Franklin Chen

I'm back, after nine years!

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 10:30:00 GMT

I'm back.

The last time I updated my Web site was in 2016, nine years ago. My last blog post wasn't even a proper standalone piece of writing, but a reference to writing I did somewhere else.

Basically, life happened.

What happened?

Instead of trying to look back on what happened in the last nine years, I prefer to look forward. I have changed a lot, and the world has changed a lot.

Why am I back now?

I'm back because I think I have things to say, to share with the world, and not in clickbait sound bites on "social media" on other people's platforms.

I'm also back as a gesture against the "AI slop" that is increasingly crowding out genuine human writing and communication. Yes, I use LLMs nowadays, and they are useful, but having seen too many AI-generated blog posts and news articles and product reviews, I want to write here, in my own space, in order to assert my humanity, and to encourage all of us to assert our humanity.

Humanity

Speaking of humanity, I am typing this blog post while at a Build Night by Pittsburgh Code and Supply, a local community organization that still exists and is active both online on Slack and in-person. My old programming blog, The Conscientious Programmer, even has a post from 2014 (eleven years ago!) on my first ever Pittsburgh Code and Supply meeting!

It is so awesome that in a world where so much seems transient and unreliable, Pittsburgh Code and Supply keeps going and going as a living, face-to-face community.

Tonight's Build Night had around 24 attendees! What a great turnout.

Moving forward

One thing I still need to do with this blog is merge in the programming blog that I just mentioned. When I launched that blog in 2013, I thought it would be a good idea to separate my "computer programmer" writing from my other writing, but deep down, I never really believed this made sense. Now that I am older (and wiser?), I have grown impatient with doing what my gut tells me makes no sense, so my plan is to merge that blog into this blog so that my collection of writings will be a unified "whole me".

This goes against advice I've seen that says if you write for an audience, it's best to be narrowly focused. But I'm not writing for an audience. I'm writing for myself, and for my friends, and for anyone who cares. Not an "audience".

Respecting your privacy

On this Web site that I relaunched only today (in which I migrated from Hugo to Astro), I've already thrown away the invasive Google Analytics tracking I was using in the past. I have no idea how many "followers" I have on this or that platform, and I don't care anymore.

The other thing I still need to do is get rid of the invasive Disqus comment system I was using. I want to migrate and preserve in static fashion the comments that already exist. I still don't know if I should use some other comment system or just not have a formal comment system at all on my site.

Also, I was thinking of taking photos of tonight's Build Night, and using them here, but although I took a photo to upload to the Meetup event, I decided not to use it here. There really is no need. If you want to experience a Build Night, just sign up and come to one and see for yourself!

Being honest to the past

I am slightly obsessive about being honest to the past, so I have been trying to preserve as much old information as possible during all these migrations and changes. Sometimes I have wondered whether to delete all my posts (since many of them are now embarrassing to me as I have changed as a person), but I always remember my promise to keep them.

What's next?

I'm back after nine years and I'm writing again. I'm participating in communities again, in person (I'll be writing more about that). I'm rediscovering the urgency of being truly human as well as being truly myself.

The powerful e5 Pawn break against the Benoni: using it as White, neutralizing it as Black

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 11:50:37 GMT

I've been very busy coaching chess and therefore haven't published any chess writing lately, but I was inspired by a discussion about a chess position with Isaac, the creator of <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://chesssummit.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://chesssummit.com/">Chess Summit</span>, to write a guest <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://chesssummit.com/2016/07/28/the-powerful-e5-pawn-break-against-the-benoni-using-it-as-white-neutralizing-it-as-black/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://chesssummit.com/2016/07/28/the-powerful-e5-pawn-break-against-the-benoni-using-it-as-white-neutralizing-it-as-black/">blog post there</span>.

If you love chess and want to follow the journeys of chess players who are working hard to improve their game and share their stories along the way, check out the Chess Summit site!

On finally achieving the US National Master chess title at age 45: part 1

Sat, 23 Jan 2016 01:49:11 GMT

On December 18, 2015, I finally achieved the United States National Master chess title, at the relatively late age of 45 (I don't have statistics, but I suspect the vast majority of chess players who reach National Master do so in their teens and twenties). I plan to eventually write about how I significantly improved my chess when I returned after a twenty-year break to start playing again ten years ago at age 35, and how I now teach and coach chess based on my experience in self-improvement. I will also write more about how I continue to work on self-improvement outside of chess.

For now, below is an interview that was published in the June 2016 issue of the Pittsburgh Chess Club publication, "En Passant":

When did you learn chess? How old were you? Who taught you? What did you think or feel during that first experience?

I don't actually remember a moment in my life when I didn't know the basic rules of chess!

Here's what I mean: my first life memories are from shortly before I was 3 years old (I remember celebrating my 3rd birthday), when I was already playing chess with my father. The story is that when I was 2 years old, the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match was happening and the result was that during the summer of 1972, my father and his grad school classmates decided to teach themselves chess. According to him, at some point I watched and deduced some of the movements, and he noticed my interest. I don't remember any of that, but I remember that at some point he bought "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess" (he may still have this in his library) and he led me through it after he had finished it himself. So that was my first chess book, and we did it before I was 4 years old, because life changed for me after my sister was born before I turned 4, and my father no longer had much attention for me for a while.

What I remember is simply the joy of seeing the geometry of the different piece movements fitting together. I was also extremely particular about setting up the board: I always wanted my Knights to face each other, and I still am, and at the beginning of every game, you will note that I always adjust my Knights accordingly.

What was the next big step in your chess life as a child?

After my father finished graduate school, he was very busy finding jobs, etc., and chess was put aside for a while, but finding chess sets lying around in school led me to find in the libraries some chess books written for children, and I enjoyed them very much. When I was 7, he found his first stable job in Morristown, New Jersey, so we moved yet again. We discovered that the Morris County Free Library had a huge chess book collection, and we started reading through it together. In the process, we finally realized that we had gotten some of the rules wrong when playing with each other at home!

I must have read through 30 or 40 chess books from that library between age 7 and 9 before we moved again. During that time, I had nobody to play with, because the one time in school recess I tried to play with a classmate who claimed he knew how to play, he captured my King after I overlooked a pin, and claimed victory, and would not listen to me when I said I could not make an illegal make and Kings cannot be captured! I did have one interesting experience with a chess computer.

I also started teaching my younger sister chess during this time period (at around age 4), because I had no one else to play with other than my father. And I lost every single game I played with my father, because he would not let me win; he would give me chances when I was losing, but never let me actually win!

How did you get into playing in chess tournaments?

First, my father had to learn that there was such a thing as chess tournaments for amateurs. This happened when he accidentally discovered a chess club.

Shortly before I turned 10, my parents and my sister and I were at the local community center (for a new job, my father had moved the family again, to Madison Heights, Michigan) when my father heard strange noises in the basement and wondered what was going on. He went down and came back up all excited. My sister and I went back down with him, and I still remember the thick cigar smoke and the men loudly banging on ticking chess clocks while swearing and trash-talking during blitz. My father and I joined the club and began playing in casual blitz as well as in unrated club tournaments.

Everyone said we should also join the Michigan Chess Association and the US Chess Federation and play in official rated tournaments. My father said "wait, we just paid for one membership and you want us to pay for two others already?", but signed us up for MCA membership, so that we could get the newsletter and stay informed.

When was your first tournament? Do you remember what you felt when you won your first official game?

By summer, everyone was excited about the upcoming annual Michigan Open over Labor Day weekend, so we went, signed up with USCF, and played in our first USCF rated tournament, the under-1800 Reserve Section of the 1980 Michigan Open. I lost my first round game, but in the second round, I won a very long, 88-move game as White (I still have the original scoresheet and just looked over the game again) against a 1400-rated opponent. My opponent made the final blunder in an endgame, allowing me to trade into a King and Pawn ending I knew was a win. I took the opposition, won the Pawn Queening race, and knew how to win with a Queen against Knight Pawn.

It felt great to bounce back so quickly from a first round loss to winning my first tournament game. I ended up scoring 3.5/7.0 and winning a 2nd place Unrated trophy, while my father won the 1st place Unrated trophy. I achieved my first provisional rating of 1591, while his was 1574, lower than mine despite his higher score.

My father was so excited by our success that we continued playing in tournaments for a while.

What happened after your first tournament?

After our first tournament, my father and I were excited to continue playing. He decided to continue playing in the Reserve Section while I never played in the Reserve Section again after the first tournament, because unlike him, I was not in it for the prizes but for the challenge of playing against stronger opponents and getting better myself. I did well in the Open Section of my second tournament three months after my first, and my rating went up from 1591 to 1659, so that was exciting. I won no prize, while my father got what he wanted and won prizes for a fine performance in the Reserve Section. After this second tournament, everyone was taking note of my progress, and said I had talent. I didn't think so highly of myself, because by then, I had met Ben Finegold, who was a year younger than me, but already much better than me in the tournament scene.

In January 1981, my father applied for a chess scholarship from the American Chess Foundation in order for fund some chess instruction for me, and we got funding for ten lessons in May from the winner of the 1980 Michigan Open, Master David Whitehouse.

Before the lessons even began, I had continued to do well in tournaments, beat my first Expert, and gotten my rating up to 1741.

I very much enjoyed the lessons, and still remember a great deal from them in retrospect. Mr. Whitehouse showed me some endgames, openings, and illustrative games of his, but most of all, gave me a tremendously useful book list, and I would even today recommend the study of many of the classics that he listed.

What was your first setback?

Unfortunately, despite the ten weeks of instruction, it turned out that I was stuck at a plateau for an entire year of tournament play, not having gone higher than 1765. In fact, during my second year of tournament play (age 11), I had my first loss against a lower-rated opponent, my first draw against a lower-rated opponent, and my first loss to an unrated opponent.

Meanwhile, my father himself had topped out at a rating of around 1774, I had finally beaten him at home (after which he never played a game of chess again for another 20 years), family life was in disarray as he looked for another job, and I was becoming a teenager and not getting along with my parents or my teachers in school. So my father let our USCF memberships expire, in July 1982, and my parents worried that I was too obsessed with chess (my mother never approved of it in the first place) and took away my chess set. I didn't protest too much, because I had my own life problems at the time, plus had no idea how to continue to improve in chess. So that's how I retired from chess at age 12. Life was in disarray for everyone, and I almost failed my classes in the fall during the 7th grade.

When did you return to chess after this setback?

Within the following year, some things had improved: my father had a new job lined up, and he renewed my lapsed USCF membership and gave me my chess set back. It was clear, though, that chess was only to be a hobby and he would not be supporting me in any substantial way. In 1983-1985, I concluded my chess career of my youth by playing two tournaments each of those years (during which my father had one more job change, the final one of his career, and we had moved a couple more times).

Through introspection, I did make a conscious effort to improve my play and broke through my 1700 plateau quickly during my return to chess at age 13, having missed age 12. I got up to 2050 when I was 15. All the while, though, I felt more and more that I still didn't really understand chess, and Ben Finegold had long since made Master, and would drop out of high school to move to Europe for a professional chess career. I did still think enough about chess that I wrote my college application on how chess is simultaneously an art, sport, and science, and informed how I think about human endeavors.

Then chess ended for me for 20 years.

As your rating was rising, say after it past 1200, 1500, 1800, what types of thoughts did you have? Did you think you would one day become a Chess Master or Grandmaster? Can you share the emotions of reaching higher ratings?

In my youth, I never believed I was going to become a Master, and I never acted as though I wanted to give it a try.

I liked to play, hoped I was improving, but didn't have the internal drive or family support to do anything really serious with chess. I didn't really play that much chess as a youth: in 1980-1985, I played 16 rated tournaments, for a total of 83 rated games that took me from unrated to an initial rating of 1591 to a peak rating of 2050. Compare with my adult tournament career so far from 2005-2015, which consisted of 436 rated games: the vast majority of my chess playing has occurred in my adulthood, with rating range from 2057 up finally to 2201.

My plateau at age 11, during which I received no encouragement or support from anyone, made me pessimistic even when I recovered from it. To be honest, during the entire time I played from 1983-1985, I was afraid to have any serious expectations or goals. My own lack of confidence combined with my fear of family disapproval caused me to actually be relieved when I no longer had time for chess. In fact, I considered myself rather lucky to have made it to past 2000 and had a lingering fear that if I continued, I would just lose that.

What made you return to chess after a 20 year absence?

I did play a little bit of casual chess in my freshman year in college, but then never played a game again for 17 years, nor did I follow any chess world news during that time. Chess was dead to me during those years.

But in the early 2000s, a friend mentioned that there were strong free chess engines that were worth trying out. I was skeptical at first, because in my youth I could beat chess computers. But I started playing with some engines to see how much they had improved since my childhood. They were still not so strong, but were definitely much stronger!

I became very interested in whether the engines were strong enough to resolve some analytical questions I had about complicated games in my childhood in which I didn't know if I played something correctly (in particular, some sacrifices). So my renewed interest in chess was not as a competitor but as an analyst. I started reading chess books again, and rejoining USCF, although not yet playing. In particular, around 2003, my life was changed when a chess book showed up in the public library, John Watson's "Chess Strategy in Action". I checked it out and it completely altered my perception of and understanding of chess.

Meanwhile, at this point in my life in my mid-30s, I was noticing small but clear signs of physical and mental decline (I had peaked in my 5K race speed) and thought to myself that I had unfinished business in my life, dreams I gave up or did not allow myself in childhood, that I should return to soon if I wanted to accomplish them at all before it was too late. One of those dreams was to actually see how well I can play chess if I committed to improvement, since I believed deep in my heart that I had stopped before reaching my full potential.

I discovered the existence of the Pittsburgh Chess Club in 2004, played a game of chess with my father while visiting him for Christmas, our first game in over 20 years, and in 2005, started playing in tournaments again.

What did you do to move your rating up? Did you study a lot? play a lot? What types of exercises did you do? Did you have chess boards set up at places in the house? Was there anything unique you could share that readers will enjoy knowing or reading?

In my youth, there were no chess engines or computers really worth using, so progress was much harder for someone like me who was on his own and did not have access to strong coaches (other than the ten free lessons I received at age 11). So, I initially just learned from playing blitz often at the club, playing in tournaments and reading books and magazines.

To break my 1700 plateau, I studied specific opening systems that had clear strategic goals for the middlegame. That made a huge difference moving forward because I was no longer playing just randomly, but with purpose. That worked to get me up to 2000+, but it was at that point when I realized that I was holding myself back by playing only these weird offbeat openings that I had studied. I had to go back to the classics in order to rebuild myself to go beyond 2000.

I had another plateau during my entire first year back to chess in adulthood, I was stuck at a plateau of the low 2000s and despaired of ever improving beyond my childhood level. I realized that I had to rebuild my chess understanding from scratch. I had never studied chess systematically before, had a really spotty understanding of every aspect of the game, from openings to middlegames to endgames. So in my second year back, in 2006, I started rebuilding myself, gradually transforming how I play. That paid off as I finally cracked 2100 and then 2150, during 2006 and 2007. It was not until I passed 2100 that for the first time in my life, I decided to set myself a goal of making Master!

The single most helpful tool to me in recent years has been analyzing my own games in detail with use of strong chess engines. I would say this is more important than anything else. Being confronted with reliable evidence of ideas or tactics that you missed (or your opponent missed) must be the single most useful tool for improvement available today that wasn't available in the pre-computer era. In particular, computers make it easy to try "what if" by experimenting with different continuations, setups, and see how they measure up.

Were there times you were disappointed with yourself and thought about quitting? Were there other factors like friend, family, girlfriend who led you or tried to dissuade you to continue playing chess? Is there any story you would like to share on this topic?

I have often been disappointed in my chess play, but interestingly, never seriously thought about quitting except in one situation: I only thought about quitting once I came close to reaching Master and kept failing, which coincided chronologically with my meeting a young woman.

Every loss or draw that set me back as I approached 2200 had a tendency of making me feel like I didn't have what it takes. And starting to date again in 2007 definitely began to take a toll on my chess, both because Abby actively opposed my chess activities at the time and because of my whole schedule and routine was disrupted, making tournament play difficult logistically. By the time we got married in 2009, I had basically quit chess, and I thought for good, and not willingly but as a concession. I periodically tried to come back and play, but always less well than I was capable, because of being rusty, unsupported, and tired. It wasn't until the second half of 2015 that I was ready to try again to play the best I could, this time finally with complete emotional support from Abby, who had finally come to understand how much chess meant to me. I also canceled a lot of my usual activities in the second half of 2015 in order to focus my energy outside of work on chess, and all this paid off.

What is the single, most important factor a chess player must consider to move up his/her rating?

We all hit a plateau at some point, at which we are apparently making the same kinds of errors that stronger players are not making, so somehow we have to change the kinds of errors that we make.

I think the most powerful tool available is analysis of your own games. Each game you play has the fingerprints of your personal weaknesses all over it. Using a chess engine, and ideally a strong human guide who can explain concepts and variations that lie behind the engine's numerical evaluations, you can learn to gradually remove errors. For example, if you lost an otherwise good game only because of one misconception during an endgame, avoiding that single error in the future could pay off in any number of similar situations. Or if you misplayed an opening, rebuilding your thought process that led to a strategic misunderstanding can help in all future games using that opening.

Have you been close to 2200 several times and then fell? (therefore postponing the Master level)? Can you give details of how you felt?

Yes, I have been close several times! In fact, a couple of times I had 2200 locked up, in the sense that if I had withdrawn from a tournament in progress, I would have guaranteed going over 2200 based on the wins I had already racked up in the tournament.

The first time was in the 2007 PA State Action Championship. I went in at 2171 and had won the first three rounds. In the fourth round, I had a totally won game against a Master and nerves got to me and I fell apart and lost. In the final round, I had a totally won game against an 1800 and fell apart and lost. This was my first experience of completely choking under the pressure of knowing I was very close to 2200.

Then in January 2008, I had a rating of 2197 from a Pittsburgh Chess League round. The thing you have to understand is that in January-February, I was simultaneously playing in the PCC Championship held on Tuesday nights, and had won my first three rounds by February, which meant that if I had withdrawn, I would have secured far more than the 3 rating points necessary to go over 2200. But I had never withdrawn from a tournament in my life, and didn't want to achieve Master through calculated cowardice. So I played on. But I choked, and proceeded to draw the fourth game and lose the fifth. I continued to play worse as I got engaged to be married, and quit chess the year of my marriage in 2009.

