US Allows Piracy in Antigua

The United States has recently allowed the country of Antigua, for reasons unclear to me, to sell US-copyrighted content without any respect or royalty to the proper holder. As Jeff Duntemann notes, whatever connection they have going out of there is going to be overwhelmed faster that you can say "piracy runs free." People going to the physical place to take a terabyte or two of data will probably get checked and caught by customs. Still, it's pretty insane that we're allowing people to violate all intellectual property rights and make a profit doing so. Piracy on small scales has been known to increase the popularity and legitimate sales of products, but the unfathomable proportions of what could happen here has the potential to do some serious damage to US-based content producers. Government, why?

"Hippopotamus" Themed Chess Blitz

To promote awareness of unusual openings, the chess club hosted a themed blitz tournament. In such an event, the first few moves are prescribed, usually causing a very strange position. From there, the game is played as normal. This time, we had to play the Hippopotamus, one that appeared terrible for Black yet actually allowed some good tactics. However, I did not do so well with it. Time for an account of each game!

1. Playing White against an extremely superior opponent. Things went well for most of the game, but them he just kept breaking down my structure. I could not stop an attack on my kingside, which caused me to lose.
2. Playing Black against a moderately superior opponent. I probably would have done a lot better had I not dropped a bishop within the first two nonprescribed moves. This game was essentially a disaster when taking into account my other blunders - dropped pawns, failed exchange, etc...
3. Playing Black against an opponent of uncertain strength. My opening was surprisingly OK. In fact, my middlegame went very well too. The issues came when he destroyed my castle position and took four of my pawns. Despite being down a few points, I did manage to eek out a draw from a three-move repetition.

Lojban Birthday Card

I created a birthday card, the main feature of which is some Lojban text meaning something along the lines of "time turns hope into knowledge". Probably works best for people over the age of 30.

English pronounciation: "timkee bikhuhgwah lo pakna sih koo sehlzhuo"

EDIT: There's an error; "ke" should be "ku." I'll fix it at some time in the future.

Homecoming!

Well, I did in fact attend my schools homecoming tonight. And... it was awesome! That was probably the most fun I've had in years. They had a DJ come in and use all manner of fancy equipment to queue up the requests and also control a spinning light-casting apparatus. It wasn't a really formal dance; essentially all the songs were pop music. Such dancing went on for three hours, all of which I participated in. Among those songs were two by PSY, during which everyone crowded around me and was massively entertained by my rendering of the dance. The entire event was French-themed: they had all manner of small food items and played "The Red Balloon", a 1956 French movie about a sentient red balloon, was shown after the dancing. Learned today: dancing is awesome.

Homecoming?

My school's homecoming is tomorrow and, as a high school freshman, I am now allowed to attend! I'm not entirely certain what said celebration entails, but I do know that it goes on for four hours, which is an insanely long time. Since my school is small and there's not much romantic couplage going on, I don't think there's going to be a lot of such things happening. I suppose it's a school spirit event, but to be honest I don't know what to expect from four hours at school on a Saturday.

The Sounds of Saturn

While researching the Voyager probes for a school essay, I found a really awesome web site containing the sounds naturally made by various areas in space. I found Saturn's the most interesting: an eerie, vibrating moan with some melodic pulses. See the University of Iowa's collection of space noises.

The Stanford Library of Philosophy

As I am drowning in homework, I have been forced to discover rich new sources of information. The best I have found for biographies of important dead people is the online Stanford Library of Philosophy. It contains lengthy articles on pretty much anybody who has ever thought about philosophy or theology. It's definitely scholarly and has boatloads of links to other such sources on every article. In addition to chronicling these peoples' lives, it also gives a good idea of their personalities.

Become an Amazon Author

I just learned a few minutes ago that anyone can become a published (and paid!) author on Amazon. All you need to do is have an Amazon account and go to the Kindle Direct Publishing section of their web site. I haven't actually tried to use the title-adding wizard yet, but it looks like all you need is a manuscript and some information on yourself. The home page claims you can get royalties of 70% for e-books and 80% for printed books. This might be just what I need to get motivated to actually collect my knowledge into something usable... and profitable!

MLA Signal Phrases

In writing class, I was recently assigned a research/classification essay in MLA format. I was already very experienced with MLA's style and citation format from English 101 at Black Hawk. However, this essay required that I use signal phrases before the parenthetical citations. I'm fairly certain that MLA doesn't require it, but the professor was very adamant that we use them. They're very nice in that that remove the requirement to put the author's name and book title in the parentheses, making them lengthy. However, they have the downside of placing bibliographical information right alongside content, which I personally find to be unattractive. I think it's better for text to be laid out in such a way that a machine could separate bibliographical data from real text.

