Oliver Roeder writes that the fourth game between Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin was another marathon that, like the third, ended similarly with a thrilling draw after Karjakin managed to recover from a poor situation.
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The score between defending champion Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karyakin currently stands at three draws out of the best-of- twelve game match but Oliver Roeder says that the third draw was unlike the boring first two in that it featured some unusual and exciting play in which Karyakin fought back after being taken by surprise by a Carlsen’s 10th move while playing white. But then Carlsen slipped up at move 71 and the game ended with the players agreeing to a draw after the 78th move.
It is interesting how computers are used by the spectators to analyze the best possible moves at each stage of the game. It appears that there are elaborate measures in place to prevent players from gaining access to computers when they take breaks.
On Jimmy Fallon’s show, the magician does some incredible tricks.
NOTE: People who have ideas of how these tricks were done are welcome to post them in the comments and those who would rather not know should avoid them.
As a break from political news, I was going to write about the world chess championship title match that is just beginning in New York between the reigning champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway and Russian grandmaster Sergei Karyakin. The first game ended in a draw. Carlsen is favored but Karyakin is no pushover, currently ranked ninth in the world after becoming the youngest grandmaster ever at the age of 12.
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This is a touching video taken in an animal sanctuary in Thailand in which it looks like (to the extent that one can read an animal’s intentions) a baby elephant thought that the trainer who had rescued her just a year earlier and to whom she had grown close was drowning in a river and so swam out to rescue him
I had to travel out of town at short notice and this disrupted my blogging schedule. It should be back to normal by the end of the week.
I have written before about how, for the blind, darkness is not the prison that sighted people imagine it to be. The sense of sight tends to overwhelm all the other senses but in its absence, they develop and use all their other senses in ways that enable them to navigate their way through the world incredibly well, usually without the need of assistance from sighted people.
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Andrea James writes about something that I have noticed and that is that reducing the number of lanes on a road, what is called a ‘road diet’, and replacing the lost ones with a center lane meant only for turning left, can produce many benefits, not the least of which is that it reduces the number of opportunities for accidents.
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I wrote earlier about the “Rule of Three”, the idea that in a group setting that it takes the presence of at least three members of a marginalized sector to make them feel comfortable enough to speak up. But even then, it may take a conscious effort on their part to break through the dominance of the majority group.
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Yesterday was his birthday but I forgot to inform the whole world. To make amends, here he is in a recent photo.
