Thursday, October 10, 2013

(276) The cute stalemate resultant from a queen sacrifice in an ending

V
During a tournament in Roquetas de Mar in January 2013 I spotted an unusual possible stalemate saving resource in an ending for my opponent, Azerbaijani Grandmaster Mirzoev.
I had this position as White -


Endgame study enthusiast, Fide Master Paul Lamford, said he found the stalemate idea cute. It was new to him, even with his experience and expertise in the specific area of chess.


Play continued 62...c3 A critical alternative was 62...Re8+ when white can reach a won queen ending after 63 Ke4 Kxe4+ 64 Kxe4 c3 65 axb4+ Kd6 66 g7 axb2 68 g8=Q b1=Q
69 Qd8+ and the a pawn drops off.
Note in this line white should avoid the smartarse trick of an x-ray check after 65... Kxb4 66 g7?? since after 66...cxb2 67 g8=Q b1=Q 68 Qb8+ black has the dastardly resource of 68...Ka3! 69 Qxb1 and stalemate!


Instead, of course, 66 bxc3+ wins easily.


Well, at a Rapids event in Carboneras in August 2013 I had this position as White vs Jose Comacho Collados, an International Master rated 2318 -

Instead of resigning some moves earlier I had been holding out for the trick I had only learned of in January and which now materialised -
1...Qc7?? 2 b8=(Q) Qxb8 
Stalemate



Incidentally, in November 2014 I was to look at the DVD of Dvoretsky ́s Endgame Manual and saw this position from the game Yates Vs Marshall, Karlsbad 1929

The game ended 1 Kc3? b1=Q 2 Qxb1+ Kxb1 3 Kb4 Kb2! 4 Kxa4 Kc3 and the king caught the pawn

But Dvoretsky noted that white could have won by 1 Qc2 a3 2 Kc3 Ka1 3 Kb3 b1=Q 4 Qxb1+ Kxb1 5 Kxa3 and The Pawn Queens.
Neither 1 Qc4+ Ka3 2 Qb5? nor 2 Qc2? worked because of the same stalemate trick of 2...b1=Q! 3 Qxb1 ... ...
...
(As the faintest of codicils I may add that I received from Byron Jacobs the diagrams included in this example on August 21st 2013. The text I quickly wrote up but, with characteristic energy, did not get around to adding the diagrams until the morning of December 3rd 2013.
That afternoon I saw that a copy of The British Chess Magazine of September 2013 had just arrived. I had requested it of BCM co-editor James Pratt on Facebook who could only have posted it on November 31st at the earliest, specifically because this issue contained my game with Mirzoev with my annotations. Yet it had winged its way over to Spain rapidly enough to arrive on the very day that I added the stalemate coincidence related to it to my blog. I had also drawn the attention of co-editor Shaun Taulbut to the second part of the coincidence - the game with Comacho Collados - but that he had not included.)

Friday, June 14, 2013

(275) Saying sorry for the consequences of projecting something upwards forty years later

On May 18th, 2013, I noted that Pam Ayres and someone else, whom I did not follow, had retweeted a tweet that I had sent to Pam the previous day. It was a whimsical observation re horses and Catherine the Great. -
18 May: @PamAyres You sound like Catherine the Great, Pam...

One of the retweeters was Paul Fletcher -
Paul Fletcher @FleTwitcher18 May@JamesPlaskett just saw one of your tweets retweeted. Bit of a surprise because we went to school together #bms #amillionyearsago

That prompted me to confess to having thrown a stone at school that had hit his head - He responded with -


Paul Fletcher @FleTwitcher18 May@JamesPlaskett OMG it was YOU! I didn't ever know, or even guess. Apology accepted, even if its a little late ;-) #stillscarred

And the chat continued...
Paul Fletcher @FleTwitcher18 MayYou did this to me @JamesPlaskett pic.twitter.com/ffq6Za4dBl


View photo

I tweeted that I would be writing up the coincidence here and he responded -

Paul Fletcher @FleTwitcher18 May@JamesPlaskett I'll look out for my small part in your blog (!) fame at last...


Then an erstwhile Primary School friend of 43 years earlier (who became a Policeman!) chipped in re an incident where I had acquired an undeserved reputation as a delinquent in 1970 for having loosed an arrow from a bow which, quite accidentally, hit a passing minibus -

Adrian @Watchoot1518 May@JamesPlaskett @FleTwitcher yet you still deny the noddy bus incident!!

Adrian's reference was to what had happened in 1970 when I stood outside his family home in Singapore and loosed an arrow from a homemade bow. It, quite accidentally, struck a bus on the far side of the road!
I was then asked, by Adrian's father, to please go away. And people aboard the bus told the driver, "Chua", that he should take action.

That was monstrously unfair as Chua had, only a week or two before, called me a "very good customer" when I paid him a fare I owed him.

