A Lot of Women Have Been Written out of the History of Chess

No, this is not a blog post about "Queen's Gambit," the recent Netflix series about a fictional female Grandmaster in the mid 20th century. I haven't seen "Queen's Gambit" yet, but I'm going to have to. I've heard very, very good things about it. I've heard that it's given a very large boost boost to the popularity of chess. And I gather that Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini were technical advisors. Pandolfini is the guy who was played by Ben Kingsley in Searching for Bobby Fischer. I've heard that the chess in "Queen's Gambit" is legit, which would make it unique among fictional representations, as far as I know. 

No, what I'm talking about is the aristocratic women who played chess in Medieval Europe. I've read in enough sources that chess was extremely popular among women of the upper classes, sources serious enough, that I believe it.

But the only names of those women I know are those I know for many other reasons. Names like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Elizabeth I of England. I could not name a single Medieval woman known primarily for her prowess in chess. I cannot refer you, gentle reader, to the moves of a single game of chess won by a Medieval woman, which have been recorded and preserved for their brilliancy.

I simply do not believe that, of all the games of chess played by Medieval women, none was brilliant enough that its moved were written down. I simply do not believe that, in an era of several hundred years when chess was played mostly by women, none of those women played the game well enough to become famous for that reason alone. That dog won't hunt.

When the best chess players' names do begin to be known, in the 16th century, the names are male, and competitive chess remained very strictly a He-Man Women Hater's Club until the 20th century, and it remains sexist, with several male players in chess tournaments for every female player taking part, even several years after the first showing of "Queen Gambit."

Nothing disappears without a trace. Perhaps some day traces of that Medieval, predominantly female game will begin to be recovered. And maybe we will begin, someday, to learn of other things those clever ladies were doing, perhaps things they weren't supposed to to be doing, like reading and writing in Latin, and philosophizing.

Grob's Attack, Carlsen Variation

PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED I AM WELL, WELL, WELL! THIS IS JUST ANOTHER CLUMSY ATTEMPT AT CONCRETE POETRY 

Grob's Attack, Carlsen Variation. AI, open-source, Stockfish, popular in Nigeria as well as Norway. How expensive will oil have to get before Republicans, even the formerly-Republican Never-Trumpers, can mention EV's, solar or wind as something other than a joke in passing? "Yeah wind power haha" and it's back to what oh what will we do about this energy crisis. Is it hot in here or is it just the end of the world? California buys more than 40% of the EV's in the US, Caitlyn Jenner said she wanted to leave California because homeless people made her sad because they blocked her view of her private jet, but sadly, she stayed in Malibu.

Grob's Attack. 1. g4. Ask a chess nerd. Or just google it. Bobby Fischer said the object of chess was to crush the opponent's mind. I suppose there's less literal brain crushing than in boxing. Yes, I know that some people combine chess and boxing, box a round, sit down and play some chess, repeat and repeat and repeat. This, too, makes me sad, and saddens others who'd heard that the whole point of chess was to avoid violence. Channels warlike urges into less harmful directions, you see.

PS: YES, YOU'RE RIGHT, I SHOULD'VE LOOKED UP "CONCRETE POETRY" BEFORE POSTING THIS, WHICH IS MERELY PROSE POETRY 

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The Division Between Art and Science, And the Decline of the Study of Greek and Latin

This is one of those posts where I offer no answers, but simply pose a question which has struck me recently. In this case the question is: can the division between the arts and the sciences in Western society seem natural only to those who have not studied ancient Greek and Latin?

In case there are readers to whom it is not already obvious: I have no idea whether the art-science split has occurred in other societies, nor how it might seem to observers from other parts of the world.

Back within the western world, I have greatly admired admired contemporary and recent authors, such as Bronowski and Pynchon, who clearly reject the notion that art and science are incompatible. I don't know how conversant those two are in the Classical languages, but when we go further into the past, there's often no longer any doubt: Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche were all very familiar with ancient Greek, and all three published in Latin. And none seemed to have the slightest inclination to separate the arts from the sciences. 

Travel back a bit further in time, to the 17th century, and Galileo wrote sonnets, and Milton wrote treatises in logic. These efforts have not become famous, non-one seems to consider them particularly brilliant, but no one of their contemporaries found it strange that they crossed the art/science divide. It takes a more recent perspective to find it strange. It requires a more recent perspective to see any divide between art and science. 

Back farther in time, to the 16th century, and we have the archetypal "Renaissance Man" -- archetypal from the point of view of some more modern commentators, that is: Leonardo da Vinci. And we are told -- by some recent and contemporary pundits -- that it is no longer possible to be such a brilliant artist, and at the the same time such a brilliant scientist. 

But who exactly is telling us this? And who goes a bit further still, in some cases, and tells us that the decline in the study of Greek and Latin was a necessary outcome of the rise of science brought about by people such as Leonardo?

Was the decline in competence in Greek and Latin necessary? Is it a good thing? 

I'm not saying that no people who are fluent in Greek and Latin have accepted such assertions. Obviously, many have. But I'm asking whether these ideas could have spread and taken hold to begin without mistaken ideas being aggressively spread by people with no knowledge of Latin or Greek, and, therefore, no idea what they were talking about, no idea of where art or science had come from.  

 Books by J Bronowski on Amazon: https://amzn.to/424W3Qu

Another Example of Being Autisitc

I looked at the clock just now; it was 3:43 PM. 343, I said to myself. 7 x 7 x 7 is 343. But, I continued, the time 3:43 does not refer to the number three hundred and forty-three, because the first 3 means 3 x 60, not 3 x100. 3 x 60 minutes past noon or midnight, plus 43 more minutes. 3:43 on the clock  means 223 minutes past noon or midnight, past noon in this case.

Then I said to myself, wait -- is 223 a prime number? And I soon discovered that it was, because it not evenly divisible by any of the primes 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, or 13, and the square of the next-highest prime, 17, is higher than 223. It is 289. 

It took me about 10 seconds to do that math in my head, and to double- and triple-check my math, and to be certain that 223 is a prime number. Without a calculator, without pencil and paper. Not Rain Man. But above average. 

