The civilized veneer of chess is deservedly rrrrrripped away in this fine video, which I found via Improbable.com. I shed some of my bitterest bad-sportsmanship tears over a chess game, and although I was less than ten years old when I shed them, I remember that near-defeat agony clearly today. It was only a near-defeat because my Aunt Harriet unaccountably failed to capture my undefended queen, and instead moved her own queen into a spot where I could take it.
If chess savagery featured on BoingBoing, somebody would be crying out for a unicorn chaser. Would the savage unicorn in this video suffice? It certainly seems to be chasing the other chess pieces.
Heh — a tilted horizon is one of those mistakes that Photoshop quickly fixes.
But I reverted this fix. Because who needs the n-millionth photo of lovely anonymous ocean under blue cumulus heaven?
What the original captured was my imperfection in the face of abstract blue perfection. And somehow the tilted horizon also reminds me that this peaceful scene is the result of enormously chaotic motions of wind and water, scattering light with implacable random changefulness.
Not that I want the bright folks of modern photography to imitate my error-prone horizons. At least, not unless their galleries stock seasick medicine…
Frank Wilczek’s grandfather Jan Wilczek joined Haller’s Army in 1919 and served with them as a private until 1920, fighting first in Galicia and later on the Russian front. In honor of Grandpa Wilczek’s service, the Polish War Veterans in America gave Frank a beautiful bronze Paderewski medal last night. Frank’s uncle Walter Wilczek also shared in the honor.
Many thanks to the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America and to its hard-working president Thaddeus Gromada for organizing a remarkable evening of Polish surprises and to Poland’s Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk for hosting it. PIASA organized the event on the occasion of its own Casimir Funk Award for natural sciences, an honor first given to chemistry Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann, who gave Frank his award last night.
Thanks also to the Association of Polish-American Engineers (Polonia Technica) and Poland’s National Academy for honoring Frank and the Wilczek family’s Warsaw-Galicia-and-other-Polish origins. In fact, thanks to everyone who made this evening so special.
There’s a longer translation of this document’s Polish on this photo’s Flickr page.
We saw Punkin Chunkin on Thanksgiving night, on the HD Science channel–wow!
You all did a great job turning that fun but chaotic event into real narrative, squeezing some of the chaos out but keeping the fun — and Brad was so funny! The sky was so blue; the pumpkins so orange, and so many. Frank kept saying, they made it all look so good! And I totally agreed. Animations showing the science were a nice extra touch I hadn’t expected.
Watching the show entailed a bit more expense than you might realize, since I went out and bought a TV and got our Comcast cable upgraded from internet to include HDTV with HBO. Our new Nintendo Wii, however, I can’t really blame on JonHotchkiss.com.
All of it, worth every penny.
And getting my first-ever IMDB-able film credit? With the job title “Prop Ninja”?
And yes, we did! Thank you, America, for electing Barack Obama.
I predict a new surge in American productivity, starting right NOW, as millions of us start to break our time-sucking addiction to political minute-by-minute analysis.
In my case, starting tomorrow. You know, the Karl-Rovians have been running against me personally for so long — East Coast born and bred, married to a professor, driving a hybrid car, and supporting gay marriage–that it’s great to wake up and discover that America’s burning question is no longer whether the Democratic candidate might be a Marxist who wants Bin Ladin to bomb us and hates iceberg lettuce.
Could this finally be the end of the culture wars? The WSJ seems to think Obama found the answer:
What would beat the culture wars was always clear from the pseudo-populist language in which they were framed. In place of a showdown between a folksy “middle America” and a snobbish “liberal elite,” Democrats needed to offer the real deal — the conflict between a public that craves fairness and an economic system that enables the predatory.
…When your mortgage is under water and your neighbors are being laid off, the need to take up the sword against arrogant stem-cell scientists becomes considerably less urgent.
The Republican response, of course, was to double down on the righteous rhetoric of red-state grievance and spin the wheel one more time.
It was sad to see John McCain sink down into the culture war Karl Rove dog whistle politics, like an old dog so thirsty he drinks water out of the toilet. I hope McCain is getting some sleep right now. Obama is the one with tough jobs ahead of him now, and I have more hope than is perhaps rational that he is going to be a great President.
Speaking of more sleep, I really need some more sleep too.
Whew, we just got home from scary Halloween fun, with huge noisy machines that hurl or blast ginormous pumpkins across farmers’ fields!
Jon Hotchkiss is creating a show for Discovery Science Channel about Delaware’s annual Punkin Chunkin festival. It will air for an hour on Thanksgiving Day, hosted by improv comedian Brad Sherwood (of Whose Line is it Anyway, and he’s really funny!) with the physics explained (of course) by a Nobel laureate–who is Frank Wilczek.
And Betsy Devine is getting a credit too, I am told, as “Prop Ninja” for supplying marshmallows, rubber bands, and lots of other useful items you’ll see onscreen.
My Flickr photoset documents just a small chunk of the massive punkinology that I recommend you sit down to on Thanksgiving Day
Here you see Frank Wilczek talking at Reiter’s Scientific Books. Aka “Reiter’s Scientific, Professional Technical Books”. What a great bookstore! It was a real bookstore like this that helped Frank (and many young people) get started in science.
Amazon recommends books on the basis that others who bought book X also liked book Y. In a bookstore, you also look into your own future, because shelves include books that people might read after finishing books X and Y.
Such help and encouragement are especially useful to young people or to those who are trying to study something by themselves.
If you go to Washington, don’t miss Reiter’s Book Store. They will ship your purchases to you by UPS, and said purchases can include not just books and magazines but anatomical models of brains or a lifesize skeleton.
October 20th, 2008 · Comments Off on Five minutes well spent with boy band for Obama
Just when you thought this election could not get crazier, it’s… BoyBama!
Funny, warm-hearted, and charming, from the wild and crazy dudes at Portal-A Interactive, who explain:
we decided to make this parody music video in support of the Obama campaign and to show women everywhere that we can shamelessly pander with the best of them.
What wonderful news that Yoichiro Nambu finally got a Nobel Prize! Frank and I were just beaming at each other when the announcement came. It felt like having the Red Sox win the World Series, although minus the cars honking and people screaming in Harvard Square.
Frank is a big admirer of Nambu, whose work he praised in in a postcript to his own 2004 Nobel Lecture (pdf):
I’d like to mention specifically a trio of physicists whose work was particularly important in leading to ours, and who have not (yet?) received a Nobel Prize for it. These are Yoichiro Nambu, Stephen Adler, and James Bjorken. Those heroes advanced the cause of trying to understand hadronic physics by taking the concepts of quantum field theory seriously, and embodying them in specific mechanistic models, when doing so was difficult and unfashionable.
In fact, Nambu won the prize yesterday for a different part of his work, which just goes to show how brilliant and creative he is. I hope he will have as lovely a time in Stockholm as we did; it is a wonderful party.
Meanwhile, I quickly uploaded my own snapshot of Nambu to Wikipedia. And that photo soon went to the front page of Wikipedia, which delighted me. But it also soon went up all over the Google News with a credit to Reuters instead of to Betsy Devine and/or Wikipedia. That is a violation of the photo’s license, and I think that Reuters should be ashamed of itself.
