One too many mornings

As brought to you by the BBC. Weird fantastical images to whet your appetite for the delicate beauty of the universe we live in.

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I’ve been looking to read this for a long time and never got around to it. I’m glad I’ve made the effort as the first half is fast-paced and thought provoking. I hope the rest of it lives up to the hype.

I picked this up in the Oxfam bookshop near home. It is apparently out of print now but it is a great book that teaches chess openings in a fun and constructive way rather than by rote. It has definitely improved my openings and mid-games too.

This book is a wonderful collection of problems taken from early stages of chess games (they are grouped by the openings in which they arise). You try to pick which of three options is the best move under the circumstances. Unlike most problem books, this one tests and teaches not just tactics but strategic/positional considerations. Evans’s explanations and analyses of the right and wrong moves are superb. It’s ridiculous that the book is out of print, but at this writing Chess Digest apparently still has a few copies in stock.

After British troops acting under orders drove a tank through a prison wall in Iraq to rescue SAS men “captured” by Iraqi police, John Reid thinks everything is just fine.

The UK defence secretary and Iraqi prime minister have denied the unrest in Basra has strained relations between the two countries.

Troops actually there on the ground have a different opinion and have

greatly reduced their presence in the streets Thursday, apparently responding to a provincial governor’s call to sever cooperation until London apologized for storming a police station to free two of its soldiers.

Not suprising since

Basra’s provincial council held an emergency meeting and voted unanimously “to stop dealing with the British forces in Basra and not to cooperate with them because of their irresponsible aggression on a government facility.”

I know people out there. Please John just bring them home. Mind you the people I know out there are contractors of one sort of the other. B

The cartoon band are set to break new technological ground by appearing on stage in 3D holographic format, although due to financial and creative technicalities, the trek will not take place until 2007. The cartoon performance for the last tour was an assault on the senses but this is going to fry your tiny little mind.

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The Guardian interviews Kim Stanley Robinson on the release of his new book. It is a very revelvant science fiction novel set in an America beset by the problems of global warming. It’s an interesting interview after the recent hurricane and rapid rise of energy prices. Perhaps this is the cold grey morning after mankinds largest party, to quote a Shell executive.

You may notice the Dugg it section on the right sidebar. These are stories I dug at digg.com. You can view a feed of these stories at here.

It could have happened before. Last year in fact they just avoided calamity by a whisker.
Lefti wrote of Hurricane Ivan

And there is a better way. One year ago the Wall Street Journal of all organs reported that Cubans do it better.

“Civil Defense Lt. Angel Macareno…credited Cuba’s evacuation program for ensuring no one died. He said nearly 1.9 million of the nation’s 11.2 million people [Ed. note: nearly one-fifth of the population!] - rather than the 1.3 million earlier reported - were evacuated before Ivan struck.

“Evacuations here are widespread and mandatory. Civil defense plans are highly developed, with preparedness education programs for the entire population.

“‘The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions, and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does,’ Salvano Briceno, director of the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, said in Geneva. [Ed. note: of course this applies to a lot more than just hurricane preparations]

“In 1998, only four people died during Hurricane Georges, while 600 died elsewhere. This year, Hurricane Charley killed four people in Cuba, but 27 in Florida.”

Why do we do this to ourselves when we don’t have to?