This is an example of why I got frustrated with people who couldn't do the math back in March 2016, when Obama, Rachael Maddow and I told them that Hillary had clinched the nomination. 

Also, I am autistic, and for 9 1/2 years I haven't been able to explain to a single person how it was that Barack, Rachel and I knew. I assume Barack and Rachel have both been able to explain it to at least a few people, because they both have far more people paying attention to them, and also because neither one of them is autistic: they're both much better at talking to people, at persuading people. 

Dover Books on Mathematics, at Amazon: https://amzn.to/40CvBwT 

Randon Thoughts About Some Golf Stats

According to the website golfplayed dot com, there are 38,864 golf courses in the world, and of those, 16,752 are located in the US. Japan is in 2nd place with 3,169 courses. Scotland, widely agreed to be the birthplace of golf, is in 10th place with 614 courses. That's about 1 golf courses for every 200 square miles in the US, every 500 square miles in Scotland, and every 35 square miles in Japan.

An estimated 1 to 2 billion golf balls are made annually. That's roughly 25,000 to 50,000 balls per course, per year. Where do they all go? The folks in the golf subreddit, the best experts I know, say: driving ranges, water hazards, golf bags, garages, Bigfoot. Perhaps the #1 answer is; Yeah, I don't know either, that's a whole bunch of golf balls.

How many golf carts are there in the world? Or perhaps I should ask, after searching and searching for even one estimate: why is no one willing to answer this question?  But I see that the golf cart industry is about $2.5 billion a year and growing. At $5,000 to $15,000 a cart, that's hundreds of thousands of new carts a year. 

Hundreds of thousands a year. That's a lot.

Golf carts have been selling well since the 1950's. I'd say there have to be millions of golf carts out there. Not necessarily mostly on golf courses full-time either, because is there room for all of them on golf courses? Not all at once. I've seen a lot of golf carts on movie lots, in movies about movies.

And here's where I start to get paranoid: I've been paying rather close attention to electric vehicles for about a decade now. I had never been one of those Who-holds-back-the-electric-car guys until now, when I think about all those big shots playing golf, the guys who call the shots, riding around in millions of electric golf carts for the past half century or so. Electric, because almost all golf carts are electric, because golfers, just like the rest of, would rather not be bothered by the noise and stink of internal combustion.

All those big shots playing all that golf, riding around in those constant reminders that electricity provides perfectly good, reliable transportation, all the way back to the Eisenhower administration...

 

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Rainbow-Translucent Graphite-Fiber K-Pop Hyper-Efficient Micro-Mini EV's --

 -- would sell well here in the US. To those who say that they wouldn't sell, I ask: who's trying?

The post title refers to EV's which currently exist only in my head, unless they're on sale somewhere else in the world, and if I saw them I'd say, Yes, that's it, exactly. There are many, many tiny inexpensive EV's which have been sold in other countries. Every report of a new one ends: "-- and they will not be available in the US." The smallest US-made EV was the Chevy Bolt, manufactured until the end of 2023. We're waiting for the next-generation Bolt, and while we wait, the next-smallest EV from GM is -- the Equinox? Ain't exactly small. 

I literally dreamed about those tiny EV's with K-Pop vibes and colorful, translucent exterior panels. In the dream, magically, I was able to make drawings of cars in my head. In real life, I must rely on the magic of words. In my head, these tiny, sleek, fun 2-passangers cars have a K-pop youthful vibe. In my dream I was pitching the design to Hyundai/Kia, and they were talking about building and selling them here in Murrka.

In the dream, some friends of mine disapproved, saying that public transportation and walking and bicycling should be promoted instead. I replied that all of those things should be promoted, and EV's too. It's a debate I've had many times in waking life. 

The dream design I was pitching to Hyundai/Kia was fun. These are tiny little hot hatches, and the see-through exterior panels, as far I know, would be a new thing. Maybe we could save the world without having any fun, but would there be a point to that?

 Shop for K-Pop videos on Amazon (caution: you may have fun!) : https://amzn.to/4isHmMC

Too Paranoid? Or Not Nearly Paranoid Enough?

 If AI is so smart, how come it hasn't warned humanity that they're wasting way too much electricity on AI?

Or maybe AI has already decided that humanity is just in the way, and the energy wastage is part of the plan to wipe us out?

And if I'm right, since I'm posting this publicly, maybe AI will track me down and take me out firs -- AARRGGHHH! Goodbye, humanity! I loved some of you! And many dogs! And all cats! squeeeeee *ominous dial tone* (ask your grandparents)

Haha, just kidding, I'm still here! But food for thought maybe? 

I daydream sometimes that Gavrilo Princip missed Franz Ferdinand, and Franz Ferdinand manages to talk Europe's leaders out of WWI, which in turns means that the Nazis and WWII and A bombs and H bombs never happen, and Franz Ferdinand visits Princip in confinement far more luxurious than anything Princip has seen, and they have long talks and become good friends and when Franz Ferdinand becomes Emperor in 1916 he orders a series of plebiscites which begin a rapid and yet peaceful break-up of the Austrian Empire, and Princip mentions Nikola Tesla to Franz Ferdinand, who persuades Tesla to return to Europe, where very soon he is Rector of Belgrade Polytechnic, and electric vehicles, solar and wind energy and information technology establish themselves very rapidly all over Central and Eastern Europe, the region's carbon footprint is below zero by 1930, and instead of having a Great Depression the world follows the example of the former Habsburg empire and goes very very very green, and...

I said "daydream" but I usually have these fantasies just before going to sleep at night. 

Buy books about Austro-Hungary at Amazon: https://amzn.to/43mBtMK

Bruce Hornsby and... ?

I don't know whether Bruce Hornsby is really into golf. Huey Lewis is really into golf. And Lewis and Hornsby have worked together. As musicians, I mean. And Hornsby's first big hugely successful group was Bruce Hornsby and the Range, who broke a hole in the sky in 1986 with their debut album The Way It Is and its inspiring title track.

Now, I cannot stress strongly enough that I do not know any of the persons, places, businesses or events in what follows. I am just a big silly goof who calls himself a monkey. For a living. The following is a work of the imagination.

