quote of the day

“Science is not like religion; it’s not about finding true doctrines. It’s about demolishing wrong ones. Ideas are two a penny; it’s the efficient destruction of error that leads us to truth. And we really need such a method. The truths at the heart of Newtonian mechanics, evolution, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and bioinformatics are often so counterintuitive and disturbing that we only accept them when absolutely every other possibility has been shot down in flames. To understand the mechanism, you first have to burn away the myth.”
(Ross Anderson, Cambridge – the Unauthorised History)

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thought of the day

“As a manager, you are caretaker of No for you group. When it is time to do the right thing by stopping, it’s your job to bust out the No. You defend your team against organizational insanity with No.”
(Rands, on being a new manager)

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reboot

“We will not apologise for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defence, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.”

(Barack H. Obama,
inaugurating. Sing it, brother.)

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ho, ho, ho

“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near.” (John 1:3)

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thought of the day

“If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right will make no difference.”
(Abraham Lincoln, on how much attention to pay to critics)

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Nationals

This was my final game of six at the Australian Open:

First tournament I’ve ever been at where senior players actually came more than one at a time in order to tell me I should’ve saved the two forlorn black stones in the corner, easily worth twenty points and the game.

Y’know what? I should have saved the two black stones in the corner. Or Amelia should’ve killed them earlier. Or both. Then the protracted ko fight for the last free point on the board would’ve had meaning. :)

But I liked my endgame and dragon-wrangling. Not perfect, but I trimmed her lead back to six points plus komi. Also, my performance in the kyu division of the tournament (won two, lost three closely, one bye) confirmed that four kyu is converging on my actual rank.

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kifudancer FTW

I played a game with ~kifudancer the other evening at the club:

Around move 110 you can see the signature knife-fight for a large group of stones in order to clear a moyo by brute force; this is a common feature of my games against club opponents when I have sleepwalked through the opening. My osimato was weak, and the fight petered out in ignominy around move 162 with the connection to the lower-right group. Usually with these I lose the attacking forces and thence the game, but this time I managed to pull out at least the upper half.

In the end, white has a really large top-right corner and bottom territory, plus a chunky piece of the centre-left. The monkey-jump at move 184 was large, but not as large I think as the death of the top-right corner and the reduction of the bottom-left corner down to temporary seki. White by 41.

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wisdom

“You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing this. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway.”
(Robert Jordan, Winter’s Heart, al-Lan Mandragoran to Rand al’Thor)

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because there is always more than the surface

Here’s a game I played recently by correspondence:

As you can see, I managed a corner invasion in the top-left quite early. Both players left it alone, black assuming it could be killed easily, white assuming the unusual distance to the principal wall below meant it would live easily. In the end, it was a knife-fight for seki, which I lost due to the aji of the black triangle at the bottom centre.

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thoughts of the day

“Never regard study as a duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong.”
(Albert Einstein)

“It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.”
(George Kennan)

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