarins take up their quarters in their respective lodges, the whole army of writers whose duty it is to copy out the essays of the candidates, to prevent collusion, take their places. Altogether there must be over 20,000 people shut in. Cases have been known in which a hopeful candidate was crushed to death in the crowd at the gate. Each candidate is first identified, and he is assigned a certain number which corresponds to a cell a few feet square, containing one board for a seat and one for a desk. Meanwhile the printers in the building are hard at work printing the essay texts. Each row of cells has two attendants for cooking, etc., assigned to it, the candidates take their seats, the rows are locked from the outside, the themes are handed out, the contest has begun. The examination is divided into three bouts of about 36 hours, two nights and a day, each, with intervals of a day. The first is the production of three essays on the four assigned books; the second of five essays on the five classics; the third of five essays on miscellaneous subjects. The strain, as may be imagined, is very great, and several victims die in the hall. The literary ambition which leads old men of 60 and 70 to enter not unfrequently destroys them. Should any fatal case occur, the coffin may on no account be carried out throughthe gates; it must be lifted over or sometimes through a breach in the wall. Death must not pollute the greatentrance. At the end of the third trial, the first batch of those who have completed their essays is honored with the firing of guns, the bows of the officials, and the ministry of a band of music. Three weeks of anxious waiting will ensue before a huge crowd will assemble to see the list published. Then the successful candidates are the pride
of their country side, and well do the survivors of such an ordeal deserve their credit. The case of those who are in the last selection and are left degreeless, for the stern reason that some must be crowded out, is the hardest of all.
=======================
It seems the Philippine BAR imitates this Chinese civil exams...
COMPETITION, COMPETING
If there is ONE single personal problem I have - it's my being NON-COMPETITIVE...
I mentioned in a previous POST that I have WEAK WILL - MORE ACCURATELY, I am essentially a NON_COMPETITIVE INDIVIDUAL & this is the SINGLE BIG REASON for my not being successful in Life... In fact, I DISLIKE/HATE COMPETING (i.e. being COMPARED WITH OTHERS)... I have attained distinction in my studies & even received some "citations of distinction" even in CHESS but this was because I just did naturally what was needed to be done... But I did not give that added PUSH, I did not have that DESIRE to go over & above another fellow human characteristic of STRONG PERSONALITIES or COMPETITIVE INDIVIDUALS... This LACK OF INITIATIVE or "TIMIDITY" I believe is common among the "Philippine Islanders" & that s why they are POOR & MATERIALLY UNSUCCESSFUL... Maybe they have grown weary of CENTURIES of STRUGGLING [REMEMBER: The Nusantarans were the first in ASIA to collide with the WEST - SPAIN & PORTUGAL in the 15-16th Centuries & the DUTCH, ENGLAND, & AMERICA later...
We were fighting the de facto SUPERPOWERS ever since time immemorial!
REMEMBER: We fought SPAIN (SPAIN & PORTUGAL DIVIDED THE WORLD BETWEEN THEMSELVES THEN). WE FOUGHT AMERICA & IT WAS DURING THAT TIME (TURN OF 19th-20th CENTURY THAT MARKED THE RISE OF U.S.A. TO WORLD POWER STATUS...
TODAY's GLOBAL POWER PLAYERS SHOULD STUDY US (WE) IF THEY WANT TO LEARN SOME VALUABLE LESSONS...
@Home
NEWS: Myanmar Cyclone - Number of Dead unbelievable...
China Earthquake... How does one know the TRUTH when the ONLY source is MEDIA...
Maybe if one had friends in those places, then one may ask them... But still this knowledge would be LIMITED... One has to have a BIG VIEW (GOD'S-POINT-OF-VIEW)...
While surfing I found the following item from SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN magazine, one of my very important readings/sources of knowledge as a youth... Now I wonder its difference from the AMERICAN SCIENTIST magazine...
Brought back to my memory a description of civil exams in old CHINA as related by my Asian Civilizations teacher who was a Filipina-Chinese... She must have read this item.
OURCE: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. 841
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 13, 1892
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Scientific American Supplement, No. 841,
February 13, 1892, by Various
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15193/15193-h/15193-h.htm#art14
================================
CHINESE COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS
================================
Wuchang, on the Yangtsze opposite Hankow, is the capital of the two provinces Hupeh and Hunan. Here, every third year, the examination for competitors from both provinces is held, and a correspondent of the North China Herald, of Shanghai, describes the scene at the examination at the beginning of September last. The streets, he says, are thronged with long-robed, large-spectacled gentlemen, who inform the world at large by every fold of drapery, every swagger of gait, every curve of nail, that they are the aristocracy of the most ancient empire of the world. Wuchang had from 12,000 to 15,000 bachelors of arts within its walls, who came from the far borders of the province for the examination for the provincial degree. About one-half per cent. will be successful; thousands of them know they have not the shadow of a chance, but literary etiquette binds them to appear. In the wake of these Confucian scholars come a rout of traders, painters, scroll sellers, teapot venders, candle merchants, spectacle mongers, etc.; servants and friends swell the number, so that the examination makes a difference of some 40,000 or 50,000 to the resident population. In the great examination hall, which is composed of a series of pens shut off from each other in little rows of 20 or 30, and the view of which is suggestive of a huge cattle market, there is accommodation for over 10,000 candidates. The observance of rules of academic propriety is very strict. A candidate may be excluded, not only for incompetence, but for writing his name in the wrong place, for tearing or blotting his examination paper, etc. After the examination of each batch a list of those allowed to compete for honors is published, and the essay forms for each district are prepared with proper names and particulars. The ancestors of the candidate for three generations must be recorded, they must be free from taint of yamen service, prostitution, the barber's trade and the theater, or the candidate would not have obtained his first degree. With the forms 300 cash (about 1s.) are presented to each candidate for food during the ordeal. The lists being thus prepared, on the sixth day of the eighth moon (Tuesday, the 8th of September, in 1891), the city takes a holiday to witness the ceremony of "entering the curtain," i.e., opening the examination hall. For days coolies have been pumping water into great tanks, droves of pigs have been driven into the inclosure, doctors, tailors, cooks, coffins, printers, etc., have been massed within the hall for possible needs. The imperial commissioners are escorted by the examination officials to the place. A dozen district magistrates have been appointed to superintend within the walls, and as many more outside, two prefects have office inside, and the governor of the province has also to be locked up during the eight days of examination. The whole company is first entertained to breakfast at the yamen, and then the procession forms; the ordinary umbrellas, lictors, gongs, feathers, and ragamuffins are there in force; the examiners and the highest officers are carried in open chairs draped in scarlet and covered with tiger skins. The dead silence that falls on the crowd betokens the approach of the governor, who brings up the rear. Then the bustle of the actual examination begins. The hall is a miniature city. Practically martial law is proclaimed. In the central tower is a sword, and misdemeanor within the limits is punished with instant death. The mandarins take up their quarters in their respective lodges, the whole army of writers whose duty it is to copy out the essays of the candidates, to prevent collusion, take their places. Altogether there must be over 20,000 people shut in. Cases have been known in which a hopeful candidate was crushed to death in the crowd at the gate. Each candidate is first identified, and he is assigned a certain number which corresponds to a cell a few feet square, containing one board for a seat and one for a desk. Meanwhile the printers in the building are hard at work printing the essay texts. Each row of cells has two attendants for cooking, etc., assigned to it, the candidates take their seats, the rows are locked from the outside, the themes are handed out, the contest has begun. The examination is divided into three bouts of about 36 hours, two nights and a day, each, with intervals of a day. The first is the production of three essays on the four assigned books; the second of five essays on the five classics; the third of five essays on miscellaneous subjects. The strain, as may be imagined, is very great, and several victims die in the hall. The literary ambition which leads old men of 60 and 70 to enter not unfrequently destroys them. Should any fatal case occur, the coffin may on no account be carried out throughthe gates; it must be lifted over or sometimes through a breach in the wall. Death must not pollute the greatentrance. At the end of the third trial, the first batch of those who have completed their essays is honored with the firing of guns, the bows of the officials, and the ministry of a band of music. Three weeks of anxious waiting will ensue before a huge crowd will assemble to see the list published. Then the successful candidates are the pride
of their country side, and well do the survivors of such an ordeal deserve their credit. The case of those who are in the last selection and are left degreeless, for the stern reason that some must be crowded out, is the hardest of all.