I'm imagining Bruce Hornsby at a driving range in 1984. Big tall guy, Bruce is, minding his own business and hitting some golf balls, when a guy about a foot shorter with a receding hairline comes over, kicks over Bruce's bucket of balls and starts poking him in the chest with a forefinger and yelling at him:

"Yeah, so you think you're a hot-shot piano player, right? You think you're the best piano player around? Huh?" Poke! "Huh?!"

"Um... Hello?" Bruce says. 

But the little bald guy -- relatively little. But so are most guys. Bruce is a huge freak -- is undeterred, he keeps right on poking and yelling: "You think you're hot shit, huh? College Boy?'

"'College Boy'?!"

"You really think you're hot shit, huh? You know where Suzy's is? On route 9?"

I myself do not know of any establishment, past or present, called Suzy's, nor do I know the route of any road called Route 9. I'm just sitting here imagining this. That's all.

"Yeah," Bruce says, "I know where Suzy's is."

 "You sure? I could draw you a map."

"I've been there several times." 

"Well, if you can manage to be there Friday night, around 9 o'clock, then maybe we can see what kind of hot-shot you are. I'll be there, I'm the drummer and lead singer. Suzy's has a piano. I hear there even have it tuned now and then. ...unless you're gonna be too busy."

Bruce looks down and mumbles the admission: "No, I'm not going to be too busy."

And in fact -- that is to say: purely in my imagination -- Bruce is not too busy that Friday evening, and pretty soon he's the group's main lead singer, and two years later they're on MTV playing "The Way It Is" and making a lot of money -- or, at least, Bruce is making a lot of money -- unless they've got a manager who s terrible at his job, or ripping them of, or both. But at the very least, they let the drummer wear a fairly fancy-looking hat and suspenders during the filming of the video.

And for a variety of reasons which I'm too tired to go into here and now, I suspect that Burce was makin' some bank, and that he was paying the band okay too.  But I don't actually KNOW anything about it.

And maybe they were called Bruce Hornsby and the Range because they met at a driving range. Although there's no reason to believe that any of this is true or even coincidentally remotely close to what happened.

 Buy digital music by Bruce Hornsby and the Range on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4hpnOZN

"It's Golf O'Clock Somewhere!"

I have the impression that it's rare for golf players who are not pros to walk the course and carry their clubs the whole 3, 4 miles, instead of riding carts. I hope I'm wrong about that.

I heard a story about the Dallas Cowboys' management buying every player on the roster an electric golf cart. I was surprised: I knew some pro athletes were into golf, but I'd had no idea that many of them were into it that much. 

Than I wondered whether the real story here might be about the Cowboys' management being far out of touch with the daily lives of their players. I pictured some rookies who earn the NFL minimum, saying, "Thanks, Boss, I appreciate the gesture, I really do, but I still live in an apartment. How about paying me enough that I can buy a house so I'll have some place to park this cool new golf cart off the street?"

Then I wondered whether many individual golfers actually own their own carts, or if they just rent them at the course? I googled golf cart rental, and the rates are so high that it seems to me that the best thing might be to buy your own cart, and then buy a van to drive it back and forth from the course. Or just buy a 2010 Leaf and drive it to and from the course and use it as a cart, because that would be a lot cheaper. 

I wondered whether there are still many non-electric golf carts in use.

Then I researched the story and found that it was the Cowboys QB who had gotten a gift for all the players, not the management. And that he had bought each one an electric moped, not a golf cart. 

Buy books about the history of golf at Amazon: https://amzn.to/42y9v0r

Dream Log: Power

I dreamed I was in a huge enclosed space, so big that thousands of us were in there without feeling crowded. Most or all of the floor was carpeted. In the center of the space various sorts of fancy coffee were constantly brewed and dispensed. There were plenty of comfortable chairs and sofas and coffee tables. 

I and thousands like me roamed the space, men and women all dressed like executives: Presidents, Premieres, legislators, judges, lobbyists, chairpeople of boards, analysts, pollsters, strategists, financiers, entrepreneurs, party leaders, journalists, fixers, negotiators, some us having moved through several of those categories. We moved through this large indoor space making deals, breaking promises, forming coalitions, wheeling, dealing, moving, shaking. I had the impression that we were all pros, that no-one was there because he or she was born rich or became famous in something other than politics.

But I also wondered to what extent we might be fooling ourselves. Kings and queens have been known to believe that everything is just as it should be and every position deserved. There was no clearly-established career path I could see from truck driver, for example, to here.

I might have been tempted, in earlier eras, to call this place a "smoke-filled room," except I didn't notice anyone smoking. On the other hand, many of us seemed to have serious caffeine habits.

I made deals, strategized, huddled, sized others up and they sized me up. This was fighting with all but the physical violence. Some of the people in this room would no longer look at me or shake my hand. I assumed this was temporary in some cases, but not all. Trust was an asset in here, as much as political office and money. It was unwise to squander any of them. Or so it seemed to me at least. 

We struggled with each other, made alliances, shifted alliances, with the fates of corporations, markets, nations, the fates of many, many people at stake. Some of us world-famous, others always to be unknown to those many people whose lives we affected. Some of us, young and old, amazingly idealistic. Others amazingly cynical and heartless. Young and old.

On the perimeter of the space were doors with lighted signs above them: "EXIT" in orange letters. Now and then someone would come or go through ones of these doors. I had no idea where we were: Manhattan? London? The Central Asian steppe? I didn't know, and it really didn't matter to me. We were connected to the whole world.

And then I woke up.

 Buy The Power Broker by Robert A Caro at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3PiSCyJ

Heinrich von Kleist

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is the most celebrated German writer of the Classical period, and some, perhaps most, would say he is the most eminent German writer of any period so far, the author of Faust, Werther, West-Oestlcher Divan and many other distinguished plays, novels and poems. But also a botanist, a geologist -- he published some work on optics notable today mostly for some glaring errors, perhaps to demonstrate that no-one is completely perfect, not even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But also the longtime minister of culture of the the German city-state of Weimar. When Napoleon passed through that part of Germany, he and Goethe had a good long chat, because of course. But also too many other things to list them all here. When Germany founded its official international cultural center in 1951, they named it the Goethe-Institut, because of course they did. 