I periodically came back in 2010-2012 but just played worse and worse, unforced errors. In 2013, I started recovering, and in 2014, I again almost made Master. At 2195, I choked, losing a won game against a much lower-rated player while a Rook up! All I needed was to win that game to make Master. And I kept on choking in tournaments after that.

In fall of 2015, I more or less stopped choking. I still played badly sometimes, but I distinguish between poor quality of play and just plain choking. How did I stop choking? I stopped paying attention to my rating. In fact, in my final tournament games of 2015 that led me to go over 2200, I did not do any calculations to determine whether I would or would not go over. I knew it could be close, but did not want to calculate. I tried to focus on my games and nothing else.

I'm still proud that I made Master without the trick of withdrawing from any tournaments.

Can you discuss which is more important for chess improvement: studying the opening, middlegame, or endgame? Explain why.

The short answer is that everything is actually interconnected, and I wish I had known this earlier. A quality game will have a story behind it that connects all phases of chess. Because of this, I think the study of complete, annotated games (including annotating your own games) is the single most useful technique for improvement.

For example, opening study is popular, but studying the opening in isolation, apart from understanding fundamental principles and knowing not to fall into tricky traps, is almost irrelevant at under-2000 level, where games will mostly be decided not by opening subtleties, but by later parts of the game.

My main improvements have come from understanding the middlegame better, learning how to assess positions and create plans based on features of the positions, especially through considering Pawn structure. If you think of an opening as a way to try to get to a certain kind of middlegame, and think of the middlegame as a way to get to a certain kind of endgame, then everything starts to fit together. The middlegame is the core.

Improving in the endgame is important at all levels. When I look at my first tournament games at a 1500-1600 level, I see that the vast majority of them went into endgames where anything could happen because none of us really knew what we were doing, but I managed draws and wins because I was a bit better there than opponents who otherwise matched me in the opening and middlegame.

With my young students, I go over the opening phase with them only enough for them to survive it (by playing classically and avoiding needlessly complex and subtle variations), but focus my instruction primarily on how to get to a desired middlegame by means of opening choice. I also add endgame instruction incrementally as it becomes a bottleneck in overall performance: when they get good enough to get a dominating middlegame and then fail to win in the endgame, that's when we work on the endgame. But I feel like spending a lot of time on the endgame up front is not realistic if one is not even surviving the middlegame.

Were there any special, small or large celebration when you became a Master?

No, there was no celebration. I have to confess I'm not really a celebration kind of person.

What are your plans now?

I will continue what I've already been doing in chess since 2012: writing and teaching.

I started writing about chess on my personal blog around 2012. I really enjoy sharing my analysis and thoughts with others, and this eventually led to my writing for GM Nigel Davies' The Chess Improver site and giving private chess lessons since 2013. I am still teaching now and very much enjoy helping others improve their chess. So teaching has been my main focus in chess for a while now.

I will continue to play in local tournaments as time permits. I am not done improving yet! Also, I enjoy being a role model for my students, to walk the walk as I give them advice about how to study, improve, and compete. I have even been inspired to try to play model games to illustrate specific themes I teach. For example, last year when the subject was isolated Pawns, I played a game in which I chose an opening aimed specifically against an isolated Pawn structure.

(Update of 2016-06-25)

I still play chess with my father whenever I see him. He's still playing pretty well at age 78. I feel he is possibly even better than when he was in his 40s, probably because he has all the time in the world to play casual games regularly at his local community center since retirement. It's actually harder for me to beat him now than when I was a kid. Here's a photo from the last visit to my parents' in May 2016; I barely managed to win this game, where I took advantage of the weakness of his isolated Pawn in the endgame:

How the X-Files reminded me of the meaning of Martin Luther King Jr.

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 03:07:06 GMT

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Today was my second official celebration (with a day off from work as a holiday) of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. (I wrote last year on my first official celebration.)

For today, I not only reread MLK's 1963 <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">"Letter from a Birmingham jail"</span> as I do annually, but also rewatched my single favorite X-Files episode, "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" from 1997.

Quite unexpectedly, this hilariously entertaining yet dark and sad episode of the TV series made a deep impression on my mind when I saw it almost twenty years ago.

MLK in the X-files episode (warning: spoilers!!)

If you haven't watched this old 1997 episode of the X-files before you might want to go and watch it before reading any further. If you already have watched it or don't care, here's an unofficial transcript.

Basically, this episode is a Forrest Gump inspired look back at history, in which the infamous "smoking man" character is revealed (or is he?) to have had a history involving having a father who was an executed communist spy, but he himself grows up into a young man devoted to working covertly to defeat perceived threats to America. According to the story as it unfolds in this episode, the smoking man personally assassinated both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

What made the part about assassinating MLK poignant was that he respected MLK, and decided to eliminate him because of a speech by MLK he heard on his radio against the Vietnam War.

The smoking man says:

"If this were only a civil rights issue, I'd vote for a King/Benjamin Spock presidential ticket. But after last night, it's not... I respect King. He's an extraordinary man. But now he's talking like a Maoist... And if he convinces Negroes not to fight in Vietnam, we'll lose... and the first domino will have fallen."

MLK's 1967 speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence"

Here is a transcript of the actual speech that so angered and saddened the X-Files smoking man (and in real history, a whole lot of people).

An excerpt used in the X-Files episode: "It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism."

Here's audio of MLK himself speaking:

What the US and world were like in 1997

When I was watching this episode in 1997, I had been in a state of apathy and disappointment in the legacy of MLK for a number of years, partially thanks to having watched Spike Lee's 1992 film "Malcolm X" and then gone on to read the 1965 "The Autobiography of Malcolm X". I had come to get the impression that MLK had failed, because he was too "soft", and Malcolm X was "tougher". Note that the 1990s was a dark time, as the Rodney King beating was in 1991 and the LA riots were in 1992. And the Bosnian War 1992-1995 was fresh in my memory, illustrating that the end of the Cold War in 1991 was just the beginning of a falling apart of the former Eastern Bloc. So the 1990s were a time when I wondered what had gone wrong, not only in America, but in the whole world.

Somehow, revisiting MLK by accident through this X-Files episode, I returned to thinking that I wished MLK had lived much longer. It felt to me that he was only starting his global work when he was shut down. Yet, as long as his words remain, and are not forgotten, there may be hope. Not so much the overexposed 1963 words like "I have a dream", but the 1967 words against the American war on Vietnam.

History

That's why, when 2003 came around, with the beginning of the Iraq War, I felt angry and sad, and remembered that X-Files episode. I knew that MLK would have warned against the Iraq War as well. Was there any way he could have stopped it? Or would he have been eliminated, again?

Conclusion

Every year, I will continue to renew my memory of and my understanding of what MLK did in his life and what he was in the middle of doing when he was murdered.

If you were this old man playing chess against a young boy, what would you have done?

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 17:08:32 GMT

I'm going to tell you a true story about an old man and a young boy (age under 10) who played a game of chess in a competitive tournament where prize money was at stake. I'd like you to think about the odd situation that occurred, while looking at it, with empathy, from different points of view:

the old man
the young boy
the boy's parent
the tournament director, whose job is to enforce the official US Chess Federation rules of tournament chess
the bigger picture of the chess community
the biggest picture of life lessons

Given the whole story, do you think that what happened was right? Is there something you would have done differently if you had been one of the actors in the story? In particular, what would you have done as the old man?

Prelude

Let's call the old man Mr. M, the boy B, the tournament director T.

In the beginning of the second half of a long tournament, Mr. M and B were paired against each other. Neither had been doing too well in the tournament up till that point, but there was the rest of the tournament to go, and anything can happen in a long tournament. Mr. M on paper had the highest US chess rating of their shared class division going into the tournament and so was the favorite to win. B was a young newcomer to chess who had only been playing for half a year but was improving rapidly.

It turned out during the game that B played extremely well, outplaying Mr. M. The position was complicated but B had an advantage. B thought he spotted a winning move, and carelessly (still being young and impulsive, unfortunately) picked up one of his pieces in order to make the winning move, but in mid-air realized it was not going to win.

Touch-move

The touch-move rule in chess is one of the most important rules that exists in serious tournament chess. If you touch your own piece with intent to move it, or touch an opponent's piece with intent to capture it, then you have to complete your move using the touched piece one way or another.

Violating touch-move is very common among young chess players in a casual setting, and therefore a critical bad habit to break, as B learned the hard way in this game.

Where to move it?

However, since B was still in mid-air, he did not have to complete the move he was going to play. He did have to complete some legal move using his touched piece, which he still held. At this point, he intended to put the piece back on its original square, as is legal to do so, to think of what move to make with the piece.

Unfortunately, in confusion, B accidentally released the piece on a random other square rather than the original square. This was really bad luck because the move that was thereby determined by the release.

The old man's decision

Since Mr. M knew as well as B did that B did not intend to release the piece on the absurd square it was released at, he decided to allow B to return the piece to the original square in order to make a different legal move. Very charitable!

But then Mr. M suddenly changed his mind and said the accidentally determined move had to stand. The tournament director was called and ruled that according to the rules, indeed the move had to stand: the piece was released on a legal square.

B's parent did not contest the ruling, because it was by the book, and the result was that Mr. M captured B's piece and quickly won the game, because the rest of the game was nonsensical given the nonsensical move B was forced to play.

Your reaction?

Given this information, how do you feel about what happened? Rules are rules, but Mr. M had the power to insist on strict enforcement or to overlook the unintended violation, and originally intended to let it go.

My first reaction when learning about this story was anger that Mr. M had changed his mind like that. If Mr. M had taken one course of action or the other, without suddenly changing his mind, I would have been OK with that. Either be forgiving or play by the book, but be consistent!

My second reaction, was from the point of view of what this incident meant for B in the long run. I had some conflicting feelings:

I felt bad about B being forced to lose an important game in which he was playing some of the best chess he had ever played in his life.
I was annoyed that B still hadn't mastered "touch-move", and felt that he needed to learn a lesson that would help him avoid such carelessness in his future chess tournaments, and this was a legitimate case of his learning an important lesson.
I worried about how B would feel about this loss, given that he had started off the tournament pretty badly and was just getting his momentum back by the second half.

Complications

But this wasn't the whole story. The other thing Mr. M did when explaining why he changed his mind was that he wanted to win the game and the tournament (recall that he was in a worse position against B, and hadn't been doing so well in the tournament despite being the highest rated player in the section). So his concern wasn't about strictly enforcing the rules; presumably if he already had a tournament win locked up and this game didn't "matter", he would have been "charitable" and allowed B to continue.

Does this change how you feel about what happened?

For me, Mr. M's justification made me actively dislike him. At the same time, maybe B learned an additional life lesson in this tournament, that adults will do whatever is in their own interest and any generosity offered may be contingent on whether it impacts their own interest.

The end result

Some rounds later, the tournament was complete. It turned out that Mr. M won all subsequent games he played in the tournament, and therefore won the tournament, along with the prize money for first place, $500. He achieved his goal, fulfilling his justification for being firm in his game against B. So from his point of view, he made the right decision and got his moment of glory.

B bounced back from his disaster and also won his remaining games, and ended up with a pretty successful tournament overall. You could say that although it was unfortunate that his touch-move slip might have cost him first place, he learned a lot about taking touch-move seriously and about recovering from unfortunate incidents during a chess tournament. So from B's point of view, he probably learned a lot more from Mr. M's adherence to the rules than if Mr. M had been too nice.

Conclusion

Although I don't like how Mr. M went about what he did, the end result seems actually optimal for everyone involved. Or was it?

Appendix

I've written in the past about some life lessons I learned from chess as a child. I'm curious how B will look back at his incident later in life.

Accidentally discovering and performing some music by Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth: Coração que Sente

Tue, 29 Dec 2015 23:05:10 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

In November, I fell in love with some music I accidentally discovered.

What happened was that I was looking for some music for flute and guitar to play, with me on flute and one of my friends on guitar, and I did a simple search in the local library online catalog, and at the top sorted by date was "Brazilian folk tunes for flute and guitar", which came with a CD of sample performance tracks, so I picked it up.

What followed was a series of explorations that resulted in unexpected changes in my life.

Exploring the Brazilian music in the score book

I listened to some tracks on the CD of this book of arrangements and found the music (Brazilian polkas, tangos, waltzes) really enchanting. Most of the music was by a composer Ernesto Nazareth, who lived 1863-1934. I wouldn't call this music "folk tunes": it's a sophisticated combination of popular and classical styles using catchy dance rhythms.

I'm a real sucker for waltzes, so at first I thought I would pick one of the beautiful waltzes to choose to suggest to play with a partner on guitar. It came down to "Confidências" or "Coração que Sente" (English translation: "Heart that Feels"). The latter was much easier and shorter, as I learned while sight reading through it with the CD track, so I thought I was done.

Finding astounding performances of "Coração que Sente" on YouTube

Looking for performances of the piece on YouTube to get an idea of how people play it, I immediately entered a strange new world.

First of all, I learned that the original music was for piano. OK. Then, while listening to and/or watching a dozen or so videos of performances of this piece (OK, I was obsessed), I found a huge variety of interpretations, and some of them spoke to me more than others. Some I found light and boring. The ones that interested me were the ones that were extremely intense and probing. You might think this music was just fluff, but I found a dark undercurrent behind it that spoke to me, in that its different sections (the piece is roughly in rondo form) present clear emotional contrasts, with longing, melancholy, and manic excitement.

Arthur Moreira Lima

A very intense performance I found was by a pianist named Arthur Moreira Lima in 1975, used after the fact as soundtrack on YouTube for a silent film using footage from 1929. What an odd pairing!

Lima goes all out in Romantic expressiveness, with extensive rubato and dynamic and rhythmic flexibility. It was completely different from the relatively straight, danceable version on the flute/guitar CD demo.

You have to listen to his performance (ignore the film or watch it, as you wish):

João Carlos Assis Brasil

Even more extreme than Lima was this weird guy João Carlos Assis Brasil, who is apparently so unknown in the English-speaking world that Wikipedia doesn't have an entry on him, although I found this random pieced-together bio.

His live performance here from 2013 is the single most extreme, yet deepest, interpretation of this waltz I found (he adds his own ornamentation). I was deeply moved by it. (Warning, bad sound quality.)

Other good performances

Fernanda Canaud, with a very expressive performance (including her own extensive embellishments), uses drastic changes in articulation and tempo for contrast. I particularly liked how naturally she seemed to express her personality through the piece:

Maria Theresa Madeira captures well the moods of the different sections of the piece; I really like the rhythmic alertness and drive throughout:

Some random YouTube guy named Ilton, playing a really crappy upright piano, but with amazing rhythmic expression that I totally love (if he played this on a good piano, I would consider his interpretation one of my favorites, period):

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://lucianoalves.com.br/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://lucianoalves.com.br/">Luciano Alves</span>, 2013, in an elegant performance:

Marcelo Bratke in a relaxed, easygoing, dream interpretation with a lilt (but after all the intense interpretations, I find this tame, I confess):

The performance that made me decide to learn and play the piece

So I spent a lot of time listening to and watching performances of the piece, but one performance was the one that made me decide to go learn and play the piece! It was this one by some random guy Marcelo Chiarella:

Why? Because I could relate to his playing:

He wasn't some famous pro pianist, as far as I could tell.
The sound quality was good and the recording was as though I were standing right there, made me feel like I was in his home, and nobody else there.
I could see his hands up close.
I liked various things he did with expression (especially when he wasn't pedaling).

And I knew that I could be much more expressive and personal (remember, the title in English translation is "Heart that feels") while playing this piece solo, on piano, than in a flute/guitar duet. So I decided to go for it.

Finding an official free score

I had to find a score. Luckily, it turned out that there was some big 150-year anniversary celebration for Ernesto Nazareth in 2013, and I found an official free PDF score on the page for the piece.

That page also had a story about the title of the piece and why it was composed. It was in Portuguese, so I tried with the help of Google Translate to translate it (I only studied Portuguese for several weeks many years ago), and pieced together (I hope I didn't get this too wrong) that Nazareth dedicated it to a student of his, Gabriella Crauz, who had showed great emotion as Nazareth described the last days of a dying nephew, as though she had been there herself experiencing what he experienced as he saw the sights in the city one last time. (If you know Portuguese, please correct me if I got the story wrong.)

This story only added to the sense I already had that this seemingly simple piece hid a depth of emotion that some performers already revealed for me.

My performance of "Coração que Sente"

As I started working on the piece, I had to decide where and when to perform it. It turned out that I learned that friends who mean a lot to me decided to move. This was really tough news to me, and they have always invited me and Abby to their December holiday party, where I play music, so I decided that I was going to perform the piece at their (now farewell) party and openly dedicate my performance to them, because they are human beings of deep feeling, hence "Heart that feels".

I performed the piece at the party the day after Christmas. In my nervousness, I completely lost my train of thought a couple of times and botched things up inexplicably (I had gone through the piece with no errors so many times at home), but I made it through, and my gesture was appreciated.

I then decided to quickly record myself at home soon after (and still botched some things up), so here I am. This is for Henry and Gina:

Other music by Ernesto Nazareth

I spent all this time talking about just one piece by Nazareth, but he wrote much more, and more substantial pieces.

I totally love Fernanda Canaud's performance of "Batuque", "Coração que Sente", and "Odeon" (the performance of "Coração que Sente" is very different from the one I posted above: more inward, refined, beautiful rather than super-dramatic):

Here is Nazareth playing his own pieces in recordings from 1912-1930:

Here is a one-hour special documentary video "Nazareth Revisitado":

A note on the English-language-oriented Web

I found a whole world of music and musicians that barely register in the English-language-oriented part of the Web. Most of what I found when trying to look up Nazareth or various Brazilian pianists was in Portuguese. So it's been really humbling to remember that many in the English-speaking world might not even know about all these Brazilian composers and musicians who are not big enough stars to warrant international fame.

Conclusion

I am grateful for accidentally discovering an entire world of Brazilian music and performers of it through my search in the local library catalog for music to play.

I am grateful for friends who inspire me by their examples as human beings of genuine and great feeling.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 24: conclusion and thanks

Thu, 24 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 24

(Reddit discussion)

Whew, it's finally over, this "24 days of Hackage, 2015" project!

