jrosenhouse | October 11, 2015This week I have another short, one-liner for you. It is another one I found at the end of one of Aviv Friedman's videos. He did not mention the composer, but I got a real kick out of it. The solution is short, but there is a lot of strategy packed into it. It is also one of those problems where you can be one move from the end and still not see where it is going.
White is to play and draw:
It sure does look bad for white, doesn't it? His passed pawn is firmly under control, while black's passed pawn is unstoppable. Game over, right?
Not so fast! There is one glimmer of hope: black's…
jrosenhouse | October 11, 2015There is no longer any need for the phrase “gay marriage.” There is just “marriage.”
For a while we shall still have to put up with an occasional Kim Davis or right-wing judge who gets mopey about it, but most people have simply moved on. They either don't have a problem with marriage equality, or they don't care enough to do anything about it. It is the ones who do who are increasingly on the defensive.
And well they should be. One reason public opinion turned around so quickly was the complete inability of the anti's to make any reasonable argument at all. Once you get beyond, “It'…
jrosenhouse | October 5, 2015The fifth Problem of the Week has now been posted. This one is probably my favorite of the term. I think it's fairly challenging. It will have to hold you for a while, though, since POTW will be taking next week off.
I've also posted a solution to POTW 4. Enjoy!
jrosenhouse | October 4, 2015Many years ago, as a middle-schooler, I attended a one-week summer chess camp in New York state. There were many excellent instructors at the camp, but my favorite was Aviv Friedman, a FIDE master originally from Israel. He had a real knack for finding interesting and instructive positions to show us, and he always presented things with clarity and humor.
So I was delighted to discover recently that he has become a regular lecturer at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis, and that many of those lectures are available on YouTube. I've been dutifully working my way through them…
jrosenhouse | October 2, 2015I saw the film Pawn Sacrifice the other day. It stars Tobey Maguire and Liev Schrieber as Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. Serious chess movies don't come along very often, so I was excited to see it.
I liked it! What's not to like about a movie where the actors deliver lines like, “They're playing a line of the Nimzo,” or “Fischer's playing the Benoni, he's never done that before. The Russians think it's suicide.” “Is it suicide?” “Oh yes...” Chess jargon? Cool! It's mostly accurate too, though they certainly took a few liberties here and there. I do fault them for two things,…
jrosenhouse | October 1, 2015Sensible people understand that there is little connection between belief in God and moral conduct. As has wisely been noted, with or without religion good people will do good, and evil people will do evil.
On the other hand, we could survey the nations of the world and note a strong inverse correlation between the level of religiosity in a society and its level of morality and basic decency. The least religious nations in the world are among the most socially conscious and morally decent on earth. The most evil and despotic are also the most theocratic.
Nor is it hard to fathom a…
jrosenhouse | September 30, 2015Did you watch the big hearing in Congress the other day? Congressional Republicans, having failed completely with their plan of holding their breath until the Democrats and Obama agreed to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood, had to settle for the consolation prize. They hauled up Cecile Richards, PP's president, so they could browbeat her for five hours. If you watch any five minute segment of it you will have seen the whole thing. The Republicans asked one stupid, mendacious question after another, and then cut Richards off the second she tried to answer. I'm sure the crazies loved…
jrosenhouse | September 20, 2015I only have time for a quickie this week. Here's another Troitzky study, simple by his standards but charming nonetheless. It's white to play and win. This is actually a one-liner in which black's moves are all essentially forced, so you might want to have a go at solving it before reading on.
We're going to round up the queen with a knight fork. Play begins 1. Bd8+ Kf5 2. Ne7+
Now 2. ... Kf6 walks right into a discovered check, while 2. Ke5 walks right into a knight form on c6. So black must play 2. ... Kf4 after which we get 3. Bc7+!. Wait a sec. Can't black just take the bishop…
jrosenhouse | September 19, 2015Granville Sewell has a new post up at Uncommon Descent. It's short, but if you don't want to read it, then rest assured it's just the same post he always writes. Could the four fundamental forces of physics assemble iPhones or nuclear power plants? Absurd! The post is framed in the context of an imaginary discussion between him and an imaginary friend who defends evolution. He plays the role of the bemused clear thinker, while his friend is, of course, dogmatic and unreasonable.
I wouldn't bother to address it, except that the title caught my eye. The post is called, “Mathematicians are…
jrosenhouse | September 18, 2015I've made occasional references to the book that I have been editing forever. Well, it has finally entered the home stretch:
The book is a companion volume to the 2013 MOVES Conference in recreational mathematics, organized by the Museum of Mathematics in New York. The publisher is Princeton University Press. It features seventeen papers, mostly based on presentations given at the conference. Be warned: this is not a trade book. Some of the papers are pretty formidable.