The second-most eminent German writer of the Classical era is Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), playwright, poet, historian, philosopher, friend of Goethe, perhaps best-known for his "Ode to Joy," which Beethoven put to music in his 9th Symphony.

And then there's the third-most celebrated German writer of the Classical era, one you may not have heard of if you're not from Germany and have taken no courses in German literature: the spooky one, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). 

 

"Spooky" feels like a very inadequate adjective to describe Kleist's works. The German word "unheimlich" is much better. I don't think there is a single English word which translates unheimlich adequately. Unheimlich means frightening, eerie, ominous, unsettling -- come to think of it, when English-speaking people mis-translate the German noun "Angst" -- and they do, utterly, every time -- they tend to come up with something close to that which is described by the German adjective "unheimlich."

Kleist was born into a Prussian military family, in Frankfurt on the Oder, about an hour's drive from downtown Berlin today according to Google Maps, not to be confused with the much bigger and more well-known Frankfurt on the Main in western Germany, Germany's financial center and home of its highest skyscrapers, and also where Goethe was born. Kleist wrote plays, fiction and poems, and other things, including a fascinating essay on the marionette-theater. 

One of his plays, Der zerbrochene Krug, is among the best loved German comedies. The rest are quite dark, and one, Der Herrmannschlacht, which tells the story of the crushing defeat of several Roman legions by a coalition of Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg forest in 9 AD, is seldom performed, because it is considered, quite rightly, to be really about Kleist's hatred for Napoleon's army, for France in general and for non-German things in general. More about that later. 

If you saw a photo from a production of Kleist's Prinz von Hombuurg, you might well assume that what you were seeing was from a weird modern or post-modern staging of the play. But actually, scenes from the play as Kleist wrote it, and as it was performed in his lifetime, look like that, because very weird things happen in the play. Unheimlich. 

And then there are Kleist's stories. The longest and scariest of them, Michael Kohlhaas, has given a figure of speech to modern German: "to play Kohlhaas" means to be extraordinarily stubborn. 

The story was inspired by a report of a 16th-century episode in which a man from the merchant class reacted violently to mistreatment by a nobleman. In Kleist's re-telling of the story, Kohlhaas is a horse-dealer whose horses and servant are mistreated by a drunken lout of a junker. Kohlhaas demands restitution, and doesn't get it, because, you may not be shocked to learn, in 16th-century Prussia, noblemen could sometimes get away with mistreating commoners. But turns out Koohlhaas was the wrong commoner to mess with: long story short, he and his friends declare war on the Junker after his legal efforts fail, burn down the countryside, and although Kohlhaas is eventually caught and executed, he also manages to prove that he was right. 

This story is unheimlich right from the start. From the opening scene, where, now that the drunken lout of a junker has succeed his father, there is a toll charged to cross a bridge which Kohlhaas used for many years to bring his horses to market with no toll, there is the sense that what is portrayed is this fiction is both eerily real and and quite unpleasant -- that Kleist is thrusting under our noses the wrong things about the world from which we ordinarily choose to look away. 

The world is not as it should be. And Kleist describes this with devastating skill.

It also ought not to be that a poet as talented as Kleist was infected with such common and ugly nationalism, but his play Der Herrmannschlacht, with its heroic ancient Germanic tribes standing in for the Germans of Kleist's own time and the ancient Romans standing in for France, leaves little doubt about that, and of you still doubt it, his political writings and letters from the time of Napoleon's occupation clear it up. You see, Kleist was very disturbed by the way in which French soldiers and German women were behaving with one another. 

Not with the behavior generally of occupying soldiers of any nation, and of the predicaments of women of the nations they occupied. Not with horrors of war generally. Those could have been topics of reasonable discussion. But, no, Kleist was very specifically and exclusively disturbed about French soldiers and what they were doing with German women. There's no putting a positive spin on it.

And the final, very disturbing  fact about Kleist is his death; a young, terminally-ill woman, Henriette Vogel, convinced him to kill her and then himself. In 1811, Kleist, 34 years old, his success and reputation growing rapidly, shot her dead, and then fired a bullet through his own brain. 

The world is not as it should be.

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Colorful Little Icons on Golf Balls

I've been in 46 of these 50 United States -- all but Hawaii, Washington, Idaho and Maine. And so I've seen a lot of messed-up stuff. 

But I honestly do not know whether I've seen a city with more mobile homes per capita than Anchorage, Alaska. Lots and lots of huge, luxurious houses, and lots and lots of huge trailer parks. I haven't seen Anchorage in 16 years, so it might look completely different now, who knows. Not me, is who. 

Anyway. In the middle of the night about 20 years ago, I was walking through a large empty lot in Anchorage. Why was I walking through a large empty lot in Anchorage in the middle of  the night? Well, to tell you the truth, i was doing my job. It was a messed-up job. I don't want to talk about that job right now. Maybe after the election. Please vote the straight Democratic ticket. Thank you.

So, I was waking through this big empty lot in the middle of the night, but not in the dark, because it was around the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and in that time of the year in Anchorage the sun does set, but it doesn't stay down for very long and the sky doesn't get completely dark. And I was thinking to myself, Well, I wonder if this is where they're going to put the next big trailer park. And that was when I found a golf ball. 

It's a Wilson TC2 Tour golf ball -- I still have it, I'm looking at it right now -- standard white golf ball, except that on one -- what do you call a corner of a sphere? -- except that in the middle of one ordinarily empty white space, it has a colorful little icon bearing the name of a local golf course, on a little outdoors-y picture suggestive of golf. 

What was it doing there? Well, just now, 20 years later, it has occurred to me that they could have been planning to put up a golf course there, and not a trailer park. According to Google, an 18-hole golf course typically covers 120-200 acres, and can be as small as 30 acres if all of the holes are par 3. That lot was at least 30 acres. Trust me. I grew up in rural northern Indiana, in relatively flat land sectioned into 1-mile, 640-acre squares. I'm autistic. I can calculate acreage.

