Sunday, October 30, 2005

Woodland Park Zoo

It's been a really busy month - my project at work launched, my sister and brother-in-law came to visit me for our birthdays, (my sister's birthday is the day after mine), and my friend Martin was at a conference in Portland and came up to see Seattle visit me for the weekend.

So aside from all the crazy hours, I've been to the aquarium, the Space Needle, hiking, the Experience Music Project, and the Woodland Park Zoo. I'm still organizing all the photos that I've taken, but for a start, here are some photos from the zoo.

Snow Leopard

Monday, October 17, 2005

Roulette and Weather

Last week there was a three page article in the Seattle Times about global warming (basically stating that it was an undisputable fact). In yesterday's paper the letter's to the editor had eleven letters about the article - five were critical, four were supportive, and two were written by smart asses who had nothing of note to say.

Sometimes reading letters to the editor are funny, because people are so dumb. Take this except for example: How can anyone predict the climate over the next 100 years when today's experts are so often wrong about tomorrow's weather?

Um, maybe 'cause large scale tends are easy to predict, but the specifics are not. I have no clue what day in February it will snow in Ottawa, but I'm pretty sure that they will be at least a foot of snow on the ground there by the end of February.

Or better yet, to see how dumb their argument is, let's turn it into a gambling analogy - A casino cannot predict where a roulette wheel will land next, so how can the casino make money over the next 100 beats I place? Surely I can't loose any money if I bet on roulette!

World Chess Championship

I was going to add the crosstable as a comment on my previous post, but apparently I can't use <pre> tags in comments.

WCh-FIDE San Luis ARG (ARG), 28 ix-16 x 2005             cat. XX (2739)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Topalov, Veselin g BUL 2788 ** == 1= 1= 1= 1= 1= 1= 10.0 2889
2 Anand, Viswanathan g IND 2788 == ** == 0= =1 01 1= 11 8.5 2811
3 Svidler, Peter g RUS 2738 0= == ** 11 1= == == 1= 8.5 2818
4 Morozevich, Alexander g RUS 2707 0= 1= 00 ** =1 =1 == == 7.0 2743
5 Leko, Peter g HUN 2763 0= =0 0= =0 ** =1 1= 1= 6.5 2706
6 Kasimdzhanov, Rustam g UZB 2670 0= 10 == =0 =0 ** == 01 5.5 2668
7 Adams, Michael g ENG 2719 0= 0= == == 0= == ** == 5.5 2661
8 Polgar, Judit g HUN 2735 0= 00 0= == 0= 10 == ** 4.5 2606
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: TWIC

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

World Chess Championship

The World Chess Championship is being held in Argentina. It's the first "legitimate" championship in about a decade. FIDE - the world chess organization - has feuded with the top players, such as Garry Kasparov, and mucked around with the championship's format, so recent World Championships haven't included the top players. However, FIDE has finally put together a tournament with most of the best chess players in the World.

The tournament is a double round robin with eight of World's best 16 players. I don't really know the details of how they picked who would get to play. (Kramnik, Ivanchuk, and Shirov are the only notable absentees). Kasparov retired earlier this year, so the championship is up for grabs.

Anand, ranked second in the World, behind Kasparov, was the favourite to win, but halfway through Veselin Topalov (ranked third) is 6-0-1 and has a large lead. I'll have to look over some of the games later this month.

TWIC has daily coverage.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Rainy Season

It rained today. It rained yesterday. The forecast for the rest of the week is rain. I think Seattle's rainy season has begin. :-(