=======================
It seems the Philippine BAR imitates this Chinese civil exams...
COMPETITION, COMPETING
If there is ONE single personal problem I have - it's my being NON-COMPETITIVE...
I mentioned in a previous POST that I have WEAK WILL - MORE ACCURATELY, I am essentially a NON_COMPETITIVE INDIVIDUAL & this is the SINGLE BIG REASON for my not being successful in Life... In fact, I DISLIKE/HATE COMPETING (i.e. being COMPARED WITH OTHERS)... I have attained distinction in my studies & even received some "citations of distinction" even in CHESS but this was because I just did naturally what was needed to be done... But I did not give that added PUSH, I did not have that DESIRE to go over & above another fellow human characteristic of STRONG PERSONALITIES or COMPETITIVE INDIVIDUALS... This LACK OF INITIATIVE or "TIMIDITY" I believe is common among the "Philippine Islanders" & that s why they are POOR & MATERIALLY UNSUCCESSFUL... Maybe they have grown weary of CENTURIES of STRUGGLING [REMEMBER: The Nusantarans were the first in ASIA to collide with the WEST - SPAIN & PORTUGAL in the 15-16th Centuries & the DUTCH, ENGLAND, & AMERICA later...
We were fighting the de facto SUPERPOWERS ever since time immemorial!
REMEMBER: We fought SPAIN (SPAIN & PORTUGAL DIVIDED THE WORLD BETWEEN THEMSELVES THEN). WE FOUGHT AMERICA & IT WAS DURING THAT TIME (TURN OF 19th-20th CENTURY THAT MARKED THE RISE OF U.S.A. TO WORLD POWER STATUS...
TODAY's GLOBAL POWER PLAYERS SHOULD STUDY US (WE) IF THEY WANT TO LEARN SOME VALUABLE LESSONS...
Thursday, May 8, 2008
PLASTIC WATER
Friday, May 09
A cartoon clip on "WATER"
NANCY & SLUGGO CARTOON
I remember as a youngster I already read NANCY way back in the '60's (?)
THis version is actually not the original one. The original NANCY I think was
authored by Ernie BUSHmiller... The drawing style was different...
A cartoon clip on "WATER"
NANCY & SLUGGO CARTOONTHis version is actually not the original one. The original NANCY I think was
authored by Ernie BUSHmiller... The drawing style was different...
CHATUR END POST
May 09, 2008
@Home
CHESS CONT...
Chess is a mini-scale model of the battlefield/war situation
but some thinkers have gone as far as comparing it to Life itself
& they have good reasons. Not only does the one-on-one
confrontation between two adversaries/contending beings represent a
basic social relation between two persons but some finer points or
elements of the game itself have their corresponding items in Life/the World:
time (tempo), space (territory), hierarchy of roles/functions, etc
[People normally think that one should always be DOING SOMETHING...
Chess ZUGZWANG teachess us that there are occasions where NON-ACTION
is critical (NOT INaction... NONaction or SILENCE, NON-MOVEMENT, PAUSE...]
One cannot make "PASS" in Chess...
And in Life everybody is checkmated!
[Dr. Emanuel Lasker: "In LIfe, we are all duffers."]
Some chess writers speak about power, love, justice,
truth, etc in chess...
STRATEGY refers to general considerations, overall plans...
For ex.: Checkmating the King is the ultimate goal, the fundamental strategic objective
of the game.
100 Peso Question:
Can one become an excellent player, even a supergrandmaster, without
knowing how to checkmate with knight & bishop???
Can one be a good tactician & not even have any definite strategy when playing???
TACTICS refers to the more detailed execution of a plan or circumstances of the game
Example:
CAMPAIGN: KATIPUNAN VS. SPANISH FORCES
STRATEGY: CAPTURE MANILA
TACTICS: SKIRMISH IN TONDO, DIVERSIONARY AMBUSCADES IN NOVALICHES
BUT MAIN FORCE COMES VIA MORONG/SAN JUAN TO OVERRUN INTRAMUROS...
Strategy is about plans, Tactics is about action.
Strategy is brain work by generals, Tactics is bloody work by foot-soldiers.
Strategy is normally fixed, Tactics changes event from moment to moment
MY (JAMAAL'S) BASIC AXIOM/FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE IN WAR, BATTLE, COMPETITION, ETC
==========================================================
NO AMOUNT OF TACTICAL VICTORY CAN CORRECT A WRONG STRATEGY
==========================================================
In a sense one can win all the battles and lose the war!
PRECISELY what has been happening to the MUSLIMS ever since
World War I: THEY HAVE EITHER NO (NONE/NIL) OR THE WRONG STRATEGY!!!
I have not "made any money" from my "chess wisdom" but I really believe
that I could have been a GOOD chess coach or even teacher...
MY TWO REQUIRED TEXTBOOKS: NIMZOVICH's MY SYSTEM & FISCHERS'S MY 60 MEMORABLE GAMES
BUT to be READ only AFTER two years of intensive club chess-playing...
ALSO another ADVICE: LEARN FIRST to play RAPID chess...
ALL EXCELLENT CHESS MASTERS ARE FAST PLAYERS...
I am a NOTORIOUSLY SLOW PLAYER (HAR HAR!) & therefore NOT a GOOD player...
In fact, I DO NOT WANT TO MAKE A MOVE EVEN AS WHITE! HAR!
Kung may "PASS" nga sa chess eh mag-pa-PASS aku eh!!!
It's not so much due to proscrastination but more the symptom of INDECISIVENESS (miseducated on/by HAMLET Prince of Denmark??!!...)
A Mid-East friend told me once that I had WEAK WILL (= ABULIA)!
There's method in my madness:
My reasoning is: No Move=>No Action;No Action=>No Trouble;No Trouble=>NO KARMA!!!
-------
DIGRESS:[I lost my "positional sense" & "chess intuition" (skills or natural ability I slowly developed or accumulated thru reading & playing) when I got interested in yoga/meditation.
Before, whenever I looked at the chessboard, it looked "MEANINGful" - the men moved in my imagination. But after the thinking shift, all these "MEANING" vanished. The chessboard now looked barren/unmoving - ala existential desert scene or landscape!
It seems the shift to right brain/hemisphere thinking & one year of misguided vegetarianism
(no milk or lentils/beans for protein!) destroyed a big part of my brain cells.
Analytical & Sequential thinking - math (numerical calculation), chess, computer programming, logic are LEFT controlled whereas artistic imagination, space visualization (?) are RIGHT...
(This was the time when Korchnoi came to RP & played Karpov in Baguio(?). Korchnoi had an Ananda Marga mentor.)