Yet I, with characteristic impracticality and gaucherie, did not take issue with the outraged passengers. And instead just slipped away.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

(274) Sam Harris´ true thoughts on life, the universe and everything

At 11:20 or so on the evening of February 22nd 2013 I was viewing an e mail link that my wife had just sent me. She had been disputing an earlier statistic that I had advanced where Sam Harris had cited 38% of British Muslims as advocating the death penalty for any apostate. It may be heard here at 3:00 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZVYfADAnw8&list=PL45FAA00C0F2F490E

I had sent her one link to Harris on Youtube where he gave a high % and was now moved to e mail her across (she was actually in an adjacent room!) another one where he gave a still higher figure. She was not enthusiastic about Harris and sent me across this link - http://www.loonwatch.com/tag/sam-harris/ I began reading it, and did not find it very supportive of her negativity. Whilst I did so I happened to have a Youtube link continuing to play in the background.
When I reached this point in the loonwatch piece -

There is no vice in having once been religious, for we all of us inherit our mythologies from our parents, but Harris did not inherit his Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. He was bred in a secular home, granted a secular education and lived in a secular state. Instead, he chose to abandon his secular upbringing and voluntarily convert to a foreign religious system.
He claims to have shed his former dogmatism, but telling by the loving chapter on mysticism in The End of Faith, it is clear that he sets much stock by some articles of those creeds. It also clarifies why he studiously will not say, as any materialist should have no problem affirming, that there is no afterlife. In numerous occasions when the subject has arisen either in his book or when he's been asked if he believes that consciousness lives on beyond the death of the brain in interviews like this Salon appearance, he has chosen to either declare his belief in reincarnation or, if the audience is a sceptical lot, preferred the evasive formulation of "I just don't know" because "If we were living in a universe where consciousness survived death, or transcended the brain so that single neurons were conscious – or subatomic particles had an interior (subjective) dimension – we would not expect to see it by our present techniques of neuro-imaging or cellular neuroscience."
When he's reminded by Salon that, in spite of his claim to be driven by data, that on the contrary "Most evolutionary biologists would say consciousness is rooted in the brain. It will not survive death." He responds "I just don't know".
There was a crystallising display of his Buddhist convictions some years ago at the Salk Institute. He was asked point blank by the physicist Lawrence Krauss if he thinks reincarnation is true and Harris shrugged "Who knows?" Alluding to the case studies of past-life regressions by Ian Stevenson cited in The End of Faith, he explained "There are these spooky stories." When the assembled congregation of scientists erupted in astonished laughter at his religious credulity, he grew visibly nervous and, keen to skate past the embarrassing moment, shot back with "Okay, you are on firm ground being sceptical about reincarnation ... I have published a few spooky things about telepathy and reincarnation which amount to not an endorsement of these beliefs, but just, you know, I hear there is all this data and someone like Dean Radin writes a book about it, and Brian Josephson, a Nobel Laureate in physics, blurbs it. I don't have the time to do the meta-analyses and statistical expertise. So, I'm awaiting the evidence. Listen (with rising chagrin) I don't want to talk about reincarnation. It may be."
where this link occurs - Sam Harris: Fearless Among Peers - YouTube
- and as I read Krauss ́ questioning and Harris ́ response on the subject of reincarnation I simultaneously got to hear it (35 minutes in) because the Youtube link - which was not actually quite the same one as that supplied in the loonwatch link - reached precisely the same point. Even though I see little in the above piece to affirm Fiona's statements re Harris' supposed Islamophobia, it did, to me, lend even more weight to the supposition that he was, quite possibly, not being 100% truthful about his beliefs concerning life, the universe and everything.

Harris is CEO of Project Reason (which I also followed on Twitter) and he and I had exchanged a few tweets a few days earlier, e.g.

  1. Well, what were you trying to contact during your long meditative exercises with spiritual teachers?
You're a remarkable man, Sam: valuing spiritual experience whilst espousing atheism + non-dualism. Highly unusual in that.


He replied that he was now writing a book on that.
To which I Tweeted in response -


Doesn't sound like your leveling with us, Sam. Doubt whether your pal Dawkins would have done that just to prove a negative..

When later that very evening I signed up to receive updates from his website I noticed that the two tweets of his to me were still visible at the right hand side of his site ́s home page -

Profile

Sam Harris

 

SamHarrisOrg @JamesPlaskett I am now writing a book on the subject... 3 days ago · reply · retweet · Favorite
SamHarrisOrg Jonah Lehrer breaks his silence: bit.ly/XYW81y4 days ago · reply · retweet · Favorite
SamHarrisOrg @JamesPlaskett The soul's absence...


On April 6th 2017 there occured a codicil.
I clicked on what struck me as an inexplicable ́piece ́of rather alien text. It is caused by ́HTTP text ́ and appears right at the start of this Entry.
This resulted in my accessing a now disused Twitter account of mine and I saw that atop the list of ́tweets ́ was my retweeting a quote of Rumi ́s -

 Retweeted
""What you seek is seeking you."" ~ Rumi "
That caused me to check out more re Rumi.
And I quickly ́followed ́ both an account giving quotes from this poet, Rumi, and also the account of The Reverend Michael Jones.
I also looked up Rumi ́s Wikipedia Entry -

Rumi.


September 1207 – 17 December 1273), was a 13th century Persian[1][7] Sunni[8] Muslim poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian , and Sufi mystic.[9] Rumi's influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions: Iranians, Tajiks, Turks, Greeks, Pashtuns, other Central Asian Muslims , and the Muslims of South Asia have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages... Rumi has been described as the "most popular poet"[11] and the "best selling poet" in the United States.









Just a few moments later I heard Sam Harris refer to Rumi on a clip I had playing on Youtube. That arose through his discussing with Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Are You an Atheist?" as he spoke of his appreciation of Arabic culture. It crops up at 12:00 here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO7tHZVW3Cg
(My wife, herself a poet of some reknown, had never heard of Rumi.)

And the Rumi quote which the misattribution of text here led me to is a rendering of the Sufi aphorism, 
"When a man looks for truth, truth looks for him."
That Sufism I had heard circa 1980 from Michael Basman.

Already I had long appended THAT as the last of the quotes featuring here in my Explanation Entry - http://james-plasketts-coincidence diary.blogspot.com.es/2006/03/explanation.html