I never expected to do something like this, ever, and I am grateful to everyone who encouraged me while I was engaged in it. I enjoyed the quality of comments and corrections I got as well as links to related Haskell libraries.

Some closing thoughts:

My project goals

My goals for the project were simple at first ("show some stuff"), but quickly sharpened as I went along and became more explicit in my mind. Here are some:

Provide running, tested code, not just snippets
Make sure the code is reproducibly buildable, by using Stack and Stackage LTS as a basis
Anticipate later updating of the articles in case of factual changes or library API changes
Provide useful reference links to documentation and examples
Write example code that, although necessarily limited, might inspire enough curiosity to look further
Explain why I find something interesting, rather than just show it
Make note of possible improvements, especially for human usability
Discuss only libraries I have used, are starting to use, or intend to use in the future
Try to reuse tasks and code from earlier posts in order to create more of a sense of progression and continuity

I hope that I have succeeded in accomplishing some of these goals. I know that because of time constraints, I had to cut corners where if I had time, I would have written much more text and written much more realistic code.

The Haskell ecosystem keeps growing

There a hundred other libraries I could have picked to mention along the way, some of which I've used, many of which I've heard good things about and never used (yet).

Some useful coverage of what's been happening in Haskell:

Gabriel Gonzalez's State of the Haskell ecosystem
Stephen Diehl's <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/haskell_2016.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/haskell_2016.html">reflections on Haskell in 2015</span>
Commercial Haskell group's material in progress on intermediate Haskell

Other cool stuff I noticed

There is a blog series on solving Advent of Code using Haskell. I've deliberately not read this yet, because I might want to try Advent of Code myself sometime.

On writing

I don't expect to do a "24 days of Hackage" again.

For one thing, it was exhausting, at a time of year when I ended up having to cancel most of my normal life in December to dedicate myself to the project! I did this project out of gratitude and love for a community that has provided me the tools to make my programming life more fun, productive, and just plain joyful, but I am relieved that it's over and plan to just relax for the holidays.

I also decided that in future writing projects (about anything, not just Haskell-related), I would like more time to take a different pace, and write in more depth about topics, perhaps multi-part articles that assume a well-defined audience. I knew up front for "24 days" that I was providing "appetizers" here, and without knowing exactly which part of an undefined audience would find which appetizers useful. I would like to provide complete meals targeted toward well-defined audiences, with a preface for each article explaining what background I assume, with pointers to prerequisites as appropriate, and build up a web of interlinked information.

I have a general suggestion: how about if the Haskell community collaborated on a "module of the week" project, maybe even with the idea of incrementally building up some kind of mega-demo app showcasing Haskell that meaningfully incorporated many libraries and would be an example real world project that would be very useful for learners?

Meanwhile, I would like to encourage anyone who wants to write anything, however short or long, to go and do it. It's a tremendous learning opportunity.

Conclusion

I'd like to thank Ollie again for having done the "24 days" in the past, putting out the word that he couldn't do it this year, and encouraging me to take it up when I suggested maybe I could do something to contribute. Don't forget, his <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/">"24 days" series</span> are still up and valuable as reference.

Also, I was happy that the Haskell user group in Brazil has been translating, with my permission, my articles into Portuguese for their blog and use the articles as a basis for discussion and growing the local Haskell community!

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 23: Liquid Haskell: refinement types for the real world

Wed, 23 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 23

(Reddit discussion)

During the course of this article series "24 days of Hackage, 2015", I've made an effort to give a flavor of using QuickCheck to specify contracts that should be satisfied by our code that are not checked at compile time but are checked through randomized testing at run time. But we know that just because code has hundreds or thousands of tests, that is not a proof that code is actually correct for all possible cases. I've also used newtype as a way of indicating intent that I want to restrict legal values for a type, such as on day 15 when I laboriously intended refinements of existing types but with no automatically checkable proof that I was populating them correctly.

-- | User input without a newline, and not equal to "secret".
newtype NotSecretString =
  NotSecretString { getNotSecretString :: NotNewlineString }

type NotNewlineString = [NotNewlineChar]

newtype NotNewlineChar =
  NotNewlineChar { getNotNewlineChar :: Char }
  deriving (Show)

This is why I'm so excited about Liquid Haskell, a static analysis system for Haskell that is under very active development. It provides a refinement type system that allows you to write, in a natural and clear way, certain varieties of contracts that can be verified at compile time. I believe this sort of system will be a game changer in the future of programming languages.

What is a refinement type?

A refinement type is a type with some predicate that "refines" what possible values are allowed. In Liquid Haskell, you can add refinement type annotations to Haskell code, embedded in ordinary Haskell comments, and also write your own predicates. It's great that Liquid Haskell can be introduced into existing Haskell code without disruption or requiring that the Liquid Haskell checker be run in order to compile the Haskell code.

As an example (taken from an official demo), below we have an ordinary key-value association list data type and then we have values of two different refinements of the type where we wanted to check at compile time that the integer key is constrained in the desired way.

data AssocP k v = KVP [(k, v)]

{-@ digitsP :: AssocP {v:Int | (Btwn 0 v 9)} String @-}
digitsP :: AssocP Int String
digitsP = KVP [ (1, "one")
              , (2, "two")
              , (3, "three") ]

{-@ sparseVecP :: AssocP {v:Int | (Btwn 0 v 1000)} Double @-}
sparseVecP :: AssocP Int Double
sparseVecP = KVP [ (12 ,  34.1 )
                 , (92 , 902.83)
                 , (451,   2.95)
                 , (877,   3.1 )]

{-@ predicate Btwn Lo V Hi = (Lo <= V && V <= Hi) @-}

One thing to note about refinement types is that an expression can have more than one refinement type that you define. For example, an Int refined to being between 0 and 9 is of course also an Int refined to being between 0 and 20.

You can use refinements for preconditions and postconditions, and refine function types.

Great live demo site!

Go to the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://goto.ucsd.edu:8090/index.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://goto.ucsd.edu:8090/index.html">interactive live Liquid Haskell demo site</span>!

Because an excellent demo site already exists, I'm not going to walk through any examples of using Liquid Haskell, although I may look into going back to my old code to retroactively start adding use of Liquid Haskell.

The demo site has dozens of fully worked out examples, embedded in a live environment where you can change the code and rerun the checker to see what happens. Examples include defining a refinement type of a sorted list, so that you can write a sorting function of type (Ord a) => [a] -> IncrList a in which the type requires that it is proved by the solver that your sorting function actually performs a sort as advertised.

How do refinement types work?

Liquid Haskell works by going from refinements to a collection of logic constraints whose verification is outsourced to an off-the-shelf SMT solver, such as Z3, which needs to be installed. (On Mac OS X, I install Z3 with brew install z3.)

I have installed Liquid Haskell globally using Stack:

$ stack install liquidhaskell intern liquid-fixpoint

This installs the liquid executable that you run.

Tutorials, books, blog, discussion group

An extensive, free book, "Programming with Refinement Types: An Introduction to Liquid Haskell", available both as PDF and as a beautifully readable HTML version.

The Liquid Haskell GitHub repo, with lots of activity there.

The Liquid Haskell blog.

The Google group mailing list.

(Update of 2015-12-30)

Gabriel Gonzalez has put up a tutorial.

Videos

The Liquid Haskell team has been very active in giving presentations about their work. Here are some:

Ranjit Jhala, "Refinement Types for Haskell"

This is from 2014:

(Update of 2015-12-30)

There is a full LambdaConf 2015 video here:

Eric Seidel, "Refinement Types for the Real World"

Niki Vazou, "Bounded Refinement Types"

The recent paper on this work is here.

A note on full-blown dependent types

You might wonder what the relationship is between refinement types and a full-blown dependent type system. I see them both as useful techniques. With full-blown dependent types you can write really fancy types that encode various forms of information (and I'm interested in using dependent types more in 2016 also), but the flexibility and feel of using refinement types seems a win for problems where it is very natural to write down amenable predicates and also to work incrementally, refining gradually.

Conclusion

I'm very excited about Liquid Haskell because it's bringing refinement types into a real world setting. I expect to try to make real use of it in the coming year, 2016.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 22: Shake: the dynamic build system

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 22

(Reddit discussion)

make, the venerable build system, is flawed in many ways. For me, the main two problems were

handling dynamic builds, where something during the build triggers dependencies
wanting to write code in a real language, not make-the-Turing-complete-language

Many improved build systems have come along since make. For example, a couple of years ago, I discovered SCons, the Python-based dynamic build system, and it made my life so much better, because I could treat it as an embeddable library and have tasks call my Python code. I still have SCons programs in use.

However, Shake has come along, and I'm not looking back. It has the virtues of SCons and more. I already use Shake for new build setups and plan to migrate my old SCons builds to Shake the next time they need any significant reworking.

Note that the GHC build is migrating to Shake, so serious dogfooding is going on.

For information about Shake

Instead of repeating some fraction of the extensive and excellent documentation on Shake, I direct you to the Web site, which includes tutorial and reference material. There is also a Google group mailing list. The GitHub repo is extremely active always.

Also, check out creator Neil Mitchell's blog.

A little example of Shake

I decided to dogfood Shake myself for this post. It turns out that I should have done this earlier. I had stupidly done a repetitive task every day, copying information into a growing table of contents of the whole Days of Hackage series, when I should have written a program to do it automatically.

Here's an example Shake program that I finally wrote to do it. It is a dynamic build because the table of contents depends on running a process (the Hugo static site generator) and saving off information from that, as well as extracting information out of Markdown files. I extract the day and title from the Markdown source files, and match up the day with the generated HTML URL to create a table of contents.

Compilation

I compile my Shake programs because that makes things much faster, but you can run the shake command also.

Dynamic dependencies

Note that I could have used an oracle to save structured information, but for illustration I saved it into files instead, at the expense of "stringly typed" assumptions about the contents of the files.

Shake is all about want (target) and need (what to depend on). Some functions implicitly add a need, such as getDirectoryFiles and readFileLines. I use writeFileChanged so that Shake can decide whether the contents have stayed the same.

I apologize for the non-explicit imports. Shake being an extensive domain-specific language, I decided to just absorb the vocabulary, but I realize it makes this harder to read.

{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-}

module Main where

import MultilineRe (multilineRe)

import Development.Shake
import Development.Shake.FilePath

import Text.Regex.PCRE.Heavy (Regex, scan)
import Data.Maybe (listToMaybe)
import Text.Printf (printf)
import Control.Monad (zipWithM)

shakeDir :: FilePath
shakeDir = "_build"

-- | File, sorted by day, containing a line for each Markdown source of a post.
daysSources :: FilePath
daysSources = shakeDir </> "days-sources"

-- | File, sorted by day, containing a line for each generated Day of Hackage post.
daysUrls :: FilePath
daysUrls = shakeDir </> "days-urls"

tocFile :: FilePath
tocFile = shakeDir </> "TOC.md"

-- | Base directory of blog source.
blogDir :: FilePath
blogDir = "/Users/chen/Sync/ConscientiousProgrammer"

-- | Base directory of generated blog.
publicDir :: FilePath
publicDir = "/Users/chen/ConscientiousProgrammer-public"

-- | Generated HTML directory for each post.
urlsGlob :: FilePattern
urlsGlob = "blog/2015/1*/*/*hackage-2015-day-*"

-- | Location of Markdown blog posts.
postDir :: FilePath
postDir = blogDir </> "content/post"

-- | Rely on naming convention here.
postGlob :: FilePattern
postGlob = "*hackage-2015-day-*"

main :: IO ()
main = shakeArgs shakeOptions{shakeFiles=shakeDir} $ do
  want [tocFile]

  tocFile %> \out -> do
    sourcePaths <- readFileLines daysSources
    urls <- readFileLines daysUrls

    toc <- liftIO $ zipWithM extractTOCEntry sourcePaths urls
    writeFileChanged out $ unlines $ map formatTOCEntry toc

  -- Run Hugo to generate a directory for each post.
  daysUrls %> \out -> do
    need [daysSources]
    unit $ cmd (Cwd blogDir) "hugo"
    Stdout stdout <- cmd Shell (Cwd publicDir) "echo" urlsGlob
    writeFileChanged out $ unlines $ words stdout

  daysSources %> \out -> do
    daysFiles <- getDirectoryFiles postDir [postGlob]
    writeFileChanged out $ unlines $ map (postDir </>) daysFiles

-- | A day's entry in the TOC.
data TOCEntry =
  TOCEntry { _day :: Int
           , _title :: String
           , _url :: String
           }
  deriving (Eq, Ord)

dayTitleRegex :: Regex
dayTitleRegex = [multilineRe|^title:.*day\s+(\d+):\s*([^"]+)|]

extractTOCEntry :: FilePath -> String -> Action TOCEntry
extractTOCEntry sourcePath url = do
  text <- readFile' sourcePath
  case listToMaybe (scan dayTitleRegex text) of
    Just (_, [dayString, title]) ->
      return $ TOCEntry (read dayString) title url
    _ ->
      error $ printf "failed to extract day and title from %s" sourcePath

formatTOCEntry :: TOCEntry -> String
formatTOCEntry entry =
  printf "- Day %d: [%s](/%s/)" (_day entry) (_title entry) (_url entry)

More resources

A nice introductory talk by Neil aimed at a non-Haskell audience to try to sell Shake as a killer app:

His talk at Haskell eXchange 2015, Defining your own build system with Shake.

Conclusion

If you need to build stuff, use Shake. I'm very excited by its active development.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 21: hood, GHood, Hoed: observation oriented debugging in Haskell

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 21

(Reddit discussion)

How do you debug your Haskell code?

I have to confess up front that I don't have a good answer to the question of how I debug in Haskell.

I'm not really the right person to talk about debuggers, because the last time I used an official debugging tool was when I was developing in C and C++ and used tools such as gdb and higher-level interfaces to that, and since then, my debugging process for most languages has involved looking at stack traces and logs, insertion of "print" statements, writing finer-grained tests, and refactoring code to find out the root cause of a problem. I do not use official debugger applications any more (with breakpoints, stepping, etc.). But should I?

The question becomes even more complicated when working in Haskell, because I think it honest to say that Haskell does not have a great story for debugging.

I've taken a look into a family of debugging tools for Haskell, including hood, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://community.haskell.org/~claus/GHood/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://community.haskell.org/~claus/GHood/">GHood</span>, and Hoed, which are all based on the same concept: manual annotation of source code in order to generate traces that can later be analyzed in interesting ways.

Hood

Let's take a look at hood first, standing for "Haskell Object Observation Debugger". It's all about observation through a type class Observable a and an instrumenting function observe:

observe :: Observable a => String -> a -> a

Secret side effects!

Warning! Despite its type signature, this function performs effects underneath using unsafePerformIO, so you have to be careful how you write code that uses observe, in order to get the traces you want.

Example of instrumenting a pipeline

Let's instrument the word counting pipeline from day 8. We import Debug.Hood.Observe, and copy and paste the original code with modifications to insert calls to observe.

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

module HoodExample where

-- | hood
import Debug.Hood.Observe (Observable(..), observe, observeBase, printO)

import qualified Data.MultiSet as MultiSet
import qualified Data.Text.Lazy as LazyText
import qualified Data.Text.Lazy.Builder as LazyBuilder
import Data.Text.Lazy.Builder.Int (decimal)
import Data.Ord (Down(..))
import qualified Data.Char as Char
import qualified Data.List as List
import Control.Arrow ((>>>))
import Data.Monoid ((<>))

-- | Break up text into "words" separated by spaces, while treating
-- non-letters as spaces, count them, output a report line for each
-- word and its count in descending order of count but ascending order
-- of word.
wordCount :: LazyText.Text -> LazyText.Text
wordCount = observe "(1) wordCount"
  >>> LazyText.map replaceNonLetterWithSpace >>> observe "(2) map replaceNonLetterWithSpace"
  >>> LazyText.words             >>> observe "(3) LazyText.words"
  >>> MultiSet.fromList          >>> observe "(4) MultiSet.fromList"
  >>> MultiSet.toOccurList       >>> observe "(5) MultiSet.toOccurList"
  >>> List.sortOn (snd >>> Down) >>> observe "(6) List.sortOn (snd >>> Down)"
  >>> map summarizeWordCount     >>> observe "(7) map summarizeWordCount"
  >>> mconcat                    >>> observe "(8) mconcat"
  >>> LazyBuilder.toLazyText     >>> observe "(9) LazyBuilder.toLazyText"

replaceNonLetterWithSpace :: Char -> Char
replaceNonLetterWithSpace c
  | Char.isLetter c = c
  | otherwise = ' '

summarizeWordCount :: (LazyText.Text, MultiSet.Occur) -> LazyBuilder.Builder
summarizeWordCount (word, count) =
  LazyBuilder.fromLazyText word <> " " <> decimal count <> "\n"

(I apologize for the mindless boilerplate in the String description of each observation point: one can imagine writing a Template Haskell wrapper, I guess, if desired.)

Here I've chosen just to instrument the natural data "stages" in the pipeline. If we wanted to, we could instrument at any other level as well, e.g. the result of calling summarizeWordCount (with (summarizeWordCount >>> observe "summarize word count"), or many other more powerful levels, such as instrumenting a function, not just the result of a function call, e.g., (observe "summarizeWordCount function" summarizeWordCount), which results in collecting all the calls to the function.

Implementing the `Observable` type class

Annoyingly, because everything's based on the Observable type class, we ignore GHC warnings and create orphan instances for various types (the alternative, adding a newtype wrapper for everything, is rather onerous in this situation):

-- | Some orphan instances of 'Observable'.
instance Observable LazyText.Text where
  observer = observeBase
instance (Observable a, Show a) => Observable (MultiSet.MultiSet a) where
  observer = observeBase
instance Observable LazyBuilder.Builder where
  observer = observeBase

Sample output

For simplicity, let's use printO :: Show a => a -> IO () to perform a run that outputs a trace. More generally, there's runO that executes an arbitrary IO action.

exampleRun :: IO ()
exampleRun = printO $
  wordCount "I have all-too-many words; words I don't like much!"