Just like Arab ISLAAM, Indian HINDUISM available outside its place of origin apparently
is not really its genuine/true form- it's the watered-down or even WRONG version!!!]
ISLAAM, HINDUISM, BUDDHISM, JAINISM, SIKHISM, CONFUCIANISM, SHINTOISM, TAOISM, ETC
- all presented to the ignorant masses by their ENEMIES!!!
It's my fault: I first saw chess players as stationary/non-moving persons/apparently doing nothing & completely misinterpreted this scene & this misconception was deeply-imbedded in my memory! [Cf. GBShaw's negative comment on chess & chessplayers]
Anyway, to continue to what I could have been...
But, of course, how can one teach another how to master chess if one is not himself a chess master? Yet I believe I grasp the fundamental principles/techniques for training a child to make QUICK progress. Chess-playing ability is NOT the same as ability in teaching chess.
An academic political scientist is not necessarily a politician. Teaching involves different skills, aptitudes or talents... One may be a chess grandmaster & yet make a poor chess teacher.
And in school, I had countless "laude teachers" who were no-good at teaching!!!
Our collegiate chess group once had an avid newbie who was a BATIL/BAD player
& yet he was a highly-organized, methodical/systematic presenter &
very good at explaining things in graded steps so he was assigned to take a role as lecturer.
He knew much chess theory but he could not apply it in actual play.
In chess, it is not the ACQUISITION but the APPLICATION of theory/know-how/knowledge
that REALLY MATTERS. In the end it is ACTUAL PLAYING that decides.
Again, nevertheless, it is not simply just a question of winning.
If one asks: what makes a good chess player? then the answer is so simple: One who beats anybody and everybody is the CHESS CHAMP. Just like when Fischer was asked if he was
a chess genius & he replied that if he won against Spassky(?) then he was one.
Again things seem easy when said/talked about.
One may have beaten all opponents (100 persons) but if they are all PATZERS/BATILS...
One may have lost all 10 games one ever played. But if these are 40+ movers against the likes of
Morphy, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Tal & Fischer...!
So, it is not really true that it is only the end result that matters!
So chess, like Life, is not really THAT SIMPLE...
[In a sense, really good players are immensely PRACTICAL people.
I believe a REAL CHESS WIZARD will mate you in one-half move if ever there is such a possibility!]
CHESS & LIFE... One models the other... Which is which?
Chess is like Life... but Life is also like Chess:
Life is a GAME... PLAY it (-the EXISTENTIAL reply to THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION OF PHILO...)
... The most important thing in Life is not the triumph but the struggle...
It is not the travel destination but the trip/journey that is really the point...
LASTLY, as in Math & Music, there are chess "IDIOT SAVANTS"... (I do not admire these.)
Fischer's life's "endgame" pronouncements clearly show he was not one... At least I LEARNED this...
And that's why I "idolized" Dr. Emanuel Lasker - a mathematician, philosopher & world chess champion...
I doubt if there will be another one like him... He was a Jew... Was he a ZIONIST???...
Have so many many more chess IDEAS... BRILLIANT & stupid...
MAYBE shall create brief articles or a separate blog on my "chess wisdom"...
NEXT: EAST ASIAN/JAP GO (CHIN:WEICHI/KOR:BADUK) & NUSANTARAN G.G./GAME OF THE GENERALS(SALPAKAN)
INDO-ARYANS: CHESS
EAST ASIANS: GO
NUSANTARANS: SALPAKAN
TMNP [MR_ABULIA)
@Home
CHESS CONT...
Chess is a mini-scale model of the battlefield/war situation
but some thinkers have gone as far as comparing it to Life itself
& they have good reasons. Not only does the one-on-one
confrontation between two adversaries/contending beings represent a
basic social relation between two persons but some finer points or
elements of the game itself have their corresponding items in Life/the World:
time (tempo), space (territory), hierarchy of roles/functions, etc
[People normally think that one should always be DOING SOMETHING...
Chess ZUGZWANG teachess us that there are occasions where NON-ACTION
is critical (NOT INaction... NONaction or SILENCE, NON-MOVEMENT, PAUSE...]
One cannot make "PASS" in Chess...
And in Life everybody is checkmated!
[Dr. Emanuel Lasker: "In LIfe, we are all duffers."]
Some chess writers speak about power, love, justice,
truth, etc in chess...
STRATEGY refers to general considerations, overall plans...
For ex.: Checkmating the King is the ultimate goal, the fundamental strategic objective
of the game.
100 Peso Question:
Can one become an excellent player, even a supergrandmaster, without
knowing how to checkmate with knight & bishop???
Can one be a good tactician & not even have any definite strategy when playing???
TACTICS refers to the more detailed execution of a plan or circumstances of the game
Example:
CAMPAIGN: KATIPUNAN VS. SPANISH FORCES
STRATEGY: CAPTURE MANILA
TACTICS: SKIRMISH IN TONDO, DIVERSIONARY AMBUSCADES IN NOVALICHES
BUT MAIN FORCE COMES VIA MORONG/SAN JUAN TO OVERRUN INTRAMUROS...
Strategy is about plans, Tactics is about action.
Strategy is brain work by generals, Tactics is bloody work by foot-soldiers.
Strategy is normally fixed, Tactics changes event from moment to moment
MY (JAMAAL'S) BASIC AXIOM/FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE IN WAR, BATTLE, COMPETITION, ETC
==========================================================
NO AMOUNT OF TACTICAL VICTORY CAN CORRECT A WRONG STRATEGY
==========================================================
In a sense one can win all the battles and lose the war!
PRECISELY what has been happening to the MUSLIMS ever since
World War I: THEY HAVE EITHER NO (NONE/NIL) OR THE WRONG STRATEGY!!!
I have not "made any money" from my "chess wisdom" but I really believe
that I could have been a GOOD chess coach or even teacher...
MY TWO REQUIRED TEXTBOOKS: NIMZOVICH's MY SYSTEM & FISCHERS'S MY 60 MEMORABLE GAMES
BUT to be READ only AFTER two years of intensive club chess-playing...
ALSO another ADVICE: LEARN FIRST to play RAPID chess...
ALL EXCELLENT CHESS MASTERS ARE FAST PLAYERS...
I am a NOTORIOUSLY SLOW PLAYER (HAR HAR!) & therefore NOT a GOOD player...
In fact, I DO NOT WANT TO MAKE A MOVE EVEN AS WHITE! HAR!
Kung may "PASS" nga sa chess eh mag-pa-PASS aku eh!!!
It's not so much due to proscrastination but more the symptom of INDECISIVENESS (miseducated on/by HAMLET Prince of Denmark??!!...)
A Mid-East friend told me once that I had WEAK WILL (= ABULIA)!
There's method in my madness:
My reasoning is: No Move=>No Action;No Action=>No Trouble;No Trouble=>NO KARMA!!!
-------
DIGRESS:[I lost my "positional sense" & "chess intuition" (skills or natural ability I slowly developed or accumulated thru reading & playing) when I got interested in yoga/meditation.
Before, whenever I looked at the chessboard, it looked "MEANINGful" - the men moved in my imagination. But after the thinking shift, all these "MEANING" vanished. The chessboard now looked barren/unmoving - ala existential desert scene or landscape!
It seems the shift to right brain/hemisphere thinking & one year of misguided vegetarianism
(no milk or lentils/beans for protein!) destroyed a big part of my brain cells.