So for 20 years I've been picturing various ways the golf ball could have gotten there. Maybe there was a golf course just over a stand of trees next to the lot, and maybe somebody hit a bad slice. Or maybe someone got mad and deliberately hit a ball out of the course. Google says that the all-time longest drive is over 550 yards and that lots of players can hit a ball over 300 yards. Making it actually rather easily explainable how golf balls can get all sorts of places. I have no idea where that empty lot was. For all I know it could have been right next to a golf course.

Or maybe, I've been thinking to myself over the decades, some big shot was flying over Anchorage in a helicopter, and tried to hit a mobile home resident with a thrown ball. Or maybe he just accidentally dropped a ball out of the helicopter.

But maybe, I'm thinking to myself now, it got there because they were about to put a golf course there.  

Years later, I had moved to a Midwestern city, and I found a golf ball on or near the sidewalk within a few blocks of my home. It's a Nike Mojo 4 Star. And it too has a colorful little icon in a place the manufacturer had left blank, in this case the icon of a local of a utility workers' union. 

And in this case the nearest golf course is more than a mile away, so this little ball has more splainin to do than the first one.

But wait -- let me search for driving ranges on Google Maps... Aha! More easily splainable now! But wait some more... Seems most or all of these driving ranges are indoor. I don't know anything about golf, almost.

These 2 balls, until several days ago, had been about the extent of my 21st-century experience of golf. Are Wilson TC2's and Nike Mojo 4-Star's good golf balls? I don't even know enough about golf for the Google results about these golf balls to tell me whether they're good or bad or expensive or cheap. I have no frame of reference. I have learned, just now, that Nike stopped making golf balls years ago.

Since these were the only 2 golf balls I had seen up close in the 21st century, I assumed that this meant that these days, golf balls all have fascinating colorful little icons put onto them by someone other than the manufacturer. Also, I had done searches for used golf balls on Amazon and seen still more fascinating colorful little icons. 

And so -- the other day I went into the local used -sporting-goods store and bought a plastic box of a dozen used golf balls. 

Why? you ask. Do you always know know why you do everything you do? If so, you and I are very, very different. But yeah, it was partly because I was looking forward to a fascinating little rainbow of those colorful icons. 

I shoulda dug through the bin of individual balls next to the packaged ones. On most of the 12 balls I got, 11 Titleist Pro V1 and Titleist V1X, the big empty white space is left empty. A couple of them have what looks like magic marker stripes in one quadrant -- maybe because "Oh look we both brought Titlesists marked 4" ? -- and 2 of them have decidedly drab, uncolorful little corporate logos, so drab and uncolorful that  you could miss them on your first look. No way you could miss the logo for the golf course or the one for the utilities workers' union on the golf balls I've had for years.

So which is the rule, and which is the aberration -- the 2 golf balls I've had for years, each with a colorful logo, or the 12 I just bought, very much less colorful?

How many times must I tell you that  I DON' KNOW NUTHIN BOUT NO GOLF?! You tell me which is the aberration.

Buy golf balls on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4fWZ5u2

Fundamentalist Marxism

Obviously, whenever you read a text which is thousands, or hundreds of years old -- or maybe even decades old when it comes to economics, or even years or months -- even if you rate the text very highly, you will also discard a lot. Because people -- some people, at least -- learn as time goes by.

Then there are fundamentalists: people who regard certain texts as perfect. Most well-known are religious fundamentalists, who are generally unbearable even to the other people in the same religion.

But Marxists are also accused of fundamentalism. I don't know whether it's true of most Marxists, but, Jesus, Lord from above -- so to speak -- it's true of a lot of them. There are a lot of dull-witted Marxists who spend what seems to be their entire lives denouncing anyone who claims to see any contradictions between what Marx wrote, and reality. 

And I don't think that Marx himself can be excused from blame for this. He uses terms like "inevitable" and "immutable" a lot.

It seems that people noticed this similarity to religious fundamentalism in Marx pretty early. In 1847 -- a year before the Communist Manifesto -- Marx published a "Communist Catechism," a satire of the questions and answers which children memorize in order to become members of the Catholic Church, but for Communists instead of Catholics. Ha-ha-ha, not as funny as you thought, Karl!

There's a lot of worthwhile stuff in what Marx wrote. There's a lot of worthwhile stuff in the Bible. There's also a certain amount of nonsense in both the Bible and in Marx. That in itself is unremarkable. Nobody's perfect. Compare the Bible and Marx to other writing done around the same times, and they're really not all that bad.

What is bad, and very unusual, in the case of the Bible and in the case of Marx, are the huge numbers of sheer idiots who cling fiercely, blindly, stupidly, to the worst parts.

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Diva

Yesterday my brother referred to Sabrina Carpenter as a diva. I had no idea what he meant. It could have been one of several distinct things.

So I decided it was time to talk about the word "diva."

I first became aware of the term sometime around 1975. Maybe more like 1973. In any case, as far as I was aware, a diva was a star female opera singer. I didn't know much about opera -- I still don't -- but I heard Beverly Sills and Maria Callas referred to as divas.

Going back a bit further in time, the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary defines a diva as "a distinguished female singer." Etymological sources are given such as Italian meaning "goddess" or "lady-love" and Latin meaning "goddess," feminine of divius, "god."  

The 1933 also mentions the synonym "prima donna," which is Italian for "leading lady," "primary female singer," etc. Opera again. The earliest English usage cited is from Harper's in 1883. In the late 19th century in the English-speaking parts of the world, opera was considered to be something primarily Italian -- correctly? I don't know. I don't know much about opera.

When I first came across the term "diva," in connection with opera, I had heard the term "prima donna," but not in any sense which had to do with opera. A prima donna, as far as I knew, was a spoiled, difficult, unpleasantly egotistical person, gender not specified.

Eventually I learned that the two terms were synonymous, in opera, and in the wider world. Except that "diva," like "punk," was re-claimed by people at who the term was hurled. A diva became something positive, a proud, strong woman who didn't care if you found her difficult. The first non-operatic usage I noticed was it being applied to female pop music stars, like Diana Ross or Patti LaBelle. 