G/20 Quads

This week at the local chess club, the members were split into groups of four to play game-in-20 minutes quads.  There was surprisingly no delay or increment, so time started going down immediately.  Since there were four people in each quad, each person played three others.  The first of my three games, I played my former chess teacher and lost.  I was up at first, but moved too quickly and got caught by a kingside attack. In the next game, I did well against someone who is pretty good.  He made a terrible mistake near the endgame, dropping his queen and resigning.  The last game was considerably more interesting.  My opponent played a Sicilian defense, which messed me up because I don't know it very well.  I made a few small errors that led to my being down a bishop in the endgame.  However, he had extremely little time.  When he promoted a pawn, he expected me to place it on the board for him, but I (as the rules say to do) pressed my clock and told him to place it.  By that time, only three seconds were left on his clock.  I won on time because I had one pawn left.  Two out of three is OK, I guess...

Re-listening to Songs

When I talk to people about music, they always are trying to find the newest great song.  They always want to search out new artists, which is of course fine, but it seems that they're getting bored of awesome songs after hearing them just three or four times.  I really don't understand this.  I can't really describe my taste in music, but it's hard for me to find songs that I truly enjoy.  Once I find such a song, I can loop it for hours and still experience the awesomeness each time.  Maybe it's wise for small children to slowly get into popular music; find an amazing band or a few songs and learn to appreciate the details.  Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about most popular music.

Illowa Fall Classic 2013

Just like every year, the Quad City Chess Club put on its fall tournament, the Fall Classic.  Since my chess skills have kind of been in decline recently, I didn't do particularly well this year.  I did, however, get an amazing (and undeserved draw) with a pretty good player.  The game went amazingly well for me until the endgame, where I got into a bad position.  I offered a draw in desperation; he accepted, not seeing that he could have just taken all my pawns with his king.  The next round, I was obliterated by my former teacher. He used a queen-pawn opening, knowing that I could easily defeat him had be played a king-pawn.  The third round, I played a lower-rated gentleman.  He did give me a very good game; it took quite a while to finish him off.  In the last round, I was again totally destroyed by a queen-pawn opening, this time played by a young boy with a rating of 1500+.  Overall, I scored 1.5, not bad for being in the open section.

Fixing English

After reading many books and writing many papers, I have seen many awkward phrases and unnecessary sentence breaks. Those breaks were necessary to stop the sentence from becoming really long and confusing, but the idea should be tighter than just paragraph level. There are other issues, namely the "he or she" one. Unfortunately, learning another language takes a long time and is complicated.

So, I decided to make a specification for a more logical version of English. The vocabulary can stay, but grammar needs to be overhauled to be more like programming. For example, having sub-lists is very difficult. Let's pretend you need to say that someone needs to first "fix the dryer" and then "wash the pants and shirt". One possible sentence: Fix the dryer and wash the pants and shirt. This isn't the best example, but it does demonstrate how sub-lists can sound strange. I propose that this be allowed: Today, <<Fix the dryer> and <wash the <pants, shirt>>. Yes, in this case it is longer, but in the most important places it will remove annoying sentence breaks and prevent confusion.

I just might try to invent a more logical and clean citation format as well, kind of like Ms. Turabian did.

A Solution to the Politically Correct Grammar Problem

A few months back, I posted a complaint that people freak out whenever "or she" is omitted after the default "he". Saying "he or she", "him or her", or whatever other female-including phrase invariably makes the sentence more complicated and difficult to understand. I decided that the somewhat-obscure "xe" (pronounced ksee) fixes everything.  It's just a simple matter of replacing the H with an X in "he".  For "him", use "xar" (pronounced ksahr).  For "his", use "xan".  I just might adopt this system on this blog. (Queue massively confused readers.)

Possibly Feasible "Star Trek Next Generation" Communicators

This might belong better at Fleex's Lab, but whatever.  This is a nice place.

I was operating the sound booth for a video presentation this morning when there were some issues.  Since I was so high up and far away from the teacher overseeing the presentation (despite having line-of-sight), it was necessary for her to run up to the sound booth and make the appropriate change on the light control.  A few hours later, during a chess game, I thought that the chest pin communicators seen on Star Trek: The Next Generation would have been immensely useful.

I believe it is possible for us at our current level of technology that would have at least helped my situation.  It is already possible to have reasonably thin speakers (see earbuds) and microphones (see webcams).  I'm not certain on RF transmitters/receivers, but there exists decently compact radio equipment (see MP3 players). Shove all that stuff into a 4 by 4 by 1 centimeter box, add some buttons to the front, and you've got an awesome communicator.

However, I do not believe it's possible to recreate the voice-activated routing.  Instead, it would be more practical to link two or three communicators by placing them in contact and sending the new listening frequency.  Once that is done, simply tap a large button to speak; others' transmissions are automatically played.  A button to null the listening frequency might also be nice.  Obviously, the transmissions couldn't go very far; it would be impossible to register constantly-changing mobile radio stations with the FCC.

I wonder how much such a device would cost.  If it exists already, I would definitely pay up to around $200 for it, assuming there are a few other people who have them.  Perhaps there's some company out there that could manufacture a few of these units.