Analytical & Sequential thinking - math (numerical calculation), chess, computer programming, logic are LEFT controlled whereas artistic imagination, space visualization (?) are RIGHT...
(This was the time when Korchnoi came to RP & played Karpov in Baguio(?). Korchnoi had an Ananda Marga mentor.)
Just like Arab ISLAAM, Indian HINDUISM available outside its place of origin apparently
is not really its genuine/true form- it's the watered-down or even WRONG version!!!]
ISLAAM, HINDUISM, BUDDHISM, JAINISM, SIKHISM, CONFUCIANISM, SHINTOISM, TAOISM, ETC
- all presented to the ignorant masses by their ENEMIES!!!
It's my fault: I first saw chess players as stationary/non-moving persons/apparently doing nothing & completely misinterpreted this scene & this misconception was deeply-imbedded in my memory! [Cf. GBShaw's negative comment on chess & chessplayers]
Anyway, to continue to what I could have been...
But, of course, how can one teach another how to master chess if one is not himself a chess master? Yet I believe I grasp the fundamental principles/techniques for training a child to make QUICK progress. Chess-playing ability is NOT the same as ability in teaching chess.
An academic political scientist is not necessarily a politician. Teaching involves different skills, aptitudes or talents... One may be a chess grandmaster & yet make a poor chess teacher.
And in school, I had countless "laude teachers" who were no-good at teaching!!!
Our collegiate chess group once had an avid newbie who was a BATIL/BAD player
& yet he was a highly-organized, methodical/systematic presenter &
very good at explaining things in graded steps so he was assigned to take a role as lecturer.
He knew much chess theory but he could not apply it in actual play.
In chess, it is not the ACQUISITION but the APPLICATION of theory/know-how/knowledge
that REALLY MATTERS. In the end it is ACTUAL PLAYING that decides.
Again, nevertheless, it is not simply just a question of winning.
If one asks: what makes a good chess player? then the answer is so simple: One who beats anybody and everybody is the CHESS CHAMP. Just like when Fischer was asked if he was
a chess genius & he replied that if he won against Spassky(?) then he was one.
Again things seem easy when said/talked about.
One may have beaten all opponents (100 persons) but if they are all PATZERS/BATILS...
One may have lost all 10 games one ever played. But if these are 40+ movers against the likes of
Morphy, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Tal & Fischer...!
So, it is not really true that it is only the end result that matters!
So chess, like Life, is not really THAT SIMPLE...
[In a sense, really good players are immensely PRACTICAL people.
I believe a REAL CHESS WIZARD will mate you in one-half move if ever there is such a possibility!]
CHESS & LIFE... One models the other... Which is which?
Chess is like Life... but Life is also like Chess:
Life is a GAME... PLAY it (-the EXISTENTIAL reply to THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION OF PHILO...)
... The most important thing in Life is not the triumph but the struggle...
It is not the travel destination but the trip/journey that is really the point...
LASTLY, as in Math & Music, there are chess "IDIOT SAVANTS"... (I do not admire these.)
Fischer's life's "endgame" pronouncements clearly show he was not one... At least I LEARNED this...
And that's why I "idolized" Dr. Emanuel Lasker - a mathematician, philosopher & world chess champion...
I doubt if there will be another one like him... He was a Jew... Was he a ZIONIST???...
Have so many many more chess IDEAS... BRILLIANT & stupid...
MAYBE shall create brief articles or a separate blog on my "chess wisdom"...
NEXT: EAST ASIAN/JAP GO (CHIN:WEICHI/KOR:BADUK) & NUSANTARAN G.G./GAME OF THE GENERALS(SALPAKAN)
INDO-ARYANS: CHESS
EAST ASIANS: GO
NUSANTARANS: SALPAKAN
TMNP [MR_ABULIA)
Saturday, May 3, 2008
CHATUR
SUNDAY, MAY 04, 2008
@HOME
=====
CHESS
=====
First of all, to make things clear & final, let me state this saw,
which is understood by all chess players, masters & amateurs alike:
"I like chess, but chess does not like me." HAR!
I do not have an iota of talent for the game.
Nevertheless I have achieved something - I earned a chess gold medal
for playing well at last board (HAR!) in inter-university
collegiate team competition. I was a former varsity player for our school team.
My playing strength oscillates from 1800-2100 (CLUB PLAYER)
I have beaten a national master in blitz (He gave me 5-2 partida!) &
in real slow game a master cannot guarantee quick victory since I can be MAKUNAT
just as I will give any grandmaster difficulty at 5-1 BLITZ... MAY TIRA DIN AKU...
Most importantly, I have accumulated CHESS WISDOM - something even its masters do not necessarily have...
In reality, I personally do not possess or I LACK the FIRST & FOREMOST
requirement for chess-playing or requisite quality/identifying mark of good chessplayers:
STRONG WILL(POWER) - I'm the NERVOSO type!
Many people tend to associate chess-playing with thinking/the brain/
"mental"/intelligence. But in reality it is more of a warrior game - game of the NERVES/HEART or EGGS.
It is the game par excellence for fighters or mind warriors or mental gladiators.
It requires FIRST & FOREMOST STRONG EGGS/BALLS/NERVES, the COMPETITIVE URGE the WILL TO CONTEND & WIN & the DESIRE TO CRUSH ONE's OPPONENT/RIVAL
[When I was younger I even felt pity for a losing opponent & allowed him to equalize HAR!]
I assure the unfamiliar reader, chess-players are HEARTLESS individuals
The better player, the more merciless. Of course, this does not mean chessmasters are unloving/uncaring individuals... But over the chessboard, they will checkmate even their own special loved ones! Indeed chessplayers have BIG EGOs & TREMENDOUS SELF-CONFIDENCE or BILIB SA SARILI...
Fischer claimed daw he would checkmate even his own mother!!!
I would say a person with ordinary memory can excel at the game if he/she has that "KILLER-INSTINCT"
I would say the correct basic formula is CHESS ABILITY = 50% WILL + 50% MEMORY
Chess-playing is not really different from fighting a war, legal wrangling, transacting trade,
courting a girl, closing a business deal, passing a job interview etc etc
CHESS, LIKE LIFE, IS A STRUGGLE...
CHESS AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL
I truly believe CHESS is a n EXCELLENT TOOL of EDUCATION
for CHESS IS THE BEST MEANS TO EXPOSE ONE's WEAKNESSES.
You may not LEARN anything directly from it but playing it competitively will expose your weaknesses:
Laziness, procrastination, inaction/indecision, lack of energy/initiative, weak will,
stupidity as in unthinking/nonreflection, etc
& CHESS inculcates thinking/foresight, self-discipline, self-control, concentration, patience, etc...
CHESS IS MORE THAN JUST A GAME.
It's surprising but chess is more than just a boardgame, it is a lot more...
It has a complex & colorful history & is associated with important human events & famous personalities.
In fact, I believe it even has an occult/mystical aspect.
For example the Kalmykian & FIDE (?) world chess federation President Irsan Ilyuzhinov claims
it originated from outer space, maybe from extra-terrestials!
I believe that whenever a chessboard is open especially with two players present
"spirits" hover over them, maybe the spirits of FIGHTING/STRIFE...
NOTE TO GHOST-HUNTERS: Try bringing along a chessboard & set it up in your contact session. I'm quite sure you'll attract unseen forces - unruly as in contentious types o terrifying nga lang!
