Chess Rap

An oldie but a goodie!


From the 2020 "talent" show:

Video Creds: AT (soft giggles in background = icing on the cake)

Inspiration Creds:  Roman Pedan & Al Urim (Swampscott Chess Team circa 2004)

Ringing in the Year of the Rat

One of many benefits of being a multicultural household is we get to celebrate both Solar and Lunar holidays.

鱼 (fish): a homophone for surplus (餘)
             So you can carry the good stuff with you into the new year.

餃子 (dumpling): look like the silver and gold ingots of yore
             For wealth in the coming year

Family (家庭):
                Connecting the older generation to the newer one:

Stealing Bicycles, Now and Then

I've been running an under-the-radar foreign film club for a year now.  I've been sharing some of my favorite classics with a small cohort of students with the stamina to muscle through these gems.  All along, I've been fascinated to note my own internal new relationship to these personally formative movies, many of which I haven't seen in 25 years or more.  Mostly the changes in my reactions are due to being a Dad.

Tonight, on the one year anniversary of the club, I showed the de Sica's 1948 "Bicycle Thieves" and I had tears running down my face at the end.  This movie didn't even make my original top ten list!

The thing that struck me this time around is the complete and total emasculation of the main character.  He can't provide for his family, he is being crushed beneath society's uncaring heel, and his son's admiration is a spotlight on his inefficacy.  When he takes his son out to eat a meal they can't afford and he confides in his little guy "We deserve this because we are men", I heard his cry for help.  The pathos of his desperation resonated in me powerfully.

Then, in the final scene, as his own son reached out for his hand to comfort his father as father's tears came out, my own came out too...

Constructing myself to be constructed by others

Everything is a construct, isn’t it?

I spend a lot of time thinking about this fact in a science-y kind of way:  Mass itself coming from energies-of-relationships.  My own self being an ever-changing set of atoms and yet I keep actively re-arranging those atoms to keep my own identity the same (both physical and mental).  My sense of self is a construct too, but that is so hard to think about because I’m thinking about it with the construct itself. So meta…

 

Now, I’m turning my attention to more sociological constructs:

Married couples become more similar over time.  

Teachers tend to dress and act in similar ways. 

Men act “manly” or whatever because it’s what’s expected.  

Of course, some of this is baked in:  the couple that got married probably already had certain similarities that drew them together.  People who make teaching a profession probably have certain common personality traits.  Men, of course, are genetically and hormonally constructed in a certain way. 

Lately though, I’ve started to think about how much of who we are is also a social construct as well as being ‘baked-in’.  The people around us (or the people we choose to be around) have certain expectations of who we are/how we should behave.  Our tendency is to fulfill those expectations.  By fulfilling those expectations of others, I am constructing who I am, aren’t I?

Just like the molecules that make up my physical body are a construct in that I am not those things themselves, but rather how they relate to each other (you can make a lot of non-Kens out of the Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen in my body), my personality is also a construct in that I do not live by myself on an island:  I am how I relate to others…

I find this thought both exhilarating and scary. 

As I travel through life, I think I am forging a path but the path may be forging me…

Turning Fifty in a 14 Billion Year Old Universe

Middle Age Youthful dreams of perfection Mellowing into complacency Naïve enthusiasm for life Tempering into wry amusement Outsider feelings of unbelonging Shifting to belonging on the outside Yearning for purpose Maturing into acceptance Internal, eternal conversations between young and old me: Same but different. Soured by the roads not taken, But rewarded by the chosen path well explored. Made more curious about the branches above By the ones below. Keep climbing, Keep looking down, Keep looking up. For long ago, I could only see up; One day soon, I will only gaze down.

Big Bang to Big Chill Pure Energy Pure Potential Matter over Antimatter Quantum Imperfections Seed the Galaxies Quark to Protons to the Periodic Table Complexity begets Complexity Riding the Entropy Train to the Future: Expanding, Cooling, Recombining. The beginning was boringly undifferentiated The end will be a useless mess The now is glorious

Archaeology, Time, and Small Brains

We just did the Cosmic Calendar in astronomy which is a great tool (Thanks, Carl!) to help conceptualize the enormous yet finite amount of time the Universe has been around.  I love emphasizing to students what a small blip our entire history as a species in the Universe is (last few mins of Dec 31).

I feel I have a really good handle on this small-in-time stuff, but just the other day I read a book review on a new book about Uruk, considered the world’s first city (part of the society that originated the base-60 number system that eventually gave us 360 degrees in a circle).  I was blown away by the line that the archaeological dig is complicated by the fact that Uruk spanned “more than 4500 years of urban history”.

Here is an entire dead and long-gone city that was a living, bustling metropolis for longer than all of recorded history (which begins around that time, in that place, ~3300 BCE).  I felt a real ceiling on my imagination.

Rome, considered the oldest European city, has only been around for about 2,800 years.  

I feel like Boston and New York have been here forever, but they are less than 400 years old.  If my intuition of what is old is so bad at these small time scales, what hope do I have when faced with the history of the Universe?  