Simultaneously, I noticed that the usage of the term "diva" in opera could be positive or negative. It could denote that a star soprano was a great singer, or that she was an aggravating person. Then I noticed that in the case of Maria Callas, different people applied the term "diva" to her non-singing, offstage life, some positively, some negatively, although they were all referring to the same behavior. What struck some people as difficult and disgraceful, struck others as proud and glorious. 

Or perhaps it was more a case of some regarding a woman as proud and disgraceful, while others saw her as proud and glorious. Reclaiming the intended insult as a compliment. Saying that if you had a problem with this particular goddess, it was strictly your problem. 

I was already somewhat disturbed by people applying the term "diva" to non-operatic singers, when I became aware that it was being applied to people who didn't sing at all. Drag queens, for example. In To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, the regional-award-winning drag queens refer to themselves as "fierce, ruling divas."

Thinking that over, while getting ready to write this essay, I began to wonder whether the operatic connection might be all in my head, and whether ladies who refer to themselves as divas might not be going back directly to the Latin, skipping opera altogether. As in: opera? What opera? Honey, I'm talking about goddesses! 

Then I remembered that, in To Wong Foo, the book DV by Diana Vreeland is recommended to a young lady as the last word in getting a MAY-un, and of course, Diana Vreeland, whatever else she was or was not, and that's several more essays at least, was utterly incapable of going for an entire book without saying quite a bit about Maria Callas. Of course I've read DV. What, you haven't?! *faints*

So anyway, my point was that I'm going to have to ask my brother just exactly what he meant when he called Sabrina Carpenter a diva.

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EV Public Charging

One evening over 20 years ago, I happened to surf onto "Nightly Business Report." Not the sort of thing which ordinarily held my interest for more than a few seconds, but this time I ended up watching an entire guest commentary or editorial by a columnist from Forbes, a crusty, white bearded curmudgeon who asked, "When are one of you billionaire geniuses going to design a computer I can turn on and off like a TV?"

A darn good question! And all these years later, it still is. The commentator went on to say that computer guys made computers for computer guys, and not for the public. Computers are inconvenient and difficult to use for the general public, because computer guys don't care.

I was reminded of this just a couple of days ago, reading a social media conversation about public EV charging. Someone had started a thread because they were new at using public chargers, and having some difficulty. 

Something lots and lots of people can relate to. And thankfully, they were getting lots of advice, and hopefully, enough of it helped and they can use public chargers now.

But one participant was not helpful, was not friendly. They called the original poster stupid, and had harsh words for people who were "too lazy to learn" how to operate public chargers. 

Personal computers all over again: tech guys know how to do things like public charging, and, basically, screw you if you don't.

I know there are reasons for everything. I know tech guys got wedgies growing up and it made them angry at the whole world.

But there's a difference this time around: computers have never had to compete with any older, more familiar technology. They were new and unique, and they remain unique. EV's are competing with ICE vehicles, and public charging is competing with gas stations. 

And so, many of you may be very relieved to learn, the days when you can just go up to a public charger and swipe a credit card as if you were at a gas station -- no apps -- are already here in parts of Europe and California, which means they will be everywhere soon.

Competition between merchants, between old and new ways of doing things, leading to innovation which directly benefits the consumer. I hate to say it, but maybe Adam Smith wasn't completely wrong about everything.

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Dream Log: Selena Gomez

 

I know what some of you are thinking: another movie star?! Steve, you're delusional! To which I say, Not guilty. I know these are just dreams. I know, for example, that Ms Gomez and I have never met. 

On the other hand, I am rather gorgeous, and I have actually, in real life, dated a couple of movie stars. There's nothing weird about that: I was a professional actor for a brief period of time -- "professional" in the sense of actually being paid to act. Not in the sense of having been paid enough to live on -- and actors and actresses do tend to date each other, just the same way people in other professions tend to see each other socially, and a couple of the actresses I dated were, or became since, movie stars. Names? Haha, Nope!

If all the women I ever snuggled with were somehow together in one place and you could see the whole group of them, you'd have a heart attack and die, that's how literally drop-dread gorgeous they have been. And some of them were also actresses.

So. Anyway. Selena. 

In the dream I was near Wakarusa, Indiana, the small town in cornfield-Indiana where I grew up. I didn't think of it as "cornfield-Indiana" when I lived there. I just thought it was weird when I went somewhere else and there were no cornfields, at all. Or only a few, here and there. I've been dreaming a lot about Wakarusa lately. 

In the dream, Selena Gomez and I actually didn't get to the first date: she asked me out, we made arrangements to meet at 8 that evening, and the rest of the dream was mostly me walking and driving between several small houses among the cornfields and looking forward to the date. It was winter, everything was covered with snow. In one front yard were the stumps of several trees which had been recently felled; in another, as if a series were being continued, several trees had been felled, and then the remaining stumps had been carved into the shapes of angels, not elaborate carving, but not what I would call crude either, rather nice. Rather abstract and merely suggestive of the shapes of angels

Then I was inside one of those houses, and there was a land-line phone with an answering machine next to it, and I was doing something involving a message to or from Selena. A small and nerdy-looking man observed what I was doing, shook his head and said I should just grab her already, or she was going to think I was a nerd and dump me. Actually, he worded it even a little bit more crudely than that. I wondered who he was and why he was giving me advice. Did he actually know Selena, or was his advice based on celebrity-gossip TV, or what? What did he care what went on between her and me?

Presumably, Selena was there filming something on location, but I didn't know exactly what. She showed up around 8, and now that I'm awake I realize that it was still daylight, whereas in reality at 8 in the evening in the winter in Wakarusa it would be night-time (you see? I'm able to discern differences between reality and dreams).

I mentioned to Selena that I had grown up in Wakarusa, and she said, "Oh yeah, that little town next to the county line," and I replied that it had been so long since I had been there that I couldn't remember where the county line was. Then I woke up and looked it up, and sure enough, the county line is just a little to the west of Wakarusa.