Before the Fischer-Spassky world match which popularized chess
my aunt's Olongapo curio shop already carried expensive kamagong chess sets but
my brother who was studying in St. Louis Baguio (the cool climate
was good for his asthma) brought home one summer vacation an inexpensive medium-sized
wooden set & Fine's Chess the Easy Way & I learned the moves.
But we, my sister & I were "PIKON" & normally ended up overturning the board & hurling the pieces. One of of our normal childhood antics was to make GULO/ruffle each other's damitan when quarreling
So, the chess pieces ended up with a broken bishop or ear/nose-less knight.
We were too stupid & immature to understand & learn the ART of bloodless fighting...
[I believe BUSH & MCCAIN do not know/play chess 'coz if they did
they would not have gone to VIETNAM & IRAQ to kill people...]
CHESS is precisely the highest & finest development of human warfare/battle/combat...
Just as MONOPOLY or some other game would be the businessman's game, chess is the warrior's game.
CHESS has also been refered to as the philosopher's game or the royal game.
CHESS was developed in ancient times as a model of the actualities of the battlefield or fighting arena
It is an Indo-European/Aryan game that originated in Old India.
It was known then as CHATURANGA & had different form & rules. It evolved thru time
& moved out to PERSIA (as SHAHTRANG). Muslim Arabs brought it as SHATRANJ Westward & it even reached MUSLIM SPAIN. [The CRUSADERS learned it from their ARAB foes & it became "CHRISTIANIZED" - KING with CROSS, the ELEPHANT for example, became the BISHOP with its "NOTCHED-SMILE" representing the BISHOP/POPE's MITER (originally a pagan head-gear symbolic of the fish-deity DAGON.]
[By the way, one of the former world junior champions & a friend
of Bobby Fischer was the GM REVEREND FATHER William Lombardy, a Catholic priest.]
I always heard an old pthisical chess club habitue refer to the bishop as ALFIL.
Later, I understood the term when I saw in the QUR'AN the SURAT UL FIL (VERSE OF THE ELEPHANT)
MUSLIMS NOTE: Muslims learned chess first before Christians. Salahuddin Al Ayyubi (SALADIN) liked the game. But now Muslims are at the bottom of chess competitions if at all they are represented/present.
JEWS had several world champions... Steinitz. Lasker, Fischer, Kasparov
One of the better MUSLIM leaders of the past, the Baghdad Caliph(?) HARUN AL RASHID
had his own chess "stable" - he took care of & supported professional chess players.
Chess was a favorite game of the Knights Templars. Jews - ZIONists or otherwise consider it
as the JEWISH national pastime. Rich Jewish businessmen-patrons of chess included PIATAGORSKY, the ROTSCHILDS... In this archipelago, a Spaniard (or Mestizo?) spy for the Katipunan, Fernando Canon was among the first "masters" in this country.
Canon even played daw in an international tourney in Barcelona, Spain.
Rizal had his own ivory chess set & even won a tourney in Germany(?)
World-champion Alekhine visited Manila in the 1930's.
THe first ASIAN IM? (Cardoso?) was from this country & so was the 1st ASIAN GM (Torre).
SuperGM Anand learned CHESS here.
A strong Mindanawan Muslim player once told me he believed chess pieces corresponded to exact locations in the battlefield - that in the past there really were foot-soldiers, knights & other men in formation in the field. It seems war theorists realized the stupidity & futility of killing humans & just modelled fighting... So chess was born...
M'ranaw culture includes chess (chaturan?) so much so that the chess term "shahmat"
had entered their communication/language... Ask genuine M'ranaws about the word...
Chess came to this archipelago thru two routes - via the Espanoles & via the Moros...
HOW I GOT BITTEN BY THE CHESS BUG
One semester/breaktime before sophomore year (1973?) I returned to Olongapo from Manila for a brief vacation. I visited my grade school & my former classmates who were now also high-schoolers. I was invited to join their beach party. At the beach, I was told proudly by the crowd that an old classmate, an Ilocano-Pangasinense was their school chess champion. He was not a special student (I was the VALEDICTORIAN) but he was a "silent" type. I remember in 6th Grade, he was fond of relating stories about German Nazi movies & he imitated the German lingo "Achtung Achtung ANEYN DI ESPELETAYN KEPA BORDON"! - He also saw the same B&W film with a train & wailing sirens...
Also I got this joke-puzzle from him:
What sign was an illiterate man reading when he uttered "ISE KRE AM POR SA LE?" (Ans: Ice Cream For Sale) He wanted to play with me but I declined since I was not really fond of playing chess. Later after noon/lunch, the two "class sweethearts" B & S were encouraged to play against each other. I watched them play & noticed that the girl was cute/attractive... I kept stealing a glance at her pretty face... To my COMPLETE SURPRISE, the game ended not too long with the girl beating the boy!!! I was DUMBFOUNDED!
It never occurred to me or I never imagined that a male could be beaten by the weaker sex in any game or competition. THAT WAS REALLY SOMETHING NEW, AN EYE-OPENER FOR ME. Suddenly I became interested in CHESS. It offered something I was ignorant of or did not know anything about. It was a "fair" (as in "JUST" as in justice) affair!
I remember very well, the girl, SMF, went home early & was fetched by her family car, a TOYOTA sedan... I watched with "sad longing" her departure... I don't know if as a budding young MAN (developing glands!) I had fallen in love with the smart CHINITA girl or with CHESS... & mixed up the two... That is, my pubescent crush-@-1st-sight on her became associated with the game of CHESS & my fascination shifted to the game... That fascination "never cooled" I wonder if there is a psychological principle that can explain this possible transference/shift...
But from that moment on I was "possessed" by the CHESS FEVER...
THE FASCINATION WITH CHESS stayed with me until I graduated from secondary school (ADEMU) & entered college (UPD). I began to devour anything & everything I saw about CHESS - books, magazines, pictures, etc. I borrowed all the chess books in our high school library:
Znosko-Borovsky's Art of Combination, New York 1924, Botvinnik, etc.
Even bought NBS Reinfeld How to Win Chess Games Quickly (BUT COULD NOT DO IT! HAR!)
I read the articles in the Philippine Panorama(?) magazine, solved puzzles of Bulletin Today...
I imbibed myself with chess trivia. Memorized faces, names of chess personalities & openings...
But note that I did not really play chess competitively... I was just obsessed with CHESS as an object of interest in/of/with its own intrinsic nature... even minus the human factor...
Of course I was also awed by the "masters"... Anything CHECKERED always caught my eye/attention... I was hypnotized everytime I saw checkered patterns of floor/bathroom tiles, bedcovers/tablecloth, etc...
In 4th year HS I joined the chess club & began to PLAY...
CHESS always held a special place in my mind...
It was about the/this (same) time that MATH also caught my ATTENTION (Via GEOMETRY)... I need mention that I was also learning MUSIC (piano-playiing)... CHESS, MUSIC, MATH...
TO BE CONTINUED
@HOME
=====
CHESS
=====
First of all, to make things clear & final, let me state this saw,
which is understood by all chess players, masters & amateurs alike:
"I like chess, but chess does not like me." HAR!
I do not have an iota of talent for the game.
Nevertheless I have achieved something - I earned a chess gold medal
for playing well at last board (HAR!) in inter-university
collegiate team competition. I was a former varsity player for our school team.
My playing strength oscillates from 1800-2100 (CLUB PLAYER)
I have beaten a national master in blitz (He gave me 5-2 partida!) &
in real slow game a master cannot guarantee quick victory since I can be MAKUNAT
just as I will give any grandmaster difficulty at 5-1 BLITZ... MAY TIRA DIN AKU...