The output (I just run this in GHCi):

-- (1) wordCount
  "I have all-too-many words; words I don't like much!"
-- (2) map replaceNonLetterWithSpace
  "I have all too many words  words I don t like much "
-- (3) LazyText.words
   "I" :  "have" :  "all" :  "too" :  "many" :  "words" :  "words" :  "I" :
  "don" :  "t" :  "like" :  "much" : []
-- (4) MultiSet.fromList
  fromOccurList [("I",2),("all",1),("don",1),("have",1),("like",1),("many",1),("much",1),("t",1),("too",1),("words",2)]
-- (5) MultiSet.toOccurList
   ("I", 2) :  ("all", 1) :  ("don", 1) :  ("have", 1) :  ("like", 1) :
  ("many", 1) :  ("much", 1) :  ("t", 1) :  ("too", 1) :  ("words", 2) : []
-- (6) List.sortOn (snd >>> Down)
   ("I", 2) :  ("words", 2) :  ("all", 1) :  ("don", 1) :  ("have", 1) :
  ("like", 1) :  ("many", 1) :  ("much", 1) :  ("t", 1) :  ("too", 1) : []
-- (7) map summarizeWordCount
   "I 2\n" :  "words 2\n" :  "all 1\n" :  "don 1\n" :  "have 1\n" :
  "like 1\n" :  "many 1\n" :  "much 1\n" :  "t 1\n" :  "too 1\n" : []
-- (8) mconcat
  "I 2\nwords 2\nall 1\ndon 1\nhave 1\nlike 1\nmany 1\nmuch 1\nt 1\ntoo 1\n"
-- (9) LazyBuilder.toLazyText
  "I 2\nwords 2\nall 1\ndon 1\nhave 1\nlike 1\nmany 1\nmuch 1\nt 1\ntoo 1\n"

This can definitely be a useful way to debug pipelines, or just to generate traces for use in teaching. For example, here we might see immediately that we didn't get the answer we wanted (classify "don't" as a word) because at the third stage, we got "don", which meant that something went wrong in a previous stage, of which there happened to be only one here, the removal of non-word characters.

There's a lot more you can do with hood, but this gives a taste.

GHood

Next, we briefly move to <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://community.haskell.org/~claus/GHood/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://community.haskell.org/~claus/GHood/">GHood</span>, which has the same Observable interface as hood, except we import Debug.Observe instead of Debug.Hood.Observe. So I won't show the example code because it is literally just copy and paste and changing the import. Module copy/paste issues like this (which also arose on day 15 on IOSpec) really make me wish Haskell had parameterized modules like ML. (And the Observable orphan instance issue as well, where ML-style modules are the natural way to plug in different ways to observe the same data type as desired.)

GHood is a Java-based graphical back end to hood. When you install GHood, it comes with a Java JAR file. Java is executed to read a log file ObserveEvents.log that is generated from running hood-instrumented code. You can animate, step back and forth, and the traces are shown in a tree structure, including showing evaluation of thunks. It's an interesting proof of concept from 2001 but is kind of primitive. I decided not to try to include a screenshot of a sample run because the Java Swing app's output scrolls way to the right in its window and is not really customizable.

Hoed

Hoed has an API based on hood but is a much more modern, sophisticated, active project. It enables "algorithmic debugging" by providing an interactive Web app where it uses a tree structure to repeatedly prompts you for whether results were correct, to narrows down and identify the source of the error based on your feedback.

Furthermore, it comes built in with support for hooking up to QuickCheck for property-based debugging. Check out the documentation and screen shots.

Hoed launches a local Web server you can access with a browser at port 10000. The GitHub repo contains a lot of examples.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time to get it working the way I wanted to show here in the context of using the interactive debugging system, so I'll just have to say, Hoed is very interesting and I plan to get more into it when I have time. I will update this post later.

Conclusion

I haven't used debugging tools much in recent years, but this could change as I find ways to make use of new tools that are easy to use. hood-based systems seem useful as one way to collect information during execution without radically restructuring code.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 20: dimensional: type-checked computation on physical quantities with units

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 20

(<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3xoe58/24_days_of_hackage_2015_day_20_dimensional/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3xoe58/24_days_of_hackage_2015_day_20_dimensional/">Reddit discussion</span>)

One thing that my science teachers in high school always emphasized, when we did calculations, was to be explicit about the units of measurement. They were very stern that we show our units, carry them and cancel them as appropriate, in order to get a final answer that was meaningful. And for good reason! If you add a distance (such as in meters) and a velocity (such as kilometers per second), that is a type error. It is also a type error to add the numerical value of a distance in meters and a value of a distance in feet: to perform such an addition, you have to convert to a common unit first and then add the numbers.

The programming language F# comes with units of measure built into its type system. This is a really cool feature. How can we do this in Haskell?

It turns out that with a lot of fancy type machinery, people have done this sort of thing in Haskell. A library I looked at for making unit-checking into type-checking for physical quantities is the actively evolving <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dimensional" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dimensional">dimensional</span> library.

Today I'll show a little bit of code using it to give a flavor of what you can do with it.

Installation

Because dimensional is moving so quickly, I didn't use the old version coming with the current Stackage LTS. I added to stack.yaml

- dimensional-1.0.1.1
- exact-pi-0.4.1.0
- numtype-dk-0.5

dimensional is moving so quickly that the master branch on GitHub is already beyond even this version.

(Update of 2016-01-06)

Stackage LTS 4 has caught up, no no more need for these modifications.

Example task

As a runner, I sometimes want to perform all kinds of predictions or projections from goals, to calculate various quantities such as required pace to finish a race in a certain time, so I decided to play with using dimensional to express a simple calculation.

Given a goal 5K time and a target racing stride rate (180 steps per minute), I calculate the stride length required.

An HSpec test

Imports:

module DimensionalExampleSpec where

import DimensionalExample (requiredStrideLength)

import Prelude hiding ((+))
import Numeric.Units.Dimensional.Prelude
       ( (*~), (/~)
       , (+)
       , Length, Time, kilo, meter, minute, second
       )
import Numeric.Units.Dimensional.NonSI (foot)

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldSatisfy)

Note that I took the pain to provide explicit imports for Numeric.Units.Dimensional.Prelude. In reality, if I were using the dimensional library for a serious amount of code, I would bite the bullet and acknowledge that we are working in an entire domain-specific language of arithmetic that warrants hiding the Prelude and just using everything the dimensional Prelude provides, as far as commonly used units, quantity types, and overloaded arithmetic operators.

The sample test, which just verifies I do not have to have a stride greater than 4 feet but must be greater than 3 feet:

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "dimensional" $ do
    it "check required running stride length" $
      let fiveK :: Length Double
          fiveK = 5 *~ kilo meter

          goalTime :: Time Double
          goalTime = 24 *~ minute + 45 *~ second

          feetPerStep :: Double
          feetPerStep = requiredStrideLength fiveK goalTime /~ foot
      in feetPerStep `shouldSatisfy` (\x -> x > 3 && x < 4)

Note that every quantity is parameterized over the numeric type involved, e.g., Length a. The operators with ~ combine a numeric value with a unit to give a complete quantity. You can multiply by units, divide by them (as in dividing by foot to get a Double from a Length Doubleabove). The normal operators such as+` operate on quantities.

Implementation

module DimensionalExample where

import Prelude hiding ((/))
import Numeric.Units.Dimensional.Prelude
       ( (*~)
       , (/)
       , Quantity, Recip, DTime, Length, Time
       , one, minute
       )

-- | "Ideal" turnover for steps while running is 180 steps per minute.
turnover :: Quantity (Recip DTime) Double
turnover = (180 *~ one) / (1 *~ minute)

requiredStrideLength
  :: Length Double
  -> Time Double
  -> Length Double
requiredStrideLength distance goalTime =
  distance / goalTime / turnover

Here one is used to go to a dimensionless quantity. Underneath, the dimensional library uses type families to represent division by units and so forth.

A concern about usability

Unfortunately, as you might expect from a library that uses a lot of type level infrastructure and computation, there's definitely a learning curve in understanding the conceptual foundation of this library, although the documentation is pretty good. The worst thing is that because of type synonyms in combination with all the type level stuff, the error messages can get really weird if you do something nonsensical. Even if you do something meaningful, you can get confused. For example, supposed we didn't know enough to write the type signature for turnover above. The inferred type is:

    Top-level binding with no type signature:
      turnover :: dimensional-1.0.1.0:Numeric.Units.Dimensional.Internal.Dimensional
                    'Numeric.Units.Dimensional.Variants.DQuantity
                    ('Numeric.Units.Dimensional.Dimensions.TypeLevel.Dim
                       'numtype-dk-0.5:Numeric.NumType.DK.Integers.Zero
                       'numtype-dk-0.5:Numeric.NumType.DK.Integers.Zero
                       'numtype-dk-0.5:Numeric.NumType.DK.Integers.Neg1
                       'numtype-dk-0.5:Numeric.NumType.DK.Integers.Zero
                       'numtype-dk-0.5:Numeric.NumType.DK.Integers.Zero
                       'numtype-dk-0.5:Numeric.NumType.DK.Integers.Zero
                       'numtype-dk-0.5:Numeric.NumType.DK.Integers.Zero)
                    Double

Ouch! This is in fact what I first got when writing the code without explicit type annotations. I had to hunt down what was really going on in order to find the type synonyms that expressed my intent.

I don't know how to fix the general problem of type-heavy libraries resulting in a lot of usability learning curves and gotchas, but I think that as more and more fancy types are used in Haskell libraries, something needs to be done. I have a hard time believing that a typical scientist who barely knows any Haskell and whose job is to write safe and correct code would use a library like dimensional at this stage, however cool it is. That said, I'm pretty excited that dimensional exists and is currently being actively developed!

Real examples

Doug Burke uses dimensional in his astronomy IHaskell notebooks, for example this one.

Conclusion

dimensional is an interesting library for making units explicit and type-checked in calculations involving physical quantities, and a showcase for how types can be used to better express and check intent.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 19: ghc-core-html, list-fusion-probe; checking GHC's fusion rewrite rules for erasing intermediate data from existence

Sat, 19 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 19

(Reddit discussion)

The single coolest feature of using Haskell, for me, has to be fusion. The GHC compiler performs this remarkable optimization that can erase entire intermediate data structures from existence.

What does that mean, and how can we know it happened? Today I'll show how ghc-core-html and list-fusion-probe can sort of help in determining what the compiler actually did to your intermediate data structures.

I'll give examples with lists as the intermediate data, but also mention vectors because yesterday, day 18, I briefly mentioned fusion in the context of vectors.

Imports for code

First, let's get some imports out of the way before showing some HSpec and QuickCheck tests:

{-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-}

module ListFusionProbeSpec where

import Data.List.Fusion.Probe (fuseThis)

import Test.Hspec ( Spec, hspec, describe, it
                  , shouldBe, shouldSatisfy
                  , shouldThrow, errorCall
                  )
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)
import Test.QuickCheck.Function (Fun(..), apply)
import Control.Exception (evaluate)
import Control.Arrow ((>>>))
import Data.Function ((&))

What is intermediate data in a pipeline?

When programming in a compositional way, often we create pipelines of data flow, in which data from one stage gets transformed into data for the next stage, and so on until the final output. The problem is that a naive implementation of a pipeline will result in construction of some data structure that exists only for the purpose of being consumed by the next stage.

Here's an HSpec test illustrating a pipeline in which we name each intermediate list:

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "list-fusion-probe" $ do
    it "runs a chain of maps, filters" $
      let list1 = ["Hello", "my", "world!"]

          -- ["Hello", "world!"]
          list2 = filter ((> 2) . length) list1

          -- [5, 6]
          list3 = map length list2

          list4 = map (*3) list3
      in list4 `shouldBe` [15, 18]

In a typical implementation of a typical programming language, code looking like this will result in allocating and creating four lists (or arrays, or whatever collection type is idiomatic and desired), one after another, and traversing three lists using a filter and two maps. To do something cleverer and avoid creating intermediate data, one uses a special "stream" collection type, or more radically, "transducers". These techniques enable collapsing the computation of the final data into a single traversal and no allocation of intermediate data.

The Haskell ecosystem contains many libraries for performing these kinds of optimizations, such as foldl, but they are outside the scope of this article. Instead, for simple examples such as the one above, GHC already automatically applies fusion, through special <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/rewrite-rules.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/rewrite-rules.html">rewrite rules</span> that are included in the standard libraries.

A note on pipeline syntax and composition

We can write the pipeline in many different ways. Here's an OO-style way using & (reverse function application) and >>> (left-to-right composition):

    it "runs a chain of maps, filters (OO-style)" $
      let list4 = ["Hello", "my", "world!"] &
                     (filter (length >>> (> 2))
                      >>> map length
                      >>> map (*3)
                     )
      in list4 `shouldBe` [15, 18]

Here is the same thing but with the compositionality factored out. This is my preferred way of writing pipelines as first-class values:

    it "runs a chain of maps, filters, written compositionally with >>>" $
      let pipeline = filter (length >>> (> 2))
                     >>> map length
                     >>> map (*3)
      in pipeline ["Hello", "my", "world!"] `shouldBe` [15, 18]

Using traditional right-left composition .:

    it "runs a chain of maps, filters, written compositionally with ." $
      let pipeline = map (*3)
                     . map length
                     . filter ((> 2) . length)
      in pipeline ["Hello", "my", "world!"] `shouldBe` [15, 18]

What does rewriting mean?

The thing that rewriting does that the other approaches do not: the rewriting is a compiler preprocessing pass that rewrites your source code in order to optimize it. We're not going into exactly how it works. There are rewrite rules that match source code constructs and replace them with semantically equivalent constructs, and basically fusion happens when during the course of repeatedly rewriting, certain constructs cancel themselves out, and "poof" goes your intermediate data.

If you look at the source code for map you will see scary-looking comments and compiler directives that look like

map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
{-# NOINLINE [1] map #-}    -- We want the RULE to fire first.
                            -- It's recursive, so won't inline anyway,
                            -- but saying so is more explicit
map _ []     = []
map f (x:xs) = f x : map f xs

-- Note eta expanded
mapFB ::  (elt -> lst -> lst) -> (a -> elt) -> a -> lst -> lst
{-# INLINE [0] mapFB #-}
mapFB c f = \x ys -> c (f x) ys

-- The rules for map work like this.
--
-- Up to (but not including) phase 1, we use the "map" rule to
-- rewrite all saturated applications of map with its build/fold
-- form, hoping for fusion to happen.
-- In phase 1 and 0, we switch off that rule, inline build, and
-- switch on the "mapList" rule, which rewrites the foldr/mapFB
-- thing back into plain map.
--
-- It's important that these two rules aren't both active at once
-- (along with build's unfolding) else we'd get an infinite loop
-- in the rules.  Hence the activation control below.
--
-- The "mapFB" rule optimises compositions of map.
--
-- This same pattern is followed by many other functions:
-- e.g. append, filter, iterate, repeat, etc.

{-# RULES
"map"       [~1] forall f xs.   map f xs                = build (\c n -> foldr (mapFB c f) n xs)
"mapList"   [1]  forall f.      foldr (mapFB (:) f) []  = map f
"mapFB"     forall c f g.       mapFB (mapFB c f) g     = mapFB c (f.g)
  #-}

Some resources on fusion

Here are some articles illustrating more of the low-level workings of fusion:

by Chris Done
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://lambda.jstolarek.com/2013/04/haskell-as-fast-as-c-a-case-study/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://lambda.jstolarek.com/2013/04/haskell-as-fast-as-c-a-case-study/">by Jan Stolarek</span>

But how do we know whether fusion worked?

The thing that has always bothered me is that there has not been an easy way to know whether fusion actually worked or tell the compiler, "I want the result of this expression fused, so report an error if you can't fuse it for me because I care about maximum efficiency here". For example, here is an open bug report about something that someone expected to be fused.

When writing high-abstraction code and expecting the compiler to do important optimizations for me, I consider it important to be notified if they are not happening as expected.

So it was interesting when I came across the list-fusion-probe library that does its own rewrite trickery to detect whether a list has fused or not. The way you use it with an expression of list type is you just wrap it with fuseThis, and the library will rewrite the call such that if fusion is happening, it just returns the list, but if not, it generates code that at runtime throws an exception. This is extremely primitive (I would never want to ship code that threw an exception "cannot fuse"), but is a useful proof of concept for testing.

So here are a few tests illustrating how insertion of fuseThis into pipelines verifies that fusion does happen (because there is no run time exception):

    it "fuses a chain of maps, filters" $
      let list1 = ["Hello", "my", "world!"]

          -- ["Hello", "world!"]
          list2 = fuseThis $ filter ((> 2) . length) list1

          -- [5, 6]
          list3 = fuseThis $ map length list2

          list4 = map (*3) list3
      in list4 `shouldBe` [15, 18]
    it "fuses a chain of maps, filters" $
      let list4 = ["Hello", "my", "world!"]
          pipeline = filter (length >>> (> 2)) >>> fuseThis
                     >>> map length >>> fuseThis
                     >>> map (*3)
      in pipeline list4 `shouldBe` [15, 18]
    it "Prelude foldl fuses" $
      let list = fuseThis [0..1001] :: [Int]
      in foldl (+) 0 list `shouldBe` 501501

We've verified here that list2 and list3 never exist as materialized data.

Note, for example, that the foldl example's fusion amounts to the list [0..1001] never being created; instead, the generated machine code is basically a loop with index from 0 to 1001 adding to an accumulator.

Here's a fusion failure:

    it "handwritten myFoldl fails to fuse" $
      let list = fuseThis [0..1001] :: [Int]
      in evaluate (myFoldl (+) 0 list) `shouldThrow`
           errorCall "fuseThis: List did not fuse"

where we provided myFoldl written in such a way that it does not match the fusion rewriting rules:

-- | This example taken straight from `list-fusion-probe` tests directory.
myFoldl :: (b -> a -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b
myFoldl f = go
  where go a [] = a
        go a (x:xs) = go (f a x) xs

Finally, for fun, let's write a QuickCheck test that tests arbitrary predicates and transformation functions in a filter and map pipeline:

    prop "Prelude foldl fuses the result of a filter, map pipeline" $
      \(list :: [Int]) (predicate :: Fun Int Bool) (f :: Fun Int Int) ->
      let pipeline = fuseThis . filter (apply predicate)
                     . fuseThis . map (apply f)
      in
         -- Just to force evaluation.
        foldl (+) 0 (pipeline list) `shouldSatisfy` (<= maxBound)

Why not report a fusion failure at compile time instead?

There's a user interface issue when it comes to optimizations such as fusion. Ideally, I'd like to be able to declare desired fusion and have a failure be reported as a compile-time error.