Maybe the Cosmic Calendar gives me a false sense of understanding?  A way of thinking “I know what a year is and, so, if I map out 13.7 billion years onto one year, I will gain some insight.”  But, really, if a few seconds is longer than Uruk’s entire existence and that feels like an infinite amount of time to me, what hope do I have when contemplating 13.7 billion year history of the Universe?

Wishing I had more “big brains” as the kids say these days…

Chopsticks and Funerals

I have several go-to stories that I like to tell.  Chances are if you’ve ever had me as a teacher or friend, you’ve probably heard the one that involves the Chinese mother-law-to-be and chopsticks.  I recently told that Rideout Classic at a new venue:  a funeral.  My mother-in-law passed away over the recent holidays after years of battling Parkinsons.  The story is actually from the first time we ever met and, in retrospect, is pretty representative of our relationship in general.  I would tease her and she would make fun of me right back.  There was a lot of mutual respect in our relationship, I think.  

I miss her.

----------------------

2002 

Here’s the story for the record:

I flew up from Atlanta to meet my fiancee’s mother for the first time.  She was living in Taiwan at the time and so we hadn’t actually had a chance to meet yet and it was a pretty high stakes meeting for me.  I was moving out of my parent’s basement, closing down my wine importation business in Georgia to move into her old house in Massachusetts, start teaching high school, and marry her daughter.  I didn’t imagine I was exactly what she had hoped for in a Son-in-law….

She had prepared some Chinese food and I was ready to go.  I didn’t ask what it was, I just started eating and smiling.  Asking what something is before you eat it is a total noob move!  Just eat it and enjoy it.  Also, don’t ask for a fork!  So, I’m eating with chopsticks (perhaps a bit overconfidently) and talking.  Talking a lot.  Maybe a bit of nervous talking.  I don’t even remember what I was saying.  But I do remember being aware of how Irene and her mom were both sitting across from the table silently watching me eat and talk.  I felt that I was putting on a show and I was being judged.  I was actually feeling pretty good about it all when, while pausing my chopsticks halfway to my mouth so I could finish making some extremely fascinating point about making wine or something, a piece of mystery meat slowly slipped out of the weak grasp of my chopsticks.  In my memory this all happens in slow-mo:  all three pairs of eyes move to the meat slipping free and helplessly watch it fall.  The sliver of pork (?) falls right into my shirt pocket (dressing sharp for future mom-in-law!).  

Future mother-in-law’s eyes open wide and then quickly look cunningly at me, asking “Hmmm, what is this strange young man going to do now?”  I, smoothly if I do say so myself, reach back in for a new bite and eat it with evident relish.  (Gotta show you can recover from your mistakes!).  After chewing carefully and swallowing, I gently pat my shirt pocket with its unexpected cargo and lean forward, “So good – I’m saving some for later.”

Mother-in-law-to-be is clearly delighted and her eyes express her appreciation.  I interpret the sparkle in her eyes as a “Yes, this, I can work with…”

-----

RIP, “Wai Po”(*) and know that I will continue telling this story with glee until I am getting ready for my own funeral…

(*) Once my kids started to call her Wai-Po, I jumped on that too and no one complained...

Russian Bots Scanning my Blog

Look at the data for the past week for this blog:
A clear spike in hits coming from Russia.  Pretty sure that's not from people checking out the idiosyncratic musings of a random physics teacher in Massachusetts!

I've gotten occasional spam comments before, but nothing from Russia this week - i wonder what the bots are doing?

It's not all about me?

The other day Izze and I were out for a walk.  As we were heading down the street, an approaching minivan slowed down and seem to hesitate.  I thought to myself, "I wonder if that's someone I know?" But I couldn't see past the windshield due to the angle of the Sun.

As they passed, I glanced in and saw a current student laughing in profile.  My mind immediately thought "Oh, no - they probably were waving or something as they approached and I just ignored them."  By the time they were passing me, it was too late.  I imagined their feelings being hurt and how devastating to them it was that their favorite teacher ignored them.

When I got home, I sent a quick email apologizing and explaining.

Today in class, the student said "I didn't see you."  Not understanding, I said "What, that wasn't you?  So sorry - I really thought it was you. How awkward."  and then they said "No - I think it was me; the time and place work; I just didn't notice you at all..."

So revealing that that possibility never even occurred to me... Sometimes it can be hard being so self-absorbed...

Wonder if there is a life lesson for me in this somewhere?

Nah... I can't help it if other people aren't observant, can I?

Visualizing the Most Basic of Decisions

Add some fluorescent proteins to a neuron taken from the hippocampus, put it on a glass plate and film it for one hour.  According to the researcher who took this image (Andrew Moore): “this cell is in the middle of deciding which of its neurites (a general term for the long extensions from the cell body) will become dendrites and which will become the axon.”

Just think hard while looking at this picture, and this process is probably happening inside you right now!

Thanks to Scientific American for bringing this cool item to my attention!