Most importantly, I have accumulated CHESS WISDOM - something even its masters do not necessarily have...
In reality, I personally do not possess or I LACK the FIRST & FOREMOST
requirement for chess-playing or requisite quality/identifying mark of good chessplayers:
STRONG WILL(POWER) - I'm the NERVOSO type!
Many people tend to associate chess-playing with thinking/the brain/
"mental"/intelligence. But in reality it is more of a warrior game - game of the NERVES/HEART or EGGS.
It is the game par excellence for fighters or mind warriors or mental gladiators.
It requires FIRST & FOREMOST STRONG EGGS/BALLS/NERVES, the COMPETITIVE URGE the WILL TO CONTEND & WIN & the DESIRE TO CRUSH ONE's OPPONENT/RIVAL
[When I was younger I even felt pity for a losing opponent & allowed him to equalize HAR!]
I assure the unfamiliar reader, chess-players are HEARTLESS individuals
The better player, the more merciless. Of course, this does not mean chessmasters are unloving/uncaring individuals... But over the chessboard, they will checkmate even their own special loved ones! Indeed chessplayers have BIG EGOs & TREMENDOUS SELF-CONFIDENCE or BILIB SA SARILI...
Fischer claimed daw he would checkmate even his own mother!!!
I would say a person with ordinary memory can excel at the game if he/she has that "KILLER-INSTINCT"
I would say the correct basic formula is CHESS ABILITY = 50% WILL + 50% MEMORY
Chess-playing is not really different from fighting a war, legal wrangling, transacting trade,
courting a girl, closing a business deal, passing a job interview etc etc
CHESS, LIKE LIFE, IS A STRUGGLE...
CHESS AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL
I truly believe CHESS is a n EXCELLENT TOOL of EDUCATION
for CHESS IS THE BEST MEANS TO EXPOSE ONE's WEAKNESSES.
You may not LEARN anything directly from it but playing it competitively will expose your weaknesses:
Laziness, procrastination, inaction/indecision, lack of energy/initiative, weak will,
stupidity as in unthinking/nonreflection, etc
& CHESS inculcates thinking/foresight, self-discipline, self-control, concentration, patience, etc...
CHESS IS MORE THAN JUST A GAME.
It's surprising but chess is more than just a boardgame, it is a lot more...
It has a complex & colorful history & is associated with important human events & famous personalities.
In fact, I believe it even has an occult/mystical aspect.
For example the Kalmykian & FIDE (?) world chess federation President Irsan Ilyuzhinov claims
it originated from outer space, maybe from extra-terrestials!
I believe that whenever a chessboard is open especially with two players present
"spirits" hover over them, maybe the spirits of FIGHTING/STRIFE...
NOTE TO GHOST-HUNTERS: Try bringing along a chessboard & set it up in your contact session. I'm quite sure you'll attract unseen forces - unruly as in contentious types o terrifying nga lang!
Before the Fischer-Spassky world match which popularized chess
my aunt's Olongapo curio shop already carried expensive kamagong chess sets but
my brother who was studying in St. Louis Baguio (the cool climate
was good for his asthma) brought home one summer vacation an inexpensive medium-sized
wooden set & Fine's Chess the Easy Way & I learned the moves.
But we, my sister & I were "PIKON" & normally ended up overturning the board & hurling the pieces. One of of our normal childhood antics was to make GULO/ruffle each other's damitan when quarreling
So, the chess pieces ended up with a broken bishop or ear/nose-less knight.
We were too stupid & immature to understand & learn the ART of bloodless fighting...
[I believe BUSH & MCCAIN do not know/play chess 'coz if they did
they would not have gone to VIETNAM & IRAQ to kill people...]
CHESS is precisely the highest & finest development of human warfare/battle/combat...
Just as MONOPOLY or some other game would be the businessman's game, chess is the warrior's game.
CHESS has also been refered to as the philosopher's game or the royal game.
CHESS was developed in ancient times as a model of the actualities of the battlefield or fighting arena
It is an Indo-European/Aryan game that originated in Old India.
It was known then as CHATURANGA & had different form & rules. It evolved thru time
& moved out to PERSIA (as SHAHTRANG). Muslim Arabs brought it as SHATRANJ Westward & it even reached MUSLIM SPAIN. [The CRUSADERS learned it from their ARAB foes & it became "CHRISTIANIZED" - KING with CROSS, the ELEPHANT for example, became the BISHOP with its "NOTCHED-SMILE" representing the BISHOP/POPE's MITER (originally a pagan head-gear symbolic of the fish-deity DAGON.]
[By the way, one of the former world junior champions & a friend
of Bobby Fischer was the GM REVEREND FATHER William Lombardy, a Catholic priest.]
I always heard an old pthisical chess club habitue refer to the bishop as ALFIL.
Later, I understood the term when I saw in the QUR'AN the SURAT UL FIL (VERSE OF THE ELEPHANT)
MUSLIMS NOTE: Muslims learned chess first before Christians. Salahuddin Al Ayyubi (SALADIN) liked the game. But now Muslims are at the bottom of chess competitions if at all they are represented/present.
JEWS had several world champions... Steinitz. Lasker, Fischer, Kasparov
One of the better MUSLIM leaders of the past, the Baghdad Caliph(?) HARUN AL RASHID
had his own chess "stable" - he took care of & supported professional chess players.
Chess was a favorite game of the Knights Templars. Jews - ZIONists or otherwise consider it
as the JEWISH national pastime. Rich Jewish businessmen-patrons of chess included PIATAGORSKY, the ROTSCHILDS... In this archipelago, a Spaniard (or Mestizo?) spy for the Katipunan, Fernando Canon was among the first "masters" in this country.
Canon even played daw in an international tourney in Barcelona, Spain.
Rizal had his own ivory chess set & even won a tourney in Germany(?)
World-champion Alekhine visited Manila in the 1930's.
THe first ASIAN IM? (Cardoso?) was from this country & so was the 1st ASIAN GM (Torre).
SuperGM Anand learned CHESS here.
A strong Mindanawan Muslim player once told me he believed chess pieces corresponded to exact locations in the battlefield - that in the past there really were foot-soldiers, knights & other men in formation in the field. It seems war theorists realized the stupidity & futility of killing humans & just modelled fighting... So chess was born...
M'ranaw culture includes chess (chaturan?) so much so that the chess term "shahmat"
had entered their communication/language... Ask genuine M'ranaws about the word...
Chess came to this archipelago thru two routes - via the Espanoles & via the Moros...
HOW I GOT BITTEN BY THE CHESS BUG
One semester/breaktime before sophomore year (1973?) I returned to Olongapo from Manila for a brief vacation. I visited my grade school & my former classmates who were now also high-schoolers. I was invited to join their beach party. At the beach, I was told proudly by the crowd that an old classmate, an Ilocano-Pangasinense was their school chess champion. He was not a special student (I was the VALEDICTORIAN) but he was a "silent" type. I remember in 6th Grade, he was fond of relating stories about German Nazi movies & he imitated the German lingo "Achtung Achtung ANEYN DI ESPELETAYN KEPA BORDON"! - He also saw the same B&W film with a train & wailing sirens...
Also I got this joke-puzzle from him:
What sign was an illiterate man reading when he uttered "ISE KRE AM POR SA LE?" (Ans: Ice Cream For Sale) He wanted to play with me but I declined since I was not really fond of playing chess. Later after noon/lunch, the two "class sweethearts" B & S were encouraged to play against each other. I watched them play & noticed that the girl was cute/attractive... I kept stealing a glance at her pretty face... To my COMPLETE SURPRISE, the game ended not too long with the girl beating the boy!!! I was DUMBFOUNDED!