However, the situation is tricky, because then the code can become brittle in the face of different optimization settings. For example, if you run the tests above within GHCi, you will find that GHCi never reports fusion failure. This is because it's just not doing fusion at all: it's ignoring rewrite rules, both in the standard library and in list-fusion-probe.

Maybe the solution is to have conditional directives. I do think that there has to be an option to treat a known performance bug as a compile-time error. It is not practical to live in fear and defensiveness when writing performance-oriented code and deciding, in the absence of clear compiler feedback, to simply manually write low-level ugly code because of lack of confidence that the elegant code will not perform properly.

What do you think? What kind of feedback would you like to get from compilation about optimizations you expect to be performed?

Checking generated code in yesterday's `vector` example

Yesterday, I mentioned that fusion for vectors happens, but I wasn't confident about how much actually happens. I found a useful tool ghc-core-html that outputs in somewhat prettified fashion the GHC Core code generated within GHC.

To use it, install it globally:

$ stack install ghc-core-html

I ran it on a sample modified source file to get HTML output:

$ stack exec ghc-core-html src/VectorFusionExample.hs > VectorFusionExample.html

The sample file:

-- | Extracted from VectorExample for minimal GHC Core output file.
module VectorFusionExample (makeCountsPurely) where

import qualified Data.Word as Word
import qualified Data.Vector.Unboxed as V

-- | Assume 8-bit unsigned integer.
type Value = Word.Word8

-- | Number of occurrences of an 8-bit unsigned value.
-- We assume no overflow beyond 'Int' range.
type CountOfValue = Int

-- | NOT the real thing!! With fake constants 123, 789
-- to help in reading the GHC Core.
makeCountsPurely :: V.Vector Value -> V.Vector CountOfValue
makeCountsPurely =
  V.unsafeAccumulate (+) (V.replicate numPossibleValues 123)
  . V.map (\v -> (fromIntegral v, 789))

-- | 256, in our case.
numPossibleValues :: Int
numPossibleValues = fromIntegral (maxBound :: Value) + 1

I'm not going to show the output, but just note that looking at it, I saw two calls to newByteArray#. Since one of the created arrays is the final array, but there is another allocation, we didn't manage to get down to creating just a single array without allocating any other, unlike the implementation yesterday using an internal MVector.

This is good to know, but I shouldn't have to generate low-level code and inspect it in order to obtain high-level information about what is fused where.

For more information

A tutorial on understanding the GHC compilation process is here. Here's another.

A <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/6495-keynote-from-simon-peyton-jones" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/6495-keynote-from-simon-peyton-jones">video by Simon Peyton Jones on Core</span>.

Read anything and everything by Johan Tibell on Haskell performance.

Conclusion

Today I mentioned the importance of fusion and my frustration at not being able to get the kind of detailed information I would like about whether GHC performed fusion where I want it. However, list-fusion-probe helps with writing tests to detect list fusion failure, and ghc-core-html is a useful general-purpose tools for examining generated code for any purpose.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 18: vector, vector-algorithms: unleash your inner C programmer!

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 18

(Reddit discussion)

Often in programming, the right data structure to use is a C-style array, whether treated as immutable or mutable.

Ideally, I didn't need to write this article, but I've gotten the impression that many newcomers to Haskell don't know about vector, the library for zero-indexed C-style arrays, and use lists where arrays are better suited to the problem. Arrays are efficient for indexing and are memory and cache efficient also, being allocated in a block of memory rather than spread out over pointer chasing.

The terminology regarding arrays in the Haskell ecosystem is confusing because Haskell in the 1990s originally came with a data structure called an Array, and there's even a supporting array package, but in practice I never use it because it's more generic and weird than the simple data structure later provided called "vectors" (for lack of a better name).

There are good tutorials on vector I recommend:

I thought it would be useful to give a fully worked out example of using both immutable and mutable vectors. In particular, we'll use unboxed vectors that are specialized and therefore contain no indirection and are basically equivalent to C-style arrays. We'll do some low-level C-style programming.

The problem to solve: finding the median of an array of 8-bit integers

Here is a problem found at Programming Praxis:

"The median of an array is the value in the middle if the array was sorted; if the array has an odd number of items n, the median is the (n+1)/2’th largest item in the array (which is also the (n+1)/2’th smallest item in the array), and if the array has an even number of items n, the median is the arithmetic average of the n/2’th smallest item in the array and the n/2’th largest item in the array. For instance, the median of the array [2,4,5,7,3,6,1] is 4 and the median of the array [5,2,1,6,3,4] is 3.5.

Your task is to write a program that takes an array of 8-bit integers (possibly but not necessarily in sort) and finds the median value in the array; you should find an algorithm that takes linear time and constant space."

`vector` installation

Stackage LTS 3 is still on vector-0.10, but I wanted to use version 0.11 because the API changed slightly, so I added a bound as appropriate in the Cabal file.

(Update of 2016-01-06)

Stackage LTS 4 now uses this updated version of vector.

The importance of going unboxed

Because we are given that we should write code specific to an array of 8-bit integers, we will be using <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/primitives.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/primitives.html">unboxed</span> rather than boxed (generic) vectors: boxed vectors contain elements that are pointers to values, while unboxed vectors have elements are the actual values themselves. This is pretty important for efficiency if you know up front the type of your elements.

Some tests

Let's write some tests first, assuming we will later write a module VectorExample.

Some imports first. We will be using the constant-time vector indexing operator !.

module VectorExampleSpec where

import VectorExample
       ( Value, MedianValue, averageValue
       , spaceInefficientMedian, constantSpaceMedian
       )

import Data.Vector.Unboxed ((!))
import qualified Data.Vector.Unboxed as V
import qualified Data.Vector.Algorithms.Radix as Radix

We will be using HSpec and QuickCheck, and writing our own random vector generators:

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldBe)
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)
import Test.QuickCheck (Arbitrary(arbitrary, shrink), choose, sized, shrinkList)

We will be implementing both a simple reference implementation and the desired clever one, so we will test both:

spec :: Spec
spec = do
  describe "compute median of vector of 8-bit unsigned integers" $ do
    medianSpec "inefficientSpaceMedian" inefficientSpaceMedian
    medianSpec "constantSpaceMedian" constantSpaceMedian

We test the examples given, as well as general properties. For sorting, we conveniently use the radix sort from the vector-algorithms package:

medianSpec :: String
            -> (V.Vector Value -> Maybe MedianValue)
            -> Spec
medianSpec description findMedian =
  describe description $ do
    describe "some examples" $ do
      it "handles odd number of elements" $ do
        findMedian (V.fromList [2, 4, 5, 7, 3, 6, 1]) `shouldBe` Just 4.0
      it "handles nonzero even number of elements" $ do
        findMedian (V.fromList [5, 2, 1, 6, 3, 4]) `shouldBe` Just 3.5
    describe "properties" $ do
      it "handles no elements" $ do
        findMedian V.empty `shouldBe` Nothing
      prop "handles one element" $ \v ->
        findMedian (V.singleton v) == Just (fromIntegral v)
      prop "handles odd number of elements" $
        \(VectorWithOdd values) ->
          let len = V.length values
              midIndex = pred (succ len `div` 2)
              sorted = V.modify Radix.sort values
          in findMedian values == Just (fromIntegral (sorted ! midIndex))
      prop "handles positive even number of elements" $
        \(VectorWithPositiveEven values) ->
          let len = V.length values
              midIndex = pred (succ len `div` 2)
              sorted = V.modify Radix.sort values
          in findMedian values ==
            Just (averageValue (fromIntegral (sorted ! midIndex))
                               (sorted ! succ midIndex))

The property tests specify what a median is supposed to be, for all possible cases.

A note on mutation

The radix sort operates on a mutable vector, but we are using an immutable vector, so we use the modify function that has a fancy type

modify :: Unbox a => (forall s. MVector s a -> ST s ()) -> Vector a -> Vector a

which takes a callback taking a mutable vector, and transforms an immutable vector into another immutable vector (possibly the same one "secretly" mutated underneath). It uses higher-rank types and the ST state transformer monad, but all you have to know is that Radix.sort has the compatible callback type and therefore can be plugged into modify:

sort :: forall e m v. (PrimMonad m, MVector v e, Radix e) => v (PrimState m) e -> m ()

Custom QuickCheck generators

Here are some quick and dirty generators of vectors of the kinds we want for our tests. If we were doing this for real, we'd probably want to write custom shrinkers rather than go through lists.

-- | Generate a vector with an odd number of elements.
newtype VectorWithOdd a =
  VectorWithOdd { getVectorWithOdd :: V.Vector a }
  deriving (Show)

instance (Arbitrary a, V.Unbox a) => Arbitrary (VectorWithOdd a) where
  arbitrary = sized $ \n -> do
    k <- choose (0, n `div` 2)
    VectorWithOdd <$> V.replicateM (2*k+1) arbitrary
  shrink = map (VectorWithOdd . V.fromList)
           . shrinkList shrink
           . V.toList
           . getVectorWithOdd

-- | Generate a vector with a nonzero even number of elements.
newtype VectorWithPositiveEven a =
  VectorWithPositiveEven { getVectorWithPositiveEven :: V.Vector a }
  deriving (Show)

instance (Arbitrary a, V.Unbox a) => Arbitrary (VectorWithPositiveEven a) where
  arbitrary = sized $ \n -> do
    k <- choose (1, 1 `max` (n `div` 2))
    VectorWithPositiveEven <$> V.replicateM (2*k) arbitrary
  shrink = map (VectorWithPositiveEven . V.fromList)
           . shrinkList shrink
           . V.toList
           . getVectorWithPositiveEven

An inefficient implementation that violates our space requirement

For reference (we could read it off from the QuickCheck tests almost):

{-# LANGUAGE BangPatterns #-}

module VectorExample where

import qualified Data.Word as Word
import qualified Data.Vector.Unboxed as V
import qualified Data.Vector.Unboxed.Mutable as M
import qualified Data.Vector.Algorithms.Radix as Radix

-- | Assume 8-bit unsigned integer.
type Value = Word.Word8

-- | What to return as median when there is one.
type MedianValue = Double

-- | This is an obvious implementation, basically the specification.
-- The use of radix sort makes this linear in time, but a copy of
-- the original array is required.
inefficientSpaceMedian :: V.Vector Value -> Maybe MedianValue
inefficientSpaceMedian values
  | V.null values = Nothing
  | odd len = Just (fromIntegral (atSorted midIndex))
  | otherwise = Just (averageValue (atSorted midIndex)
                                   (atSorted (succ midIndex)))
  where
    len = V.length values
    midIndex = pred (succ len `div` 2)

    -- Make a local mutable copy to sort.
    atSorted = V.unsafeIndex (V.modify Radix.sort values)

-- | Average of two values.
averageValue :: Value -> Value -> MedianValue
averageValue a b = (fromIntegral a + fromIntegral b) / 2

A note on unsafe operations

I promised we were going to do C-style programming. We could use bounds-checked indexing (which throws a runtime exception if accessing outside the bounds of a vector), but let's have some "fun", and use unsafeIndex. Note that this is truly unsafe: let's get the element at index 100 of a 1-element Int vector:

Data.Vector.Unboxed> unsafeIndex (singleton (5 :: Int)) 100
4931475852

Why use unsafe operations? For illustration and also because it happens that we can manually prove (outside the type system) that we will never go out of bounds. In real life, I'd hesitate to use the unsafe operations unless maximum performance was critical though! But we can opt in the C world of potential disaster if we want to.

I do not want to promote using unsafe operations!! Globally search and replace all unsafeXyz functions in today's sample code with xyz instead for peace of mind.

The clever solution

The clever solution allocates a table of every possible count (because we know our values are 8-bit unsigned integers) and fills it, then iterates through the table to find out where the median must lie, and when it hits the right place, returns the middle value (if an odd number of values) or the middle two values (if an even number of values).

-- | Number of occurrences of an 8-bit unsigned value.
-- We assume no overflow beyond 'Int' range.
type CountOfValue = Int

-- | Create a table of counts for each possible value, since we know
-- the number of values is small and finite.
constantSpaceMedian :: V.Vector Value -> Maybe MedianValue
constantSpaceMedian values
  | V.null values = Nothing
  | odd len = Just (findMid 0 (numToCount - countOf 0))
  | otherwise = Just (findMid2 0 (numToCount - countOf 0))
  where
    len = V.length values

    -- How many sorted elements to count off, to reach first median value.
    numToCount = succ len `div` 2

    -- Make efficient table of counts for each possible value.
    countOf = V.unsafeIndex (makeCountsMutably values)

    findMid !i !numRemaining
      | numRemaining <= 0 = fromIntegral i
      | otherwise = findMid (succ i) (numRemaining - countOf (succ i))

    findMid2 !i !numRemaining =
      case numRemaining `compare` 0 of
        LT -> fromIntegral i -- median is duplicated, don't need average
        GT -> findMid2 (succ i) (numRemaining - countOf (succ i))
        EQ -> midAverage (succ i) (countOf (succ i))
          where
            midAverage j 0 = midAverage (succ j) (countOf (succ j))
            midAverage j _ = averageValue (fromIntegral i) (fromIntegral j)

Note the use of the GHC extension BangPatterns, covered in a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-12-05-bang-patterns.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-12-05-bang-patterns.html">2014 Day of GHC Extensions</span>, to ensure strict evaluation in the tail-recursive loops.

Mutable versus immutable ways to create the counts table

What is makeCountsMutably?

Mutable

The version of the function that uses mutation does it using the create function:

-- | Use local mutation for efficiency in creating a table of counts,
-- looping through to update it, and freezing the result to return.
makeCountsMutably
  :: V.Vector Value        -- ^ values seen
  -> V.Vector CountOfValue -- ^ value => count
makeCountsMutably values = V.create $ do
  counts <- M.replicate numPossibleValues 0
  V.forM_ values $
     M.unsafeModify counts succ . fromIntegral
  return counts

-- | 256, in our case.
numPossibleValues :: Int
numPossibleValues = fromIntegral (maxBound :: Value) + 1

create has type

create :: Unbox a => (forall s. ST s (MVector s a)) -> Vector a

and cleverly "freezes", in place, the mutable vector returned within ST monad context, into an immutable vector, avoiding any copying because the mutation happening inside the callback is never visible outside it.

Immutable

But wait, there's also a way to create the table using only immmutable Vectors, no intermediate MVector needed!

-- | Make table of counts without using 'MVector'.
makeCountsPurely
  :: V.Vector Value
  -> V.Vector CountOfValue
makeCountsPurely =
  V.unsafeAccumulate (+) (V.replicate numPossibleValues 0)
  . V.map (\v -> (fromIntegral v, 1))

This is straightforward and elegant but seems to create an intermediate vector using map, which is not what we want to do given that the whole point is to be space efficient.

Fusion

But vector comes with sophisticated support for fusion.

A later Day of Hackage (it's now here at day 19) will explain what is going on, but GHC actually rewrites the calls to unsafeAccumulate and map in order to avoid creating an intermediate vector!

Conclusion

Fixed-size arrays are a very important low-level building block for many computations. I use vector when doing (sequential) array operations. Hopefully this little example shows how to write efficient vector-based imperative code in Haskell while hiding as much of the state as possible, through selected type-oriented APIs that operate between the two worlds of mutable and immutable. It is even possible to write code relying on fusion that does not explicitly build a mutable vector.

(These are sequential arrays. For parallel arrays, see a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2013-12-16-24-days-of-hackage-repa.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2013-12-16-24-days-of-hackage-repa.html">2013 Day of Hackage</span> which covered repa, a library for "high performance, regular, multi-dimensional, shape polymorphic parallel arrays".)

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 17: ansi-wl-pprint: avoiding string hacking

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 17

(Reddit discussion)

Today we do the inverse of what we did on day 14, which was parsing from text to an abstract syntax tree. Today we pretty-print an abstract syntax tree to text.

I think that in the wider world of programming, it's very common to see ad hoc, inflexible solutions to this problem, using string hacking and maybe at best some string-based templates. It's typically hard to quickly customize indentation styles, expression wrapping, and other such features when using such an ad hoc solution.

In the Haskell community, a better solution is more often used, because of the number of quality libraries out there to help in pretty-printing.

ansi-wl-pprint is one such library, that includes not only a lot of useful convenience combinators, but also provides support for colored terminal output, if you want to use that (you don't have to).

Update

A commenter on Reddit noted that there's another version of the pretty-printing library, annotated-wl-pprint. This looks really cool, and here's a video by David Christiansen on its usage in Idris.

Back to our example expression type

Recall that our expression type is:

-- | Variable in an expression.
type Var = String

-- | Expression.
data Exp
  = N Int          -- ^ number
  | V Var          -- ^ variable
  | Plus Exp Exp   -- ^ sum
  | Times Exp Exp  -- ^ product

Some sample pretty-printed output

Let's pretty-print a sample expression. (In real life, we'd create a corpus of expressions to pretty-print and verify them, and also write QuickCheck tests to confirm various properties.)

{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-}

module SymbolicDifferentiation.AnsiWlPprintSpec where

import qualified SymbolicDifferentiation.Earley as Earley
import qualified SymbolicDifferentiation.AnsiWlPprint as AnsiWlPprint

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldBe, shouldSatisfy)

import Data.String.Here (hereLit)

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "anti-wl-pprint for symbolic differentiation expression" $ do
    let eString = [hereLit|(x*1) + 2*y + ((3+z) * (4*b)) * (5+d+w)|]
    let ([e], _) = Earley.parses eString
    it eString $ do
      show (AnsiWlPprint.prettyPrint e) `shouldBe`
        [hereLit|x*1 + 2*y + (3 + z)*4*b*(5 + d
+ w)|]

To avoid the hassle of constructing an Exp value by hand, we're reusing our parser.

Exercise for the reader: write a QuickCheck generator of random expressions, and write a test that verifies that when you roundtrip a random Exp through our AnsiWlPprint.prettyPrint and then back to an Exp through Earley.parses, we get the same Exp back!

The example here formats sums to be space-separated and products to be run together, with minimal parenthesizing and optional line breaking.

The code

The code is brief. The Haddock documentation for ansi-wl-pprint is excellent, so you can check it out for an explanation of the combinators used.