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A Modest Proposal Concerning Manuscripts Shown in Historical Documentaries

I like some documentaries about archaeology. And I'm very, very much interested in ancient and Medieval texts. And so, when in a well-made film on an archaeological topic, the host takes a break from the digs to go to a library's special collection and show us some old manuscripts, I tend to like it very much indeed.

But still, I think it could be done better. Let's take, for example, one of my favorite archaeological series, In Search of the Dark Ages, written and hosted (or presented, as they say in British English) by Michael Wood and first broadcast on the BBC in the late 1970's and early 1980's. This series, for the most part, covers the Anglo-Saxon period in England and the adjoining Celtic part of Britain. One episode goes earlier, having to to do with the first-century revolt of the British queen Boudica against the Romans. 

Woods walks around historic sites, talking to archaeologists who are supervising digs, or led digs a a while ago, or want to get permission to begin digs, and asks them intelligent questions. Or he walks around historic sites by himself and speaks intelligently to the camera. Occasionally making allusions to current political events which sometimes make me wince with their conservative flavor, but no-one, not even Michael Wood, is perfect. He often quotes from Anglo-Saxon or Latin accounts of Medieval events -- he's a specialist in Anglo-Saxon -- and translates into modern English for the viewer. He seems quite fluent in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. It's all quite wonderful.

Where I see room for improvement -- and not just in Michael Wood's shows, but in every show I can recall in the archaeological genre -- is in the way in which old manuscripts are presented to the viewer. The scene will shift from a dig to a library, while Wood says in voice over something like, "To find out more about, we must turn to a manuscript in" -- in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, or in the British Library, as the case may be, or somewhere else. 

Wood will walk into special-collections rooms and proceed to read from Latin or Anglo-Saxon precious rare manuscripts. Which is awesome, but -- it leaves out the scholars who are currently working with those manuscripts.

Why not talk to those textual scholars just as he's been talking to the archaeologists? Or at the very least, mention some of them? He reads, in the episode "In Search of Arthur," from the Welsh Annals, the Annales Cambriae, one of the earliest written mentions of King Arthur. He reads the passage about Arthur right from the Bodlian Library's manuscript of the annals, the best existing manuscript.

The thing is, most of us don't have as much access to special collections as Michael Wood does. We can't just drop in and consult the best manuscripts whenever we want to. Luckily for us, in 1860, the Rev John Williams, also well known by his Welsh bardic name Ab Ithel, published an edition of the Annales Canbriae based on the very same manuscript Woods reads from in the show, and two others. 

I would like it if Wood, and other hosts of similar shows, would mention the printed editions that you and I can read. I don't know whether a new edition was being prepared while Wood was filming the show about Arthur. If so, Wood could have interviewed the new editor just as easily as he interviewed all those archaeologists. His interviews with the archaeologists have been wonderful. I see no reason to doubt that his interviews with textual editors would have been just as wonderful. If no new edition was underway at the time, Wood still could have interviewed a scholar and authority on the manuscript. 

In the episode on Boudica he reads from a manuscript of Tacitus' Annals, the primary written source for Boudica's rebellion. Why not also at least hold up to the camera CD Fisher's 1906 Oxford Classical Texts edition of Tacitus' Annals and mention that the viewer could easily get the original Latin text for themself if they so desired? Or, even better, he could have interviewed Heubner or Wellesley, who were working on new editions at the time. 

Being Michael Wood, I'm sure he could've come with far more intelligent questions for the new editors of Tacitus than I ever could, just as he came up with all of those great questions for the archaeologists. 

Let the viewers know, let them see and hear, that textual criticism is a living, ongoing, exciting thing, just like archaeology. It just needs the right host, the right presenter, to put it across. Michael Wood could definitely do it. Show the viewers that they can take part in the text in more ways than just seeing the host go into the library and look at a manuscript. Which is great! I don't want any of the producers to stop showing the manuscripts. I just want them to give the viewers a more solid connection to the manuscripts. And if it's not a famous text like the Welsh Annals or Tacitus, if it's actually still unpublished, then talk about how it isn't even published yet, and about the need for more students of Anglo-Saxon or Medieval Latin or what have you.

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Mathematics, AI and Chess

Shannon's number is an estimate of the possible number of games of chess, arrived at by the mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon (1916-2001). Shannon postulated an average of 1000 possible moves for one move by White followed by one move for Black. Then he postulated a typical length of a chess game of 40 moves, and came up with his very famous number, his very famous estimate: there are at least 10 to the 120th power possible different chess games. 

I think Shannon's number is complete garbage. I think it tells us little beyond the fact that Shannon and other mathematicians didn't know much about chess, and that few chess players know much about math. Otherwise, Shannon's number would never have become famous to begin with, and, chastened by so much derisive laughter, he would've headed back to the drawing board to try again. 

In some positions on the chess board, there are many possible moves. For White's first move, there are 20 possible moves: 16 by the Pawns and 4 by the Knights. 20 choices also for Black's first move. There are other position in which a player would have far move than 20 possible moves. For example, if a player had 3 Queens, 2 Bishops, 2 pawns and a lot of space.  

In other positions, a player has only 1 possible move: if his King is under attack and there is one 1 possible way to defend it. Or if there is only 1 possible move which would not expose his King to attack. And there are positions where only 2 moves could defend the King against attack. Or 3, or 4, and so forth.

Or, instead of threats to the King, the number of moves could be limited by his pieces being blocked by his opponent's pieces, or by his own pieces. 

How would one get an average number of moves out of all of these different kinds of positions? How many different positions are there with just 1 possible move? How many positions yield 50 or more possible moves? I have no idea. Not the faintest idea. Furthermore, I have yet to see anyone even asking this very basic kind of question when trying to determine the number of possible chess games. I'm not saying I'm the only person who's asked these questions. I'm saying that not enough people have been asking them insistently enough for the evidence of their existence to have come to my attention.