It never occurred to me or I never imagined that a male could be beaten by the weaker sex in any game or competition. THAT WAS REALLY SOMETHING NEW, AN EYE-OPENER FOR ME. Suddenly I became interested in CHESS. It offered something I was ignorant of or did not know anything about. It was a "fair" (as in "JUST" as in justice) affair!
I remember very well, the girl, SMF, went home early & was fetched by her family car, a TOYOTA sedan... I watched with "sad longing" her departure... I don't know if as a budding young MAN (developing glands!) I had fallen in love with the smart CHINITA girl or with CHESS... & mixed up the two... That is, my pubescent crush-@-1st-sight on her became associated with the game of CHESS & my fascination shifted to the game... That fascination "never cooled" I wonder if there is a psychological principle that can explain this possible transference/shift...
But from that moment on I was "possessed" by the CHESS FEVER...
THE FASCINATION WITH CHESS stayed with me until I graduated from secondary school (ADEMU) & entered college (UPD). I began to devour anything & everything I saw about CHESS - books, magazines, pictures, etc. I borrowed all the chess books in our high school library:
Znosko-Borovsky's Art of Combination, New York 1924, Botvinnik, etc.
Even bought NBS Reinfeld How to Win Chess Games Quickly (BUT COULD NOT DO IT! HAR!)
I read the articles in the Philippine Panorama(?) magazine, solved puzzles of Bulletin Today...
I imbibed myself with chess trivia. Memorized faces, names of chess personalities & openings...
But note that I did not really play chess competitively... I was just obsessed with CHESS as an object of interest in/of/with its own intrinsic nature... even minus the human factor...
Of course I was also awed by the "masters"... Anything CHECKERED always caught my eye/attention... I was hypnotized everytime I saw checkered patterns of floor/bathroom tiles, bedcovers/tablecloth, etc...
In 4th year HS I joined the chess club & began to PLAY...
CHESS always held a special place in my mind...
It was about the/this (same) time that MATH also caught my ATTENTION (Via GEOMETRY)... I need mention that I was also learning MUSIC (piano-playiing)... CHESS, MUSIC, MATH...
TO BE CONTINUED
Thursday, May 1, 2008
MAY 02, 2008
MAY 02, 2008
@Home
WHAT IS THE REAL REASON WHY LABOR DAY IS CELEBRATED ON MAY 1??? [A CONSPIRATORIAL QUESTION]
So many things have transpired in global affairs since I paused blogging/posting a few months ago...
NOW SUDDENLY the world is going HUNGRY... AS IF this PROBLEM is NEW...
Other commodity/product conspiracy groups (not just OIL CARTEL) have decided
that they also want to HAVE A SAY in WORLD AFFAIRS... (Better late then never)
I wonder when they will raise the price of WATER (NOT the PLASTIC BOTTLE)!!!
I heard in one TV item that only 3% of WORLD H20 is FRESH H20
& of this only 1% is REALLY DRINKABLE, the other 1% is UNDERGROUND/INACCESSIBLE
& the last 1% IS BEING POLLUTED BY HUMANS...
I WONDER how they GET such PERCENTAGES & DATA...
FOR ME WHAT I KNOW IS THAT THERE IS MORE THAN ENOUGH H20 TO DROWN ALL NON-AQUATIC ANIMALS & THAT SCIENCE HAS FOUND EFFICIENT WAYS TO PRODUCE FRESH H20 FROM SALTY SEA H20 (e.g. NUCLEAR DESALINATION & REVERSE OSMOSIS)
I truly believe this WORLD had REALLY TURNED FOR THE WORSE ever since they started SELLING H20...
When BOTTLED H20 began to appear here in Manila years back, my first impression was that I FELT INSULTED...
Whenever I saw H20 vendors in the bus, the thought would come to my mind
or I felt the urge to tell them: "I'll buy your product even at TWICE the
price IF you'll tell me you're selling me PLASTIC BOTTLE & NOT WATER!!!"
I felt they should call out loud or say "BOTE BOTE BOTE NG PLASTIC" & NOT "TUBIG"
In my younger days, one only needed to ask politely & one would be given FREE even a whole gallon of ice-cold, clean drinking H20 in GLASS TUMBLER here in these islands - islands almost swallowed by the ocean...
BOTTLED AIR is NOT NEW - I saw an item about it in connection with JAPAN'S allegedly POLLUTED AIR...
I wonder when THEY will COMMERCIALIZE BOTTLED AIR for ordinary breathing...
ONCE I thought of having a special printed T-SHIRT which says,
"IF YOU'RE INTELLIGENT THEN WHY ARE YOU BUYING WATER?"
[THERE IS MASS STUPIDITY. THERE IS NO MASS INTELLIGENCE]
ZIMBABWE
Two black men Tsvangirai & Mugabe fighting - Their real bosses/handlers are white men?
Zimbabwe BALLOT BOXES are used here as SAGO/GULAMAN containers HAR!!!
MEDIA
News says TURKEY says ISRAEL ready to talk peace with SYRIA
Also, EGYPT says ISRAEL ready to peace talk with HAMAS
BOTH items give the idea that TURKEY & EGYPT are speaking for/in behalf of ISRAEL!
Since WHEN did these two MUSLIM countries become ZIONISTS?!
[MY ANSWER: SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL WHEN THEY CREATED THESE NATION-STATES...
THOSE WHO CREATED "ISRAEL" ARE PRECISELY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO CREATED "TURKEY" & "EGYPT"!!!
TWO IMPORTANT ALJAZEERA FEATURES: KHALIFA & KIRSAN ILYUZHIMOV
3 Q's about KHALIFA: Was he killed because
1) he was raising funds for AL-QAEDA,
2) he turned against AL-QAEDA (his alleged taped voice says BINLADIN was infected with VIRUS)
3) of his SAPPHIRE mine (A certain "Olivier" or his gang?...)
WHICH is REALLY IMPORTANT: KHALIFA's SAPPHIRE MINE(MONEY) OR his LAPTOP COMPUTER(INTELL INFO)???
ILYUZHIMOV of KALMYKA (MONGOL HORDE DESCENDANTS) is a CENTRAL ASIAN BUDDHIST CAPITALIST CHESS BUFF
who claims E.T.'s/U.F.O. once kidnapped him! It seems we have the same INTERESTS: CHESS, E.T...
I ADVISE INFLUENTIAL MUSLIMS: SEND some representatives to his country to learn CHESS...
IRAN drops U.S. DOLLAR & blasts HILLARY CLINTON
I NOTICED both BUSH & HILLARY wearing MY fave color GREEN...
Just like the necktie of that DUTCH lawmaker(?)...
BUT FOR ME GREEN MEANS ISLAAM's PARADISE...
I'M QUITE SURE THEIR GREEN IS GREEN BUCK (DOLLAR) HAR HAR!!!
I LOVE PARADISE I HATE MONEY...
VATICAN POPE blesses NY WTC "GROUND ZERO"
WHY YEARS LATE??? (MORE THAN HALF A DECADE!!!)
"JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED" (Better never than late)
It appears that the Catholic Pope is "riding only" on the issue...
WHY DID HE ALLOW HIMSELF TO BE SEEN WITH BUSH AFTER ALL THESE EVENTS HAVE HAPPENED (IRAQ WAR, ETC.)?