The single fundamental concept behind the library is that there is a data type Doc that represents a "document", a piece of pretty-printed information, and there is an algebra of combining documents to arrange them in various ways, and then you can use one of a variety of interpreters over the document to perform the final conversion to a string at the end.

module SymbolicDifferentiation.AnsiWlPprint where

import SymbolicDifferentiation.AlphaSyntax (Exp(N, V, Plus, Times))
import Text.PrettyPrint.ANSI.Leijen
       ( Doc
       , int, text, char
       , (</>), (<//>), (<+>), (<>)
       , parens
       )

-- | Very primitive, for illustration only!
--
-- Spaces for sums, but no spaces for products.
-- Soft breaks before operators.
prettyPrint :: Exp -> Doc
prettyPrint e = p 10 e

-- | Pretty-print inside a precedence context to avoid parentheses.
-- Consider + to be 6, * to be 7.
p :: Int -> Exp -> Doc
p _ (N n) = int n
p _ (V v) = text v
p prec (Plus e1 e2) = maybeParens (prec < 7)
  (p 7 e1 </> char '+' <+> p 7 e2)
p prec (Times e1 e2) = maybeParens (prec < 6)
  (p 6 e1 <//> char '*' <> p 6 e2)

maybeParens :: Bool -> Doc -> Doc
maybeParens True = parens
maybeParens False = id

Exercise for the reader: there are many ways to improve the pretty-printer, for example to line up terms to look like

a + b*c
  + d*e
  + f*g

I would probably first transform Exp into a SugaredExp that represents an intermediate abstract syntax of terms and factors, and then write a pretty-printer over that.

Duplication of work?

You might wonder about the duplication of effort in writing the parser and the pretty-printer. Can't one write a single high-level specification to do both simultaneously? Yes, there are tools for that, but outside the scope of this article.

Conclusion

Pretty-printing is a very important part of a text-based user interface, whether for inspecting generated code or creating good error messages. ansi-wl-pprint is a good library to use for pretty-printing.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 16: safe; what is safety anyway?

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 16

(Reddit discussion)

Today I'm doing something strange: up till now, I've discussed libraries and tools I actually use. Today I'm discussing a library I do not use, while thinking about why I not, and why you or I might want to use it. This library is safe, which aims to protect against the unfortunate "unsafety" of common functions in the standard Prelude.

That's a good thing, right? After all, on day 7, I promoted the use of the NonEmpty list, and again used in day 14. I like safety, but what does "safety" mean anyway?

Safety is relative

A notion of safety is always relative to some criterion, some expectation, and even more generally, in the context of some way of life. And ways of life can be safeguarded through different mechanisms, from strict protection to "style guides" to implicit social contracts and ostracism.

In the context of the safe package, the kind of safety we are concerned about is not ever wanting to see a running program crash with an exception from pure code like

*** Exception: Prelude.head: empty list

This happens if you call head on an empty list:

-- | Crashes if nobody in line.
unsafeReportFirstInLine :: [Int] -> String
unsafeReportFirstInLine nums =
  "next up: customer " ++ show (head nums)

> unsafeReportFirstInLine []
"next up: customer *** Exception: Prelude.head: empty list

The "safe" solution is don't ever call head on a list that might be empty. There are different ways to achieve this.

Solving a human psychology problem?

One possible solution is to change the type of head.

Providing functions such as head in the Haskell Prelude is arguably a historical legacy mistake from 1990, because it encourages programmers (especially those starting out with Haskell, especially when using instructional materials that use head!) to call head. If you give people the easy ability to do something unsafe, they will surely do it, and often.

Newer language communities attack the human psychology problem by not providing an unsafe head: for example, the standard PureScript ecosystem provides a safe Data.List.head with type forall a. List a -> Maybe a but also provides an entire Data.List.Unsafe module that includes Data.List.Unsafe.head with type forall a. List a -> a.

And Elm List module provides List.head of type List a -> Maybe a.

Marking something as unsafe at least enables the writer and reader of code to make note that something might go wrong, so I think this is a good starting point for a solution. Furthermore, psychology research has shown clearly that defaults matter: if the goal is to promote safety, it is better to have the default be safe, and "opt out" explicitly to be unsafe, rather than have the default be unsafe, and "opt in" to be safe.

Unfortunately, for historical reasons, if you're working with lists and some other data structures in Haskell, you are forced to opt in to safety, rather than opt out to unsafety.

The safe package allows you to opt in to safety.

You get functions such as Safe.headMay with type [a] -> Maybe a.

-- | Using 'Safe.headMay' and pattern matching on Maybe.
reportFirstInLine :: [Int] -> String
reportFirstInLine nums =
  case Safe.headMay nums of
    Just num -> "next up: customer " ++ show num
    Nothing -> "there are no customers in line"

Pattern-matching directly on the data structure as an alternative

In practice, I don't use functions like headMay because I usually just pattern-match on the list itself:

-- | Using pattern matching on list.
reportFirstInLine2 :: [Int] -> String
reportFirstInLine2 [] = "there are no customers in line"
reportFirstInLine2 (num:_) = "next up: customer " ++ show num

When I think about it, though, there is something not quite right about this solution. The wildcard _ in the pattern gives away the fact that we are getting back more information than we actually need. In principle we should ask only for what we need, and headMay does precisely that. I'm basically violating conceptual encapsulation by getting back more than I need (the tail) and ignoring it.

So I believe I should really start using headMay in this kind of context, and thinking more deeply, I believe that the single reason I haven't is that the standard Prelude didn't provide it! It was easier to do the pattern-matching than to find safe and add it as a dependency.

How many of you think like me, and would happily use headMay if it were part of the standard Prelude, but because it is not, you use a wildcarded pattern match on a list instead?

Revisiting the `headMay` solution

Some of you might like using the maybe function that has type b -> (a -> b) -> Maybe a -> b, to avoid pattern matching on Maybe:

-- | No pattern matching.
reportFirstInLine3 :: [Int] -> String
reportFirstInLine3 =
  maybe "there are no customers in line" reportOne . Safe.headMay

reportOne :: Int -> String
reportOne num = "next up: customer " ++ show num

There's also a code golf version that I do not recommend:

-- | Code golf.
reportFirstInLine4 :: [Int] -> String
reportFirstInLine4 =
  maybe "there are no customers in line"
        (("next up: customer " ++) . show)
        . Safe.headMay

Other `safe` goodies

Each of the ...May functions also has useful variants:

One allows specifying a default to return upon empty:

headDef :: a -> [a] -> a

Another is unsafe, but at least generates a better exception. This is useful if you know that a list is not empty, and do not want to handle the case in which it is empty, but just in case, generate an exception that if triggered, at least tells you where your "internal fatal error" came from.

headNote :: String -> [a] -> a

Exactness is a safety issue

The Safe.Exact module provides a lot of useful functions that have to do with indexing into a list or the checking the sizes of lists. Here, "safety" no longer refers to an exception. It refers to something more insidious: code you write that typechecks and runs but does the unintended thing. For example, it is very easy to use take in a way that you don't intend because it silently allows you to "take" more elements from a list than it contains, but just assumes you know what you are doing and don't "really" mean "take 1000 elements" but rather "take 1000 elements or if there aren't 1000, take all the elements". I have been bitten by take before, where I passed in an absurd number that I did not intend. So the Safe.Exact.takeExact... family of functions is quite useful. In the past, before I discovered safe, I ended up basically writing my own wrappers, and now I won't do that again.

Foldable

Finally the Safe.Foldable module is useful because Foldable is full of unsafe operations.

When you know something about your data that the type doesn't know

A final note on exactness of list operations as a safety issue: the principled solution to inexactness when it comes to indexing into or size of lists is to turn the potential bugs into type errors, using dependent types: a "list" type that is dependent on its size. A later Day of Hackage will mention solutions.

Conclusion

The safe package is a nice utility library that wraps "unsafe" Prelude operations. There are technical and psychological reasons I haven't used it, and I discussed them, but I will use it in the future when it fits my needs.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 15: IOSpec: testing IO; and some QuickCheck tricks

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 15

(Reddit discussion)

On day 11, I tangentially mentioned feeling embarrassed that unlike all of my other code examples, because I was using IO, I didn't approach it by writing tests up front. I didn't want to distract from the topic at hand, which had nothing to do with IO but to do with general monadic combinators.

But now I'm back to fill in the gap by showing one way of "mocking out" IO, the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/IOSpec" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/IOSpec">IOSpec</span> library. This isn't a perfect solution, and I wish there were some kind of standard way of testing IO in the Haskell ecosystem, rather than the various different methods (often reinvented) floating around out there, but at least gives the flavor of one approach.

Ironically, I found and fixed a bug in my code for day 11 in the process of writing a test for it!! Sometimes I feel I'm super unlucky because when I do last-minute edits of code without tests (in this case to turn one print statement into two, in the course of revising the day 11 article), I inevitably introduce bugs. This is precisely why I like to write tests. I do not trust myself without tests.

The day 11 code to test

Below is a copy of the introductory description of the task in day 11, with the first version of the Haskell code. We will test this first version:

Let's write a function to simulate a user login process, in which

the user is prompted to enter a password
a loop is entered in which
- a guess is read in
- if it is not correct, we prompt again and loop
- if it is correct, we exit the loop
we print congratulations

logIn :: IO ()
logIn = do
  putStrLn "% Enter password:"
  go
  putStrLn "$ Congratulations!"

  where
    -- Use recursion for loop
    go = do
      guess <- getLine
      if guess /= "secret"
        then do
          putStrLn "% Wrong password!"
          putStrLn "% Try again:"
          go
        else
          return ()

Code changes in order to use `IOSpec`

I copied the entire module for day 11 to a new module IOSpecExample.hs, with only a few modifications:

Changing the module name

-- | Copied with modification from MonadLoopsExample
module IOSpecExample where

Hiding and adding IO-related imports

import Prelude hiding (getLine, putStrLn)
import Test.IOSpec (IOSpec, Teletype, getLine, putStrLn)

Changing type signatures

We change IO a to IOSpec Teletype a everywhere, in order to set up to use the "teletype" simulator for reading and printing characters, since it happens that our logIn only uses those operations. If we used other operations, there are other simulators available, and IOSpec <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/IOSpec-0.3/docs/Test-IOSpec-Types.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/IOSpec-0.3/docs/Test-IOSpec-Types.html">uses a "data types a la carte" type mechanism for mixing and matching</span>.

How `IOSpec` works

IOSpec works by making everything build up a data structure that is then run with a Scheduler to produce an Effect. We use evalIOSpec:

evalIOSpec :: Executable f => IOSpec f a -> Scheduler -> Effect a

We (the tester) can then interpret the Effect however we want. We'll just use a basic single-threaded scheduler for this example.

The test

For our test, we'll use QuickCheck to generate random user input, subject to some constraints. Since we're simulating a teletype, we assume that the user enters a stream (we'll represent this as a list) of strings that do not contain newlines. We want to verify that if one of them is the word "secret", then the collective output will simply be the introductory prompt, the correct total number of re-prompts upon a wrong guess, and the final congratulations.

Here's the spec, with auxiliary code discussed below:

{-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-}

module IOSpecExampleSpec where

import IOSpecExample (logIn)
import qualified Test.IOSpec as IO

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe)
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)
import Test.QuickCheck
import Data.Coerce (coerce)

-- | Required for auto-discovery.
spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "IOSpec" $ do
    prop "logIn outputs prompts until secret is guessed" $
      \(notSecretLines :: [NotSecretString]) (anyLines :: [NotNewlineString]) ->
      let allLines = coerce notSecretLines
                     ++ ["secret"]
                     ++ coerce anyLines
          outputLines = ["% Enter password:"]
                        ++ concatMap
                           (const [ "% Wrong password!"
                                  , "% Try again:"])
                           notSecretLines
                        ++ ["$ Congratulations!"]
      in takeOutput (withInput (unlines allLines)
                               (IO.evalIOSpec logIn IO.singleThreaded))
         == unlines outputLines

`newtype`s to drive QuickCheck

We're using a standard QuickCheck trick to create domain-specific random generators for already-existing data types.

One of our types is NotSecretString, representing a line typed by the user that is not equal to "secret"; it also should not have a newline. The QuickCheck Arbitrary instance is boilerplate to maintain the desired invariants.

-- | User input without a newline, and not equal to "secret".
newtype NotSecretString =
  NotSecretString { getNotSecretString :: NotNewlineString }
  deriving (Show)

instance Arbitrary NotSecretString where
  arbitrary = NotSecretString <$>
              arbitrary `suchThat` ((/= "secret") . coerce)
  shrink = map NotSecretString
              . filter ((/= "secret") . coerce)
              . shrink
              . getNotSecretString

We refine further down to the Char level, to generate NotNewlineChar:

type NotNewlineString = [NotNewlineChar]

newtype NotNewlineChar =
  NotNewlineChar { getNotNewlineChar :: Char }
  deriving (Show)

-- | Quick hack. Ideally should write specific generator rather than
-- filtering off the default 'Char' generator.
instance Arbitrary NotNewlineChar where
  arbitrary = NotNewlineChar <$>
              arbitrary `suchThat` (/= '\n')
  shrink = map NotNewlineChar
              . filter (/= '\n')
              . shrink
              . getNotNewlineChar

A note on random strings

We used a quick hack for getting an "arbitrary" string. It's not so arbitrary, as you can see from the QuickCheck source code. For quality Unicode string generation, use <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/quickcheck-unicode" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/quickcheck-unicode">quickcheck-unicode</span>.

A note on `coerce`: it's just an optimization hack

If you haven't seen coerce from <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.8.1.0/docs/Data-Coerce.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.8.1.0/docs/Data-Coerce.html">Data.Coerce</span> before, you may wonder what it is. It's just an efficiency hack to take advantage of Haskell's guarantee that a newtype's data representation is identical to the type it wraps. coerce solves the problem of ensuring that wrapping of wrapping (of wrapping...) is still recognized as having the same representation, such that there is no runtime cost in treating a value as being of a different type. It's an ugly hack but convenient. If something can't be coerced, that's a type error, so this is safe.

If you don't like using coerce, you have to use a lot of map and unwrapping and rewrapping to convert between all the different types, such as

notSecretStringsAsStrings :: [NotSecretString] -> [String]
notSecretStringsAsStrings = map notSecretStringAsString

notSecretStringAsString :: NotSecretString -> String
notSecretStringAsString = map getNotNewlineChar . getNotSecretString

It was easier if less principled for me to just think "they're all just Char and [Char] underneath". If anyone has guidelines on when to use coerce and when not, I'd be happy to link to them from here (and change my code as appropriate).

Interpreting an `Effect`

We interpret the Effect in a way taken from an <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/IOSpec-0.3/src/examples/Echo.hs" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/IOSpec-0.3/src/examples/Echo.hs">example coming with the library</span>. We convert Print and ReadChar how you would expect if generating a stream of characters or reading from one.

Taking output is straightforward, interpreting Done and Print:

takeOutput :: IO.Effect () -> String
takeOutput (IO.Done _) = ""
takeOutput (IO.Print c xs) = c : takeOutput xs
takeOutput _ = error "takeOutput: expects only Done, Print"

Reading input is trickier, because what is really happening is that an input stream of characters is used to convert one Effect into another. The ReadChar constructor has type Char -> Effect a and therefore when its value is called on a Char, goes to the "next thing that happens".

withInput :: [Char] -> IO.Effect a -> IO.Effect a
withInput _ (IO.Done x) = IO.Done x
withInput stdin (IO.Print c e) = IO.Print c (withInput stdin e)
withInput (char:stdin) (IO.ReadChar f) = withInput stdin (f char)
withInput _ _ = error "withInput: expects only Done, Print, ReadChar"

And with this test, I found the bug in my code, in which the output was not what I expected because of a percent sign that went missing during a hasty edit.

A final note: there is a popular pattern called "free monad"

If you already know about free monads, you probably wanted to tell me "what about the free monad" as this article began, but I didn't want to go there, yet. Maybe later.

Conclusion

Today I presented one way of adding a layer of abstraction to IO operations in order to be able to interpret them in an alternate way than actually doing them, in order to be able to write and run interesting tests.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 14: Earley: a promising newer parser library for Haskell

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 14

(Reddit discussion)

On day 10, I showed how to use S-expressions to avoid having to write a custom parser. But writing parsers isn't too bad in Haskell, or is it? The popular parsec library has many problems, because it requires hand-hacked backtracking that causes weird error messages and difficulty in reasoning about your grammar. There's an improved fork of parsec called megaparsec, but it's still the same kind of technology. How about something completely different.

The recent Earley is intriguing and I've begun using it for new projects where I don't need the monadic power of something like parsec but are OK with an applicative API instead and don't need the performance of something like attoparsec. Apart from good error messages, it allows handles online parsing and ambiguity.

Today I'll give two small examples of using Earley.

Installation

Since Stackage LTS is behind right now, and Earley keeps moving, I decided to use the latest version of Earley by modifying our stack.yaml:

- Earley-0.10.1.0

(Update of 2016-01-06)

Stackage LTS 4 has caught up, no no more need for this modification.

Parsing into day 10's AST

Let's go back to the symbolic differentiation problem on day 10, and create a math-like infix syntax to parse.

Tests

Here are some HSpec/QuickCheck tests to illustrate what we want when parsing a string into an Exp.

Imports

Text.Earley is the main module of the Earley package; Report is used for return a report on the progress of the parse.

{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-}
{-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-}
{-# LANGUAGE LambdaCase #-}

module SymbolicDifferentiation.EarleySpec where

import SymbolicDifferentiation.AlphaSyntax (Exp(N, V, Plus, Times))
import qualified SymbolicDifferentiation.Earley as Earley
import Text.Earley (Report(..))

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldBe, shouldSatisfy)
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)
import Test.QuickCheck (NonNegative(..))

import Data.String.Here (i)

QuickCheck tests

Some QuickCheck tests that show that some sample expressions such as x*a + y*b * (z+c) parse into the expected ASTs:

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "Custom syntax for expression parsed by Earley" $ do
    -- For simplicity, don't support negative numeric literals now.
    prop "x + a" $ \(NonNegative (a :: Int)) ->
      fst (Earley.parses [i|x + ${a}|]) `shouldBe`
        [Plus (V "x") (N a)]

    prop "x*a + y*b * (z+c)" $
      \(NonNegative (a :: Int))
       (NonNegative (b :: Int))
       (NonNegative (c :: Int)) ->
      fst (Earley.parses [i|x*${a} + y*${b} * (z+${c})|]) `shouldBe`
        [Plus (Times (V "x") (N a))
              (Times (Times (V "y") (N b))
                     (Plus (V "z") (N c)))]

Expected parse errors

Finally, one example of how to check for expected parse errors. The error tokens are user-defined and attached to grammar productions, as we will see.

    it "x + y * + 5" $
      Earley.parses "x + y * + 5" `shouldSatisfy`
        \case
          ([], Report { position = 8
                      , expected = ["number", "identifier", "("]
                      , unconsumed = "+ 5"
                      }) -> True
          _ -> False

Implementation

The implementation involves Applicative idioms that will be familiar to you if you have used parsec.