Okay, now, the number of moves in a game. Average it out at 40, like Shannon? That's ridiculous. Checkmate can happen after 2 moves, or 4 moves. It's not unheard of for checkmate to happen after 10 or 15 moves, or 20 or 30. Conversely, some games have gone on for hundreds of moves. Has anyone even attempted to calculate the number of ways in which a game could last for over 100 moves? Or the number of different ways in which a game could go on, limited by the rule that one player can claim a draw if 50 moves go by during which neither player captures and piece or moves a Pawn? Did you notice that I said that a player CAN claim a draw under those conditions? We may have to make such draws mandatory and automatic if we wish to make the number of different games finite -- or perhaps not, I'm not competent to say.

These are just a few examples of the different numbers which would need to be calculated before one could attempt to combine them all and come up with any sort of reasonable estimate of the number of possible chess games.

I don't believe that AI is here. I haven't seen a product designed by AI which wasn't hideously ugly, haven't read a poem written by AI which wasn't ridiculous, haven't interacted with a search engine or automated call center which wasn't infuriatingly stupid. 

And I haven't seen an impressive attempt yet to estimate the number of possible games of chess, let alone solve the game by coming up with the moves which will always win, or always draw against perfect moves by the opponent, the way that checkers has just recently been solved. And when those things finally do happen, which they will if we don't kill ourselves off first, it being ultimately just a matter of crunching very, very big numbers, actual human-like communication and creativity will still be far off, or, perhaps, ultimately inaccessible to mathematics.

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Mittelhochdeutsch -- Middle High German

 In an earlier post on this blog I wrote about Althochdeutsch, Old High German, written from around AD 750 to 1050. High German written from around 1050 to 1350 is called Mittelhochdeutsch, Middle High German. As with Old High German, the adjective "High" in Middle High German refers to the higher elevations of the hilly and mountainous regions of southern Germany where it is spoken, as opposed to the Plattdeutsch, Low German, spoken in the geographically flatter northern regions bordering on Belgium and the Netherlands.

With Mittelhochdeutsch, German became somewhat more sophisticated and assured, less of a mere exercise in translating from Latin and more of a legitimate literary language of its own. Much has been said about the relative literary merits of Old and Middle High German. I don't wish to take part in this debate. It seems only natural that those who specialize in Old High German would have a higher opinion of the best artistic efforts in that language, than those who don't. I will say, and this is, I believe, entirely uncontroversial, that the earliest works in German which are still widely read today are from the Mittelhochdeutsch era. 

Above all, the work of four Middle High German authors remains very popular: the anonymous author of the Nibelungenlied; Hartmann von Aue; Gottfried von Strassburg; and Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the extraordinarily fruitful period from 1170 to 1250, these four writers published book-length epic poems which a reader fluent in German can read untranslated, although she will probably wish to make frequent use of a Middle-German-to-New-German dictionary. 

The Nibelungenlied is a story of pre-Christian Germanic heroes, mixed with historic elements from the time of Attila the Hun (the character Etzel in the poem is based on Attila). Richard Wagner based his four-part operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen partly on the Nibelungenlied, and partly on the earlier Germanic versions. 

The Nibelungenlied is known as a Heldenepos or heroic epic. The works of Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach, on the other hand are called hoefische Epen, or courtly epics. They were written by knights, members of the courts of monarchs, for other members of those courts. 

Hartmann von Aue wrote a number of hoefische Epen which survive whole or nearly whole to our time, including Erec, Der arme Heinrich, and Gregorius, all well-known and highly regarded, but he is probably best known for Iwein, his retelling of the story of King Arthur's knight Gawain.

Gottfried von Strassburg's poem Tristan is no doubt best known today from Wagner's operatic version of it, Tristan und Isolde. 

Like Iwein and Tristan, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival is the tale of a knight of King Arthur's court, and like them it was adapted from a popular French version. Once again, Wagner made an opera based on it, Parsifal. Did Wagner change the v in Wolfram's title to an f in order to help people tell the medieval poem and the 19th century opera apart? Could be, I don't know. This story's hero is known to English Arthurians as Percival, the childlike, simple and innocent knight who catches a glimpse of the Grail. Eschnenbach telling of the tale is quite long, and includes many asides to the reader in which he muses about the meaning of life, or its senselessness, depending on the particular aside. Both Wolfram's skill as a storyteller, and the depth of his frequent asides, are quite remarkable.

These four authors stand rather far above others of the Middle High German era in popularity, perhaps in critical regard as well, but many others are still published and read today, including other epic poets such as Konrad Wuerzburg and Werner der Gaertner as well as some more anonymous authors; lyric poets, some anonymous, some known by name, as far example, Walther von der Vogelweide and Reinmar der Alte; as well as authors of didactic poetry, plays, and theological, legal and historical prose.

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"That's not what I mean when I say 'God,'" Revisited

Years ago I posted an essay on this blog entitled "That's not I mean when I say 'God,'" in which I vented some frustration because belief in God came in so many different forms, some of which didn't seem like theism at all to me.

I'm not frustrated about it anymore. I'm come to appreciate much more the slack which is routinely cut me by others, and I am much more glad to cut others slack, when it comes to religious beliefs. Who am I to tell other people what's what about such things? This represents a great change for me.

Some theists believe God is a man, or that God is male. Others think God is female, and still others think that the concept of gender does not apply to God. Some believe that God is a conscious, omnipotent being who created everything, knows and sees everything and cares about every living creature. Others think that God is an idea, which might sound to some of us atheists as if they are atheists, but no, they call themselves theists or Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or what have you, and when they talk about God, often they sound very much like the ones who think that God made everything and is a man with along white beard who sits on a throne. 

It would be nice if there were some sort of general agreement about what people mean when they say "God," but there isn't. Not even close. This of course makes everything very frustratingly murky and inconsistent to some of us when we try to have some sort of rational debate with theists about God. But it's been this way for somewhere between 500 and 3,000 years, or longer (we don't know how long monotheism has existed). So perhaps -- and I do mean perhaps! I'm not trying to tell you or anyone else how to go about things -- perhaps the first thing someone should do, if they want to talk to a theist about God, is to have them explain what they mean when they say "God." and sit comfy, cause it might take a while, and if they are able to explain it to you at all I'm not saying that this will be enough to permit a nice logical conversation -- imagine! Theism conflicting with rational discourse! -- and I'm certainly not encouraging anyone to debate theism with anyone. 

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