ANYBODY WHO ALLOWS HIM/HERSELF TO BE SEEN WITH BUSH IN A HIGH-PROFILE AFFAIR IS HIS FRIEND & ALLY
SINCE BUSH IS ALREADY ABOUT TO MAKE AN EXIT... ONE SHOULD FEEL EXTREMELY EMBARRASSED TO BE SEEN WITH HIM!
TIBET & CHINA
I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE ISSUE BUT I CAN ONLY CONTRIBUTE THE FOLLOWING "LIMERICK?"
[Actually as a child I remember seeing in the maps TIBET as a distinct/separate NATION-STATE... Now there's no more U.S.S.R....
Why is there a unified GERMANY, a unified VIETNAM, a unified YEMEN, but NOT a unified KOREA?...
==========
OGDEN NASH
==========
THE ONE-L LAMA
HE's A PRIEST
THE TWO-L LLAMA
HE'S A BEAST
AND I WILL BET
MY SILK PYJAMA
THAT THERE'S NO
THREE-L LLLAMA
MY CORRECTION TO NASH:
NOW THERE IS,
Now there is a three-L LLLAMA
It's a SPECIES OF CHOROPS!!!
@Home
WHAT IS THE REAL REASON WHY LABOR DAY IS CELEBRATED ON MAY 1??? [A CONSPIRATORIAL QUESTION]
So many things have transpired in global affairs since I paused blogging/posting a few months ago...
NOW SUDDENLY the world is going HUNGRY... AS IF this PROBLEM is NEW...
Other commodity/product conspiracy groups (not just OIL CARTEL) have decided
that they also want to HAVE A SAY in WORLD AFFAIRS... (Better late then never)
I wonder when they will raise the price of WATER (NOT the PLASTIC BOTTLE)!!!
I heard in one TV item that only 3% of WORLD H20 is FRESH H20
& of this only 1% is REALLY DRINKABLE, the other 1% is UNDERGROUND/INACCESSIBLE
& the last 1% IS BEING POLLUTED BY HUMANS...
I WONDER how they GET such PERCENTAGES & DATA...
FOR ME WHAT I KNOW IS THAT THERE IS MORE THAN ENOUGH H20 TO DROWN ALL NON-AQUATIC ANIMALS & THAT SCIENCE HAS FOUND EFFICIENT WAYS TO PRODUCE FRESH H20 FROM SALTY SEA H20 (e.g. NUCLEAR DESALINATION & REVERSE OSMOSIS)
I truly believe this WORLD had REALLY TURNED FOR THE WORSE ever since they started SELLING H20...
When BOTTLED H20 began to appear here in Manila years back, my first impression was that I FELT INSULTED...
Whenever I saw H20 vendors in the bus, the thought would come to my mind
or I felt the urge to tell them: "I'll buy your product even at TWICE the
price IF you'll tell me you're selling me PLASTIC BOTTLE & NOT WATER!!!"
I felt they should call out loud or say "BOTE BOTE BOTE NG PLASTIC" & NOT "TUBIG"
In my younger days, one only needed to ask politely & one would be given FREE even a whole gallon of ice-cold, clean drinking H20 in GLASS TUMBLER here in these islands - islands almost swallowed by the ocean...
BOTTLED AIR is NOT NEW - I saw an item about it in connection with JAPAN'S allegedly POLLUTED AIR...
I wonder when THEY will COMMERCIALIZE BOTTLED AIR for ordinary breathing...
ONCE I thought of having a special printed T-SHIRT which says,
"IF YOU'RE INTELLIGENT THEN WHY ARE YOU BUYING WATER?"
[THERE IS MASS STUPIDITY. THERE IS NO MASS INTELLIGENCE]
ZIMBABWE
Two black men Tsvangirai & Mugabe fighting - Their real bosses/handlers are white men?
Zimbabwe BALLOT BOXES are used here as SAGO/GULAMAN containers HAR!!!
MEDIA
News says TURKEY says ISRAEL ready to talk peace with SYRIA
Also, EGYPT says ISRAEL ready to peace talk with HAMAS
BOTH items give the idea that TURKEY & EGYPT are speaking for/in behalf of ISRAEL!
Since WHEN did these two MUSLIM countries become ZIONISTS?!
[MY ANSWER: SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL WHEN THEY CREATED THESE NATION-STATES...
THOSE WHO CREATED "ISRAEL" ARE PRECISELY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO CREATED "TURKEY" & "EGYPT"!!!
TWO IMPORTANT ALJAZEERA FEATURES: KHALIFA & KIRSAN ILYUZHIMOV
3 Q's about KHALIFA: Was he killed because
1) he was raising funds for AL-QAEDA,
2) he turned against AL-QAEDA (his alleged taped voice says BINLADIN was infected with VIRUS)
3) of his SAPPHIRE mine (A certain "Olivier" or his gang?...)
WHICH is REALLY IMPORTANT: KHALIFA's SAPPHIRE MINE(MONEY) OR his LAPTOP COMPUTER(INTELL INFO)???
ILYUZHIMOV of KALMYKA (MONGOL HORDE DESCENDANTS) is a CENTRAL ASIAN BUDDHIST CAPITALIST CHESS BUFF
who claims E.T.'s/U.F.O. once kidnapped him! It seems we have the same INTERESTS: CHESS, E.T...
I ADVISE INFLUENTIAL MUSLIMS: SEND some representatives to his country to learn CHESS...
IRAN drops U.S. DOLLAR & blasts HILLARY CLINTON
I NOTICED both BUSH & HILLARY wearing MY fave color GREEN...
Just like the necktie of that DUTCH lawmaker(?)...
BUT FOR ME GREEN MEANS ISLAAM's PARADISE...
I'M QUITE SURE THEIR GREEN IS GREEN BUCK (DOLLAR) HAR HAR!!!
I LOVE PARADISE I HATE MONEY...
VATICAN POPE blesses NY WTC "GROUND ZERO"
WHY YEARS LATE??? (MORE THAN HALF A DECADE!!!)
"JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED" (Better never than late)
It appears that the Catholic Pope is "riding only" on the issue...
WHY DID HE ALLOW HIMSELF TO BE SEEN WITH BUSH AFTER ALL THESE EVENTS HAVE HAPPENED (IRAQ WAR, ETC.)?
ANYBODY WHO ALLOWS HIM/HERSELF TO BE SEEN WITH BUSH IN A HIGH-PROFILE AFFAIR IS HIS FRIEND & ALLY
SINCE BUSH IS ALREADY ABOUT TO MAKE AN EXIT... ONE SHOULD FEEL EXTREMELY EMBARRASSED TO BE SEEN WITH HIM!
TIBET & CHINA
I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE ISSUE BUT I CAN ONLY CONTRIBUTE THE FOLLOWING "LIMERICK?"
[Actually as a child I remember seeing in the maps TIBET as a distinct/separate NATION-STATE... Now there's no more U.S.S.R....
Why is there a unified GERMANY, a unified VIETNAM, a unified YEMEN, but NOT a unified KOREA?...
==========
OGDEN NASH
==========
THE ONE-L LAMA
HE's A PRIEST
THE TWO-L LLAMA
HE'S A BEAST
AND I WILL BET
MY SILK PYJAMA
THAT THERE'S NO
THREE-L LLLAMA
MY CORRECTION TO NASH:
NOW THERE IS,
Now there is a three-L LLLAMA
It's a SPECIES OF CHOROPS!!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)