Friday coffee…

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ON CHANGING LIGHT BULBS…
I used to laugh at all those deliciously silly ”How many people does it take to change a light-bulb?”-type jokes because they were just that: so silly! Light-bulbs were designed by genius to be used by idiots…how hard a task can it be screw one in? There must be something fundamentally wrong with you if this task becomes challenging…and that is what is intrinsically FUNNY!
Light-bulb jokes are basically about laughing at ourselves for turning something that should be relatively trivial into something that resembles the Rubik Cube. CASE IN POINT is FIDE’s recent ‘solution‘ towards increased computer-aided cheating in chess tournaments.
Borislav Ivanov has turned the chess establishment on its head!
An anti-cheating committee was set up to figure out what to do. A smart start, or so you would think, but then you would be missing my light-bulb analogy! Not only is there NOT a single IT person on the committee who would know what hardware to look for in Ivanov’s case, but try to grasp this: any suspected cheater would have to PROVE his innocence! The committee has decided that a cheater can be anyone who plays enough strong computer-chess moves! Professor Ken Regan says he has the math to prove it…
Just this week there was a new escalation to the anti-cheating question. David Levy, a well respected individual in the chess world (founder of the Computer Olympiads and the Mind Sports Olympiads, amongst other notable achievements) decided to add his 2-cents to the issue by suggesting to treat chess-cheating on par with state sponsored TERRORISM!
David Levy getting to the heart of the matter, as usual.
I kid you not! Levy wrote an article that was published on ChessBase that has already outraged more than a few freedom loving individuals. Levy starts with light-bulb screwing enthusiasm:
”I believe that the problem could be solved, without too much difficulty, by the addition of a new rule, in five parts, to the FIDE Tournament Rules. Perhaps this could be inserted in Section 12: “Conduct of the Players”….
Levy then goes on and describes a horror list of civil-rights abuses ”every player must sign a standard FIDE document, presented to them in their own language together with an English translation, in which they agree to submit to airport-like security checks, immediately and on demand from the tournament organizers and/or the Chief Arbiter. Such checks may be carried out, at the organizers’ or Chief Arbiter’s discretion …”
Later Levy adds salt to the wounds ”A player who appears prima facie to fail such a security check is entitled to make an immediate appeal by demanding to be strip-searched by one or more medical practitioners of the same sex…”

I am certain that most of my readers are as shocked as I am to see suggested –by a respected opinion in the chess world–that dealing with the few cases of cheating that occur in tournaments should now result in standardized strip searches and TSA-like manhandling tactics FOR EVERYONE who wants to participate in a chess tournament!
Is this the chess world that we want for our children? I say it is time for FIDE, Ken Regan and David Levy to go back to the drawing board and try to discover a less anally-invasive way to screw in a light bulb!
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AMERICAN PUBLIC:
SNOWDEN A WHISTLEBLOWER

A poll conducted by Quinnipiac University was published this week showing that most American’s view NSA/CIA turncoat Edward Snowden to be a whistleblower (ie. a hero). You can read more HERE. But the jist of the poll is that 55% of those questioned consider Snowden a whistleblower while just 34% consider him a traitor. ”Almost every party, gender, income, education, age and income group regards Snowden as a whistle-blower rather than a traitor. The lone exception is black voters, with 43 percent calling him a traitor and 42 percent calling him a whistle-blower.”
“The massive swing in public opinion about civil liberties and governmental anti- terrorism efforts, and the public view that Edward Snowden is more whistle-blower than traitor are the public reaction and apparent shock at the extent to which the government has gone in trying to prevent future terrorist incidents,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
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TWERKING!

I must be getting old! Until today I did not know that twerk was a real word, let alone a phenomenon that is all the rage amongst those with a pulse! According to wikipedia, twerking is a dance move that involves a person shaking their upper hips and lower hips in an up and down bouncing motion, causing them to shake, ‘wobble’ and ‘jiggle.’ To “twerk” means to “dance in a sexually suggestive fashion by twisting the hips.”
HEY, I am all for that! Live and let live, I say!
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[…] “It still requires a loop antenna but there is another person who did it for medical reasons, he is going blind. This will be hard to catch. Implants are here.” This could possibly mean the end of tournament chess as we have known it. If you go to the Chessbase website (http://www.chessbase.com) and enter the word “cheating” into the search box you will find page after page of article after endless article on cheating, and more cheating. Proving that the threat is indeed stronger than the execution is an article from 19/12/2006 entitled, “Topalov: Kramnik will never admit that he cheated…” Then there is the article from1/2/2007, “Nigel Short pushes for cheating enquiry,” which concerns cheating allegations leveled at Veselin Topalov and Silvio Danailov during the Wijk aan Zee tournament. The sad fact is that computer chess programs have become so powerful that no one will ever know for certain whether or not one of the top players in the world, the so-called “Super Grandmasters,” cogitated the outstanding move, or if it came from an algorithm in some machine somewhere, maybe even in the “cloud.” I shudder to think what would happen today if a player happened to have the tournament of his life, as did Expert Alan Trefler at the World Open in 1975. From Wikipedia: In the open section of the 1975 World Open chess tournament, played in New York, expert Alan Trefler (Elo rating 2075, 125 points below the lowest master rating), and ranked 115th in the tournament, scores 8-1 to tie for first with International Grandmaster Pal Benko, rated 2504, ahead of Grandmasters Nicolas Rossolimo and Walter Browne.[8] • 8) ^ Chess Life & Review, September 1975 (available on DVD), pp. 586-87. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Trefler) If this happened in the climate of today Chessbase would no doubt lead the charge against such an occurrence being legitimate because the odds of an Expert winning the World Open would certainly be prohibitive. It is a good thing Alan Trefler did what he did “back in the day,” because if he had just won this year’s World Open, he would be hounded to the point of contemplating suicide! It has gotten to the point where there are so many articles on the chess websites that I can no longer read them all due to a lack of time. Here are two on my roundtoit list: http://www.chessbase.com/Home/TabId/211/PostId/4010353/irina-lymar-fide-must-develop-anti-cheating-rules-030713.aspx & http://www.chessvibes.com/macieja-on-fighting-cheating-in-chess Then there is the GM who gets down to brass tacks (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=get%20down%20to%20brass%20tacks) better than anyone on the web, the irrepressible Kevin Spraggett. I refer you to “Spraggett on Chess” for his inimitable take on the matter: http://kevinspraggettonchess.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/friday-coffee-8/ […]