Month: June 2011

Blowout 2100

The overall aim of governments and political parties in North America an Europe at the moment seems to be serving the interests of people who are about 50 and at least fairly well off. Keep stock prices and house prices up, prop up failing banks and car companies, keep pumping fossil fuels, don’t worry about climate change or what future generations will use for energy. After all, the core supporters of the politicians (especially when it comes to all-important campaign cash) will probably be dead by the time the most serious effects of climate change are felt. The same goes for the people in high-level decision-making positions in government and industry today.

It seems that future generations will have good cause to hate us. We have had climate change endlessly explained to us, with multiple convincing lines of evidence to back up the theory. We have been told what we need to do to stop it, but we have chosen to do nothing because we care about our short-term economic welfare more than anything else.

If that is the implicit attitude of the politics of today, it would be helpful if it was made explicit. “Vote for Party X for 30 or 40 more years of relative prosperity. After that, no promises.”

Climate wave crested?

At least for the next few years, it seems likely that the level of public concern about climate change has peaked, and attention will be focused elsewhere. That isn’t justified by the facts, but it seems to be the case, and it is the reality that people pressing for more action need to deal with now.

We have to be intelligent and determined enough to drive the emergence of acceptable climate change policies – ones that protect the planet which we all fundamentally depend upon from casual destruction, because people prefer to have cheaper electricity and transport right now. We need to do that despite how people are worried about other things, how the science is complex and challenging to understand, and how the ideal path forward can only be approximated through risk analysis. We need to try approaches until we find ones that work.

Fischer Random Chess

Those who are looking to become decent chess players seem to need to learn a repertoire of openings, tactical skills, and endgame patterns.

With standard chess, that seems to involve a lot of memorization, especially insofar as openings are concerned. They have largely been analyzed with computers, and people know what the strongest lines and responses are (though there are novelties in top-level play).

Fischer Random Chess is a bit encouraging in that it reduces the usefulness of memorization and forces a bit of creativity into every game. By randomizing the position of the back-row pieces like knights and bishops, it creates a wide variety of different starting positions. It is not feasible for human beings to memorize ideal lines in all of them, though computers will surely be able to do so eventually.

For the moment, however, during games between human beings, Fischer Random Chess seems to have good potential as a way of make the game more about realizing the implications of positions that are new to you, and less about remembering ideal responses calculated elsewhere.

Take rainbow tables out of chess! (at least some of the time)

P.S. The Chronos GX chess clock can produce randomized positions for ‘Shuffle Chess’, but it does not follow the Fischer Random Chess rule about having the king between the rooks. I wish it did, since I think Fischer Random Chess is likely to produce more balanced results than completely random shuffle chess, in terms of reducing the number of positions in which white has an overwhelming first-mover advantage and making castling reasonably fair and simple.

P.P.S. The Fischer Random rules are also probably better than shuffle chess insofar as they produce a game more similar in character to chess. It’s like chess, but with less focus on memorization. It’s not a totally different game.

Ottawa Fringe: All My Children

At the Ottawa Fringe Festival yesterday I saw All My Children: a ninety minute one-man show in which a slightly Christopher Walken-esque man recounts his rather mischievous dealings with the children of his former girlfriends. Matt Smith, the man putting it on, is easily able to hold the attention of the audience for the duration, and the show is filled with an indirect but rather effective sort of humour. I enjoyed the show a lot and would recommend it.

It is on five more times:

  • Monday, June 20th 9:00pm
  • Tuesday, June 21st 7:00pm
  • Wednesday, June 22nd 5:30pm
  • Thursday, June 23rd 10:30pm
  • Friday, June 24th 9:00pm

[Update: 5:09pm] My friend Evey wrote a review of this play for Fully Fringed.