“MOVES” is an acronym for “The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects.” Hence the name of the book. We have…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2015Kevin Drum of Mother Jones magazine is one of my favorite political bloggers. In this post he provides a perfect summary of conservative rhetoric:
These guys wreck the economy, and then complain that Obama hasn't fixed it fast enough. They blow a hole in the deficit, and then complain that Obama hasn't quite filled it yet. They pursue a disastrous war in Iraq, and then complain that Obama ruined it all by not leaving a few more brigades behind. They twiddle their thumbs over Iran, and then complain that Obama's nuclear deal isn't quite to their liking.
It's hard to believe that even their…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2015Last week's study went over well, so how about another study from Alexis Troitzky? It's white to play and win in this position:
There is an astonishing amount of strategy wrapped up in this simple position!
Let's start with some general considerations. White must try to promote his pawn as quickly as possible. Something like 1. Bd5, to slow down black's pawn, just won't work after 1. ... Bd3. Once white starts pushing his pawn, black will have to do likewise. Both sides will need one move to move their bishops out of the way of their pawns. At first blush, it seems like white will win…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2015Classes started last week, but that's not the real start of the semester. No, the real start of the semester is when Problem of the Week returns. Which means the semester starts today!
The theme for the term is “False Proofs.” By this I mean proofs that seem superficially convincing, but lead to an obviously absurd conclusion. Your task as the problem solver is to locate the exact moment when everything goes off the rails. Our problem for this first week is a classic of the genre, in which we, ahem, prove that an elephant weighs the same as a fly. As we go along we shall see that it is…
jrosenhouse | September 6, 2015I have been terribly remiss in my Sunday Chess Problem responsibilities. So how about a charming little amuse bouche from the greatest of all endgame composers: Alexey Troitzky. The position below was composed in 1898 and calls for white to play and win.
A natural first reaction would be to give check with 1. Rc2 or 1. Qh1 or something like that. You're welcome to give that a try, but I think you'll find that white quickly runs out of checks. So we need to find something a bit more subtle.
The only way to win is the shocking 1. Re6+!
For what purpose is white sacrificing the rook?…
jrosenhouse | September 2, 2015Classes started on Monday. I'm actually pretty happy about that. This summer was rather hectic and stressful in many ways. Also productive, but still. It was basically a good counterexample to the clueless types who insist that teachers only work nine months out of the year. For me, the summer tends to be harder work than the regular school year. Teaching isn't easy, and it's rather time consuming, but it's familiar and predictable and routine.
Of course, if all you know about higher education comes from what you hear in the news, you could easily think that modern academic life is an…
jrosenhouse | August 20, 2015I'm in the mood for something light-hearted today, so here's a YouTube clip for you:
It's from the Firing Line debate in 1997 about evolution and creationism. Representing darkness and obscurantism were William F. Buckley, Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and David Berlinski. Sunshine and goodness were represented by Barry Lynn, Eugenie Scott, Michael Ruse, and Kenneth Miller.
Back in 1997 I had not yet developed an interest in evolution and creationism, so I paid no attention to this debate at the time. Years later I read a transcript, but that's never the same as seeing it live. So,…
jrosenhouse | August 19, 2015I see that Barry Arrington is blogging up a storm lately over at Uncommon Descent. It's all his usual silliness--bad arguments coupled with denunciations of anyone who dares disagree with him--but this post was eyebrow-raising even for him.
The set-up is this: Arrington is in the habit of making big bold claims about what is possible and what is not. Sometimes his readers challenge him to back up those claims. These challenges are met with insults and condemnations.
In the present instance the claim is that the brain cannot be a fully naturalistic organ because mere chemicals cannot be the…
jrosenhouse | August 18, 2015Planned Parenthood heroically provides medical services to a great many women who otherwise would receive little or no health care at all. This can be thankless and even dangerous work, because there are fanatics out there who do not like what they do. They perform abortions, you see, though this is a tiny fraction of their work. Some people think abortion should be illegal, arguing, preposterously in my view, that a fertilized egg is already the moral equivalent of a human being.
Some of the fanatics are well-funded and well-organized, and they devote considerable effort to “exposing”…
jrosenhouse | August 13, 2015It used to be a major American art form for white actors to cover themselves in make-up and pretend to be black. This persisted for roughly a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. What a golden age for comedy that must have been!
As recently as the 1970s we had shows like Three's Company, that was in large part centered around some very hoary stereotypes of homosexuals. Those were good times. Too bad we have all those politically correct buzzkills nowadays to protest that real gay people rarely act the way they were portrayed on that show.
Lately there's…