Imports

{-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-}
{-# LANGUAGE RecursiveDo #-}
{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-}

module SymbolicDifferentiation.Earley where

import SymbolicDifferentiation.AlphaSyntax (Exp(N, V, Plus, Times))

import qualified Text.Earley as E
import Text.Earley ((<?>))
import Control.Applicative (many, some, (<|>))
import qualified Data.Char as Char
import Control.Monad.ST (ST)
import Data.ListLike (ListLike)

-- | What to report for something expected.
type Expected = String

The <?> operator is used to attach an expectation (which we have decided to specify as a string, with type synonym Expected) to a production.

Drivers

What we want for our particular problem is a parser that takes a string as input and expects to fully parse it. We construct it from a more generic parser that comes from processing our grammar.

-- | Return a list of all possible `Exp` parses, and also a status report
-- regardless of how many successes.
parses :: String -> ([Exp], E.Report Expected String)
parses = E.fullParses expParser

-- | Parser created from the grammar.
expParser :: ListLike input Char =>
             ST state (input -> ST state (E.Result state Expected input Exp))
expParser = E.parser grammar

Grammar

Our grammar is straightforward. Earley uses a monad to maintain its internal state, and we use the RecursiveDo GHC extension (covered in a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-12-09-recursive-do.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-12-09-recursive-do.html">2014 Day of GHC Extensions</span>) in order to be able to refer to a rule within the grammar recursively. Note that left recursion in the grammar is just fine for Earley.

Prod is the type constructor for a production, and you build up productions using combinators such as satisfy and symbol.

-- | Basically taken from <https://github.com/ollef/Earley/blob/master/examples/Expr2.hs Earley example expression parser>
grammar :: forall r. E.Grammar r (E.Prod r Expected Char Exp)
grammar = mdo
  whitespace <- E.rule $
    many $ E.satisfy Char.isSpace

  let token :: E.Prod r Expected Char a -> E.Prod r Expected Char a
      token p = whitespace *> p

      sym x   = token $ E.symbol x <?> [x]

      ident   = token $ (:) <$> E.satisfy Char.isAlpha
                            <*> many (E.satisfy Char.isAlphaNum)
                            <?> "identifier"
      num     = token $ some (E.satisfy Char.isDigit) <?> "number"
      -- For now, just handle unsigned numeric literals.

  atom <- E.rule $
    (N . read) <$> num
    <|> V <$> ident
    <|> sym '(' *> term <* sym ')'

  factor <- E.rule $
    Times <$> factor <* sym '*' <*> atom
    <|> atom

  term <- E.rule $
    Plus <$> term <* sym '+' <*> factor
    <|> factor

  return $ term <* whitespace

For more examples of grammars, see the examples directory in the Earley GitHub repo.

(Update of 2015-12-17)

The inverse of parsing is pretty-printing, covered on day 17.

For fun: solving the "number word" problem

The ability to handle ambiguity and return all possible parses is a useful one in many situations. Here I show a solution to the "number word" problem. In the past, I have managed ambiguity using Happy's GLR support, but I don't like writing parsers using Happy.

The "number word" problem:

Given a positive integer, return all the ways that the integer can be
represented by letters using the mapping 1 -> A, 2 -> B, ..., 26 ->
Z. For instance, the number 1234 can be represented by the words ABCD,
AWD and LCD.

This is a toy version of an actually serious problem, that of segmentation in natural language.

Test

The test reflects the problem statement:

module EarleyExampleSpec where

import EarleyExample (grammar, NumberWord, Expected)
import qualified Text.Earley as E
import qualified Data.List.NonEmpty as NonEmpty

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldMatchList)

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "EarleyExample" $ do
    it "returns all possible parses of number words" $ do
      let (result, _) = parseNumberWord 1234
      map NonEmpty.toList result `shouldMatchList`
        ["ABCD", "AWD", "LCD"]

parseNumberWord :: Integer -> ([NumberWord], E.Report Expected String)
parseNumberWord = E.fullParses (E.parser grammar) . show

Note that I am using a NonEmpty list of Char because an empty string is not a valid solution to the "number word" problem. (I covered NonEmpty on day 7.)

Solution

The solution is just to write a grammar that tries to pick off valid consecutive digits to make a letter. We create a production for each possible letter that we care about, using numberLetterFor, combine those productions with alternation using asum to get a composite production numberLetter, then use that for numberWord which is the grammar.

{-# LANGUAGE RecursiveDo #-}

module EarleyExample where

import qualified Text.Earley as E
import Text.Earley ((<?>))
import Control.Applicative ((<|>))
import qualified Data.Foldable as Foldable
import qualified Data.Char as Char
import qualified Data.List.NonEmpty as NonEmpty
import Data.List.NonEmpty (NonEmpty((:|)))

-- | Result wanted.
type NumberWord = NonEmpty NumberLetter

-- | 'A' to 'Z'.
type NumberLetter = Char

-- | What to report for something expected.
type Expected = String

grammar :: E.Grammar r (E.Prod r Expected Char NumberWord)
grammar = mdo
  numberWord <- E.rule $
    NonEmpty.cons <$> numberLetter <*> numberWord
    <|> (:| []) <$> numberLetter
  return numberWord

numberLetter :: E.Prod r Expected Char NumberLetter
numberLetter = (Foldable.asum . map numberLetterFor) ['A'..'Z'] <?> "number"

-- | Return a production for a given letter.
--
-- 1 is 'A', 2 is 'B', .. 26 is 'Z'.
numberLetterFor :: NumberLetter -> E.Prod r Expected Char NumberLetter
numberLetterFor c = c <$ E.word (show (toNumber c)) <?> [c]

-- | 'A' is 1, ... 'Z' is 26
toNumber :: NumberLetter -> Int
toNumber c = (Char.ord c - Char.ord 'A') + 1

Conclusion

I only recently discovered the Earley parser library and started using it. I'm pretty excited by its friendliness.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 13: hint: runtime eval for Haskell

Sun, 13 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 13

(Reddit discussion)

One hallmark of a "dynamic language" such as Lisp and JavaScript is the ability to evaluate code at runtime inside a running process. Since runtime loading of classes is a fundamental feature of Java, is Java a "dynamic language" then? I think the terms "static language" and "dynamic language" are not very useful terms, and a comparison of language and compiler and development environments should focus on specific features of the user experience and where the boundaries lie in the semantics. One tricky thing is that a lot of what is interesting is actually implementation-dependent.

For example, the Haskell standard says nothing about runtime eval, so there is some sense in which Haskell considered as a strictly defined "language" has no support for it. But if we consider the GHC implementation and its ecosystem, which is dominant today despite the existence of other Haskell implementations, there's a lot of tooling that is "dynamic", in the sense of being able to access GHC APIs in one of many different ways.

Edward Yang recently wrote an interesting blog post "The convergence of compilers, build systems and package managers" on a subset of the general issue of what can access what for the sake of tooling. It didn't touch on runtime evaluation, which is an entire topic in itself.

For today, I decided to mention that you can already do runtime eval of GHC Haskell code using the package hint and offer the thought that maybe we might want something less ad hoc than third-party packages like this.

Why dynamic loading and evaluation of Haskell code?

For me, it always comes down to being jealous of the Lisp world.

There are times when I have wanted to be able to do dynamic loading and evaluation of Haskell code, and wished I were in Lisp. The main example is when supporting user-written "plugins" that can be loaded from a source file or even typed at a custom REPL. The cleanest way of doing such a thing is to create and implement a limited domain-specific language and write a parser, type checker (if the DSL is typed), compiler/interpreter for it. But why do all that if we can just allow using the full power of Haskell instead?

Luckily, I found libraries such as hint that enabled me to do what I wanted. I'll show a toy example of the kind of thing that I have done.

The task

Imagine a program that does sorting, and allows the user at runtime to submit a custom sorting function to have it be used in place of the default options. For example, the user could have specified the path of a Haskell source file OurSorter.hs as a command-line argument, or the program could have a preferences dialog box allowing the user to enter the text of a sorting function.

To make things even more interesting, let's say that the sorting function to be specified has to be polymorphic, constrained only to require comparison:

userDefinedSort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]

How do we load this type of function at runtime?

A necessary type wrapper

The first thing to get out of the way is that we cannot load a function of type Ord a => [a] -> [a] directly, because of lack of current GHC support for <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2014-12-23-impredicative.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2014-12-23-impredicative.html">impredicate types</span>. However, there is a trick we can play, which is to wrap such a type in a newtype, along with using the higher-rank type language feature. I learned this trick from this <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2014-12-23-impredicative.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2014-12-23-impredicative.html">article on impredicative types</span>.

{-# LANGUAGE RankNTypes #-}

module SortWrapper (Sort(..)) where

newtype Sort =
  Sort { getSort :: forall a. Ord a => [a] -> [a] }

Now we can try to load values of type Sort instead of type Ord a => [a] -> [a].

How to load?

Let's create an API called loadSort that enables loading a particular Sort by looking for it by module and name. Here's an HSpec test that illustrates that we want to be able to load a Sort and use it on different types of lists. We're using Language.Haskell.Interpreter to do the work:

module HintExampleSpec where

import SortWrapper (Sort(Sort))
import HintExample (loadSort)

import qualified Language.Haskell.Interpreter as I

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldBe)
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "hint" $ do
    it "dynamically loads a correct polymorphic sort function" $ do
      Right (Sort ourSort) <-
        I.runInterpreter (loadSort "OurSorter" "ourSort")
      ourSort "ebcad" `shouldBe` "abcde"
      ourSort [1 :: Int, 5, 4, 3, 7] `shouldBe` [1, 3, 4, 5, 7]
    it "dynamically loads a wrong (only head) sort function" $ do
      Right (Sort onlyHead) <-
        I.runInterpreter (loadSort "OurSorter" "onlyHead")
      onlyHead "ebcad" `shouldBe` "e"
      onlyHead [True, False] `shouldBe` [True]

A sample "plugin"

We created a sample "plugin" in a directory whose source code is not compiled into our main program. Imagine that the user has a separate plugins directory.

The loader

module HintExample where

import SortWrapper (Sort)
import qualified Language.Haskell.Interpreter as I
import Language.Haskell.Interpreter (OptionVal((:=)))

-- | Dynamically load a 'Sort' implementation from a file.
-- src is needed to pick up our SortWrapper.
-- sort-plugins is a sample user plugins directory
loadSort :: I.MonadInterpreter m =>
            String  -- ^ module name
         -> String  -- ^ function name
         -> m Sort
loadSort moduleName functionName = do
  I.set [I.searchPath := ["src", "sort-plugins"]]
  I.loadModules [moduleName]
  I.setImports [moduleName, "SortWrapper"]
  I.interpret (moduleName ++ "." ++ functionName) (I.as :: Sort)

The most interesting part is the use of the interpret function that has type

interpret :: (MonadInterpreter m, Typeable a) => String -> a -> m a

taking a string and a witness for a monomorphic type in order to tell interpret what runtime dictionary for Typeable to use (the modern standard way for the library to have done this would have been to use a Proxy).

So there we have it: runtime eval in GHC Haskell. What hint provides is fairly primitive, but I found it useful.

Conclusion

I'd like to see more official support for dynamism in environments for languages such as Haskell. This does require access to compiler internals or official APIs, but I think this is the way to go. Principled phase separations are important but so is integration. I like that hint exists to allow me to dynamically load GHC Haskell code.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 12: json-autotype: inferring types from data

Sat, 12 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 12

(Reddit discussion)

Today we revisit a problem from day 4, in which we grabbed JSON off the Web in order to extract information about it. I mentioned then that we were using an untyped representation for JSON. Ideally, if it's not too onerous, we want to use a typed representation for our data, to avoid common errors such as trying to access a nonexistent field. The Aeson library allows us to write our own data types and convert them from and to JSON. If we were in charge of the data and data format, then this would be the way to go.

But what if, for whatever reason, we do not already have a typed data model, but are consuming, for example, JSON from a source that has not given us a spec of the data types, maybe with JSON Schema? Then we have to reverse-engineer the data types, possibly from an informal text spec of the format (which is a real pain).

Or we could take a lazy way out, and infer plausible types from a corpus of representative data. This is what the useful json-autotype package does (documentation on the GitHub repo page).

Video (update of 2016-01-08)

It just came to my attention that there is a video on json-autotype that may be of interest:

Generating a module of types from JSON data

I saved off a sample JSON document, pittsburgh-code-and-supply-events.json from a query of the Meetup events API.

The easiest way to use json-autotype is to use its command line tool, installing it globally first.

$ stack install json-autotype

For our quick example, I just manually generated Haskell source code (ideally we should integrate this process into a fully automated build):

$ json-autotype pittsburgh-code-and-supply-events.json -o
MeetupEventsJSON.hs
$ mkdir generated-src
$ mv MeetupEventsJSon.hs generated-src/

Note that although for this example, we only ran the inference on a single document, running it on more documents may give more precise types.

A quick look at the generated code

Here is a sample of what was generated (reformatted and edited for clarity):

{-# LANGUAGE TypeOperators #-}

import Data.Aeson.AutoType.Alternative ((:|:))

data TopLevel = TopLevel {
    topLevelResults :: [ResultsElt],
    topLevelMeta :: Meta
  } deriving (Show,Eq,Generic)

data ResultsElt = ResultsElt {
    resultsEltStatus :: Text,
    resultsEltGroup :: Group,
    resultsEltTime :: Int,
    resultsEltWaitlistCount :: Int,
    resultsEltVenue :: (Maybe (Venue:|:[(Maybe Value)])),
    resultsEltCreated :: Int,
    resultsEltUtcOffset :: Int,
    resultsEltEventUrl :: Text,
    resultsEltYesRsvpCount :: Int,
    resultsEltHeadcount :: Int,
    resultsEltFee :: (Maybe (Fee:|:[(Maybe Value)])),
    resultsEltVisibility :: Text,
    resultsEltMaybeRsvpCount :: Int,
    resultsEltName :: Text,
    resultsEltId :: Text,
    resultsEltRsvpLimit :: (Maybe (Int:|:[(Maybe Value)])),
    resultsEltUpdated :: Int,
    resultsEltDuration :: (Maybe (Int:|:[(Maybe Value)])),
    resultsEltDescription :: (Maybe (Text:|:[(Maybe Value)]))
  } deriving (Show,Eq,Generic)

instance FromJSON ResultsElt where
  parseJSON (Object v) = ResultsElt
    <$> v .:   "status"
    <*> v .:   "group"
    <*> v .:   "time"
    <*> v .:   "waitlist_count"
    <*> v .:?? "venue"
    <*> v .:   "created"
    <*> v .:   "utc_offset"
    <*> v .:   "event_url"
    <*> v .:   "yes_rsvp_count"
    <*> v .:   "headcount"
    <*> v .:?? "fee"
    <*> v .:   "visibility"
    <*> v .:   "maybe_rsvp_count"
    <*> v .:   "name"
    <*> v .:   "id"
    <*> v .:?? "rsvp_limit"
    <*> v .:   "updated"
    <*> v .:?? "duration"
    <*> v .:?? "description"
  parseJSON _          = mzero

data Venue = Venue {
    venueRepinned :: Bool,
    venueState :: Text,
    venueCountry :: Text,
    venueZip :: (Maybe (Text:|:[(Maybe Value)])),
    venueLat :: Int,
    venueName :: Text,
    venueCity :: Text,
    venueId :: Int,
    venueLon :: Int,
    venueAddress1 :: Text
  } deriving (Show,Eq,Generic)

Isn't this much better than inferring and writing the boilerplate manually? Now we can parse raw JSON directly into our set of types.

The funny :|: operator is an Either-like type constructor used to deal with the fact that when a field is missing from some data examples, we cannot infer whether it could potentially be a complex object that we just don't know about from our corpus of examples.

Using the generated types

Imports:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TypeOperators #-}

module JSONAutoTypeExample where

-- Reuse what we did earlier.
import WreqExample (EventInfo(..), GroupId, getMeetupEventsJSONBytes)

-- Module automatically generated using json-autotype.
import qualified MeetupEventsJSON as Meetup
import qualified Data.Aeson as Aeson
import Control.Arrow ((>>>))
import Data.Aeson.AutoType.Alternative ((:|:)(AltLeft, AltRight))
import qualified Data.Text as Text

Our replacement for the old getMeetupEventInfos:

getMeetupEventInfos :: GroupId -> IO (Either String [EventInfo])
getMeetupEventInfos groupId =
  getMeetupEventsJSONBytes groupId
  >>= (Aeson.eitherDecode
       >>> fmap extractEventInfos
       >>> return
      )

Note already the differences from before. We are now using Aeson.eitherDecode to turn JSON bytes into a full-fledged Meetup.TopLevel typed data object, and therefore can detect up front whether the JSON we got was valid (in the sense of, conforms to our prior inferred types).

Extracting events:

extractEventInfos :: Meetup.TopLevel -> [EventInfo]
extractEventInfos =
  Meetup.topLevelResults
  >>> map extractEventInfo

This is also different from before, in that we are not just using hardcoded string keys to hopefully find what we want in the JSON result. We have a Meetup.TopLevel object and just use ordinary typed record access to dive into the data.

Extracting information from a single event:

extractEventInfo :: Meetup.ResultsElt -> EventInfo
extractEventInfo event =
  EventInfo { eventName = Meetup.resultsEltName event
            , venueName = extractVenueName (Meetup.resultsEltVenue event)
            }

Again, we just use the typed record fields from Meetup.ResultsElt, instead of string keys into an object.

Finally, bottoming out as we try to get a venue name from the venue object of an event:

-- | Trickier because json-autotype apparently found events without a venue.
extractVenueName :: Maybe (Meetup.Venue :|: [Maybe Aeson.Value]) -> Text.Text
extractVenueName Nothing = ""
extractVenueName (Just (AltLeft venue)) = Meetup.venueName venue
extractVenueName (Just (AltRight jsonValues)) =
  Text.pack ("(unexpected JSON venue: " ++ show jsonValues ++ ")")

Here we recognize that maybe there is no venue, or the venue JSON field is not actually a Venue. In practice, recognizing this fact might result in changing our EventInfo type so that it doesn't assume a Text as its venueName, but for here, for now, we just stay in the stringly-typed world and try to make to with return a useful string in all cases.

But you see how having typed JSON can drive rethinking of our original assumptions leading to our definition of EventInfo and maybe improve our design. The cool thing about json-autotype is that you can make use it without having to write the JSON types by hand.

Type providers

The F# language includes support for type providers, which are ways to get types from somewhere without having to write them yourself. This is a really cool feature I'd like to see put into more typed language ecosystems. For example, there is a library for type providers for Idris.

I'm not aware of how much work there has been on a type provider ecosystem for Haskell, but I imagine that you could use Template Haskell, for example, to automate some of what we did here with json-autotype, as a crude form of type provider.

Conclusion

json-autotype is a nice library that helps in making sense of JSON that comes your way but without an associated set of types already written for you. It infers types and writes out a Haskell module for you.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 11: monad-loops: avoiding writing recursive functions by refactoring

Fri, 11 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 11

(Reddit discussion)

I often dislike writing recursive functions. Recursion is a form of goto and therefore recursion is, conceptually, the assembly language low-level infrastructure of functional programming, a fundamental building block but not necessarily something I want to see every day.

An analogy: imperative programming in the 1960s was altered significantly when brand new control structures such as for and while loops changed the face of imperative programming by removing the boilerplate of using the low-level goto everywhere; for and while are the higher-order control structures of imperative programming.

In functional programming, recursion boilerplate is avoided through writing and using higher-order functions such as map,filter, foldr, and traverse. The cool thing is that in functional programming, these are ordinary user-space functions, whereas in imperative programming, the control structures are built into the language and it's typically not so easy to invent your own.

Why would you want to define control structures yourself? I'll show examples and a useful little library monad-loops that you can use in order to avoid reinventing the wheel.

A sample task

Let's write a function to simulate a user login process, in which

the user is prompted to enter a password
a loop is entered in which
- a guess is read in
- if it is not correct, we prompt again and loop
- if it is correct, we exit the loop
we print congratulations

Here is a literal translation of the pseudocode into Haskell using recursion for the loop:

logIn :: IO ()
logIn = do
  putStrLn "% Enter password:"
  go
  putStrLn "$ Congratulations!"

  where
    -- Use recursion for loop
    go = do
      guess <- getLine
      if guess /= "secret"
        then do
          putStrLn "% Wrong password!"
          putStrLn "% Try again:"
          go
        else
          return ()

Do you like this code? Me, I'm annoyed by having to write that "helper" recursive function just to write a loop.

Comparision with typical imperative style

Compare with typical Python code:

def log_in():
  print "% Enter password:"
  while raw_input() != 'secret':
    print "% Wrong password!"
    print "% Try again:"
  print "% Congratulations!"

There's a reason while loops were invented in the 1960s for imperative programming. It was to improve the expression of control flow patterns of this form. It would be backwards to return to programming entirely in goto style. (However, this does not mean goto and recursion are bad. Knuth famously wrote an article in 1974 defending the careful use of goto against what he correctly noted was dogma that went to far against goto. The same could be said against any anti-recursion dogma.)

When I teach Haskell, I get embarrassed when people wonder what's so "wrong" about Haskell that you can't write straightforward code like the Python code above, but have to pull out the recursion thing just to do something simple. The dilemma I face when teaching is that the thought in my mind is, "But, but, we can have loops too, they're just not built into the language and you can even write your own using higher-order functions!" while I know that many are thinking "What a crappy ivory-tower impractical academic language, it doesn't even have while loops", and meanwhile I also know that you can't just jump into higher-order functions in the first hour.

Making your own loop

The central mindset of functional programming is that if you see boilerplate, a pattern, then it might be worthwhile to refactor into two components:

the abstract structure of the pattern
the concrete instance of the problem

So monad-loops provides a bunch of useful combinators capturing common control flow patterns. For example, we can use the function whileM_ for our problem:

import Control.Monad.Loops (whileM_)

The type of whileM is

whileM_ :: Monad m => m Bool -> m a -> m ()

It takes a "condition" that evaluates a Bool (in a monadic context m), along with an arbitrary monadic "body" action to perform, to return a "loop" (the monadic action that returns unit) which keeps testing the condition and performing the body.

Our code rewritten:

-- | No explicit recursion
logIn2 :: IO ()
logIn2 = do
  putStrLn "% Enter password:"
  whileM_ (do
             guess <- getLine
             return (guess /= "secret")
          ) (do
               putStrLn "% Wrong password!"
               putStrLn "% Try again:"
            )
  putStrLn "$ Congratulations!"

This looks better than the explicit recursion, except for the clumsy syntax because our loop "condition" and "body" are just ordinary expressions and therefore need to be parenthesized to be passed into the whileM_ function.

Note that the implementation of whileM is just ordinary Haskell code that abstracts exactly from the structure of our original code, by pulling out the condition and body. Functional programming is all about "extract method"!

whileM_ :: (Monad m) => m Bool -> m a -> m ()
whileM_ p f = go
    where go = do
            x <- p
            if x
                then f >> go
                else return ()

Improving the syntax

I've warned in earlier posts against getting too clever with syntax, so I deliberately presented "normal" syntax above for calling the whileM_ function, to show that it really is normal code, nothing magical. But for those of you who are not already deeply embedded in Haskell shortcut idioms, below are some rewrites into "fancier" syntax, but do exactly the same thing.

The first step to avoid a lot of parenthesizing of expressions is to use the $ function application operator, a trick to enable removing the parentheses of the final expression (the one serving as loop "body"):

-- | With $ syntax.
logIn3 :: IO ()
logIn3 = do
  putStrLn "% Enter password:"
  whileM_ (do
             guess <- getLine
             return (guess /= "secret")
          ) $ do
    putStrLn "% Wrong password!"
    putStrLn "% Try again:"
  putStrLn "$ Congratulations!"

Another step is to use some lifting of operations into the monad using liftM:

import Control.Monad (liftM)

-- | With lifting.
logIn4 :: IO ()
logIn4 = do
  putStrLn "% Enter password:"
  whileM_ (liftM (\guess -> guess /= "secret") getLine) $ do
    putStrLn "% Wrong password!"
    putStrLn "% Try again:"
  putStrLn "$ Congratulations!"

The cost is that you have to understand lifting and the $ operator.

If you're willing to pay another cost, that of using operator sectioning and the symbolic fmap operator <$>, here's a final version:

-- | With operator sectioning and <$>.
logIn5 :: IO ()
logIn5 = do
  putStrLn "% Enter password:"
  whileM_ ((/= "secret") <$> getLine) $ do
    putStrLn "% Wrong password!"
    putStrLn "% Try again:"
  putStrLn "$ Congratulations!"

This looks a lot like the Python code, except it is full of syntax that is completely mysterious to a newcomer to Haskell.

Another task: reading and collecting lines

One last example of refactoring away recursion:

Suppose you want to write an IO action for a console application that reads lines from user input until encountering "quit", and you want to collect all these lines (but not "quit") into a list:

readLinesUntilQuit :: IO [String]

Here's a sample interactive session:

> readLinesUntilQuit
hello
lovely
world!
quit

Result:

["hello","lovely","world!"]

Here's a straightforward implementation, using recursion.

readLinesUntilQuit :: IO [String]
readLinesUntilQuit = do
  line <- getLine
  if line /= "quit"
    then do
      -- recursive call, to loop
      restOfLines <- readLinesUntilQuit
      return (line : restOfLines)
    else return []

This is not unreadable, but there is definitely a lot of boilerplate going on:

a condition
recursion
collection stuff into a list

Refactoring recursion away

We'll use unfoldM:

unfoldM :: Monad m => m (Maybe a) -> m [a]

All the work is in the argument, which we extract into its own definition:

-- | No explicit recursion.
readLinesUntilQuit2 :: IO [String]
readLinesUntilQuit2 = unfoldM maybeReadLine

-- | Read a single line and check whether it's "quit".
maybeReadLine :: IO (Maybe String)
maybeReadLine = do
  line <- getLine
  return (if line /= "quit"
          then Just line
          else Nothing)

We can go further in this refactoring, because maybeReadLine intermingles both IO and a pure conditional check of the input line. Parenthesized expressions are often a code smell suggesting a refactoring opportunity.

readLinesUntilQuit3 :: IO [String]
readLinesUntilQuit3 = unfoldM (notQuit <$> getLine)

notQuit :: String -> Maybe String
notQuit line =
  if line /= "quit"
    then Just line
    else Nothing

I like this last version because it decouples the loop, the condition, and the fundamental IO action bringing in more information to use.

A note on testing

If you've been following this entire Days of Hackage article series, you may be wondering why I didn't provide HSpec tests and walk through in test-driven development style. The reason is that I didn't want to get into how one would "mock out" IO in order to write tests that simulate user activity.

Conclusion

I gave two example refactorings of code to avoid explicit recursion in favor of using combinators from monad-loops. I hope the exploration of refactoring as well as of syntax is useful to those not already familiar with these techniques and idioms. Check out the whole library for more combinators you can use.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 10: s-cargot: using S-expression syntax

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 10

(Reddit discussion)

There are times when I'm jealous of the Lisp world.

One of those times is when defining some domain-specific language, because in the Lisp world, the natural thing to do is to represent it using S-expressions as the concrete syntax, and not fuss with defining yet another special syntax, along with writing a parser for that syntax into the abstract syntax as well as a pretty-printer from the abstract syntax back to the concrete syntax. Maybe in the long run users might want a special syntax that is not just S-expressions, but for quick initial prototyping, at least, it seems worthwhile to not commit to any special syntax and just use S-expressions. Although there is nothing magical about S-expressions (or XML or JSON or any other generic representation of a tree data structure), they are particularly concise and flexible.

S-expressions are so useful that in my first job as a software engineer in the 1990s, we actually had a C++ S-expression library for input and output of a format that amounted to a domain-specific language (this was before XML was invented) that was processed by many tools (including a validator that I wrote in Standard ML).

A library on Hackage for working with S-expressions in Haskell is s-cargot. There have been many others, but most of them have gone sadly unmaintained, whereas this one is new and comes with bells and whistles.

Today I'll give an example of how to use this library, in the context of a problem domain in which having a concrete syntax is important.

Installation

We need to add s-cargot to stack.yaml:

- s-cargot-0.1.0.0

The task: symbolic differentiation

The task we solve here is, appropriately enough, a translation from the Lisp (Scheme, to be precise) code for a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-16.html#%_sec_2.3.2" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-16.html#%_sec_2.3.2">symbolic differentiator of mathematical expressions</span> in the classic computer science textbook "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". I won't be walking through the solution here, but just focusing on some syntax issues.

Example: given a mathematical expression such as the linear function 5x + 7, we want to find the symbolic derivative with respect to x, to get 5.

Simplest syntax for the expression type

How do we model an expression and a function to compute a derivative of an expression? Let's start with the most vanilla possible way, which is to define a data type for expression, Exp, along with ordinary alphanumeric constructors N (for number), V (for variable), Plus (for sum of subexpressions), Times (for product of subexpressions). A sample subset of an appropriate HSpec/QuickCheck spec to define what we need:

module SymbolicDifferentiation.AlphaSyntaxSpec where

import SymbolicDifferentiation.AlphaSyntax (Exp(N, V, Plus, Times), deriv)

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldBe)
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)
import Test.QuickCheck ((==>))

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "symbolic differentiation" $ do
    prop "d/dx (x + n) == 1" $ \x n ->
      deriv (Plus (V x) (N n)) x `shouldBe` N 1
    prop "d/dx (x + y) == x, if x /= y" $ \x y ->
      x /= y ==>
      deriv (Times (V x) (V y)) x `shouldBe` V y
    prop "d/dx (a * x + b) == x" $ \a x b ->
      deriv (Plus (Times (N a) (V x)) (N b)) x `shouldBe` N a
    it "d/dx (x * y * (x + 3)) == (x * y) + y * (x + 3)" $ do
      deriv (Times (Times (V "x") (V "y"))
                   (Plus (V "x") (N 3))) "x" `shouldBe`
        (Plus (Times (V "x") (V "y"))
              (Times (V "y") (Plus (V "x") (N 3))))

The syntax looks OK for simple expressions, but ugly when you have lots of nested subexpressions, with parentheses for grouping, as in the final artificial example.

Here is the code for a still-naive symbolic differentiator, having only a few heuristics built in for some simplification through rewriting (for example, adding 0 to an expression results in that expression rather than construction of a superfluous N 0 subexpression):

module SymbolicDifferentiation.AlphaSyntax where

-- | Variable in an expression.
type Var = String

-- | Expression.
data Exp
  = N Int          -- ^ number
  | V Var          -- ^ variable
  | Plus Exp Exp   -- ^ sum
  | Times Exp Exp  -- ^ product
  deriving (Show, Eq)

-- | Derivative of expression with respect to a variable.
deriv :: Exp -> Var -> Exp
deriv (N _)         _ = N 0
deriv (V v')        v = N (if v' == v then 1 else 0)
deriv (Plus e1 e2)  v = plus (deriv e1 v) (deriv e2 v)
deriv (Times e1 e2) v = plus (times e1 (deriv e2 v))
                             (times (deriv e1 v) e2)

-- | Smart constructor that simplifies while combining subexpressions.
plus :: Exp -> Exp -> Exp
plus (N 0)  e      = e
plus e      (N 0)  = e
plus (N n1) (N n2) = N (n1 + n2)
plus e1     e2     = Plus e1 e2

-- | Smart constructor that simplifies while combining subexpressions.
times :: Exp -> Exp -> Exp
times (N 0)  _      = N 0
times _      (N 0)  = N 0
times (N 1)  e      = e
times e      (N 1)  = e
times (N n1) (N n2) = N (n1 * n2)
times e1     e2     = Times e1 e2

The syntax of the code, using pattern matching, looks reasonably good to me. It's the Exp data construction that looks a bit ugly, although not terrible. So we have a situation in which the implementor of this little expression language is fairly happy, but the user is not. In fact, we haven't even provided a way for a user outside the system to create expressions: right now, we have an API but no parser from a string into an expression.

Parsing from what format?

One way to go is to write a custom parser from a custom syntax, for example maybe write a function fromString :: String -> Exp such that

fromString "5x + 7y + 20" ==
  Plus (Plus (Times (N 5) (V "x"))
             (Times (N 7) (V "y")))
       (N 20)

We would also want to write a pretty-printer toString :: Exp -> String such that maybe it's smart enough to go

toString (Plus (Plus (Times (N 5) (V "x"))
                     (Times (N 7) (V "y")))
               (N 20)) == "5x + 7y + 20"

It is straightforward to write such a parser using parsec or the like, but you can imagine that sometimes it might be annoying to design the syntax for a much more complex language (including special infix operators, precedences, scoping keywords, different kinds of braces, etc.) and also make users learn it.

So let's assume for the purpose of this article that we have a reason to prefer prefix-only S-expressions, just as the Lisp community does in order to avoid all the hassles of a custom syntax.

(Update of 2015-12-14) Providing a custom syntax using `Earley`

On day 14, I created a custom syntax and a parser using the Earley parser library.

(Update of 2015-12-17) Providing a custom pretty-printer using `ansi-wl-pprint`

The inverse of parsing is pretty-printing, covered on day 17.

QuickCheck tests

Here are some sample QuickCheck tests to show what it is we want to be able to do. (Note that for convenience, we are using string interpolation through the here package as introduced yesterday, day 9.)

{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-}
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

module SymbolicDifferentiation.SExpSpec where

import SymbolicDifferentiation.AlphaSyntax (Exp(N, V, Plus, Times))
import qualified SymbolicDifferentiation.SExp as SExp

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, shouldBe)
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)

import Data.String.Here (i)

-- | Required for auto-discovery.
spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "S-expression syntax for expression" $ do
    prop "(+ x a)" $ \a ->
      SExp.parse [i|(+ x ${a})|] `shouldBe`
        Right (Plus (V "x") (N a))

    prop "(* (+ x a) (+ y b))" $ \a b ->
      SExp.parse [i|
                     (* (+ x ${a})
                        (+ y ${b}))
                   |] `shouldBe`
        Right (Times (Plus (V "x") (N a))
                     (Plus (V "y") (N b)))

    it "(!? x y)" $
      SExp.parse "(!? x y)" `shouldBe`
        Left "\"!?\" is not a valid operator"

I've included a little test to indicate that we want some kind of error handling also. Nothing is more annoying to a user than terrible parse error messages. We won't provide great messages here, but at least will give an idea of how one could.

The S-expression parser

s-cargot provides very flexible ways of constructing S-expression parsers, based on what kind of syntax you want to allow (full Scheme or not, for example), and allows hooks on many levels to support readers as well as specifying the desired atom parser.

Some imports first:

{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-}
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

module SymbolicDifferentiation.SExp where

import SymbolicDifferentiation.AlphaSyntax (Exp(N, V, Plus, Times))

import qualified Data.SCargot as S
import Data.SCargot.Language.Basic (basicParser)
import Data.SCargot.Repr.WellFormed
       (WellFormedSExpr(WFSList, WFSAtom), fromWellFormed)

import qualified Data.Text as Text
import Data.Text (Text)
import Data.Text.Read (signed, decimal)

import Data.String.Here (i)

-- | Error when parsing.
type Error = String

The main driver is a pipeline of calling an s-cargot parser and then calling our own parser of an S-expression into our Exp type:

-- | For simplicity, we use 'basicParser' which just treats every atom
-- as 'Text', which we parse later rather than up front.
parse :: Text -> Either Error Exp
parse text = parseOneSexp text >>= toExp

parseOneSexp :: Text -> Either Error (WellFormedSExpr Text)
parseOneSexp = S.decodeOne (S.asWellFormed basicParser)

Once we have a well-formed S-expression, we can pick it apart, while catching errors if we encounter one.

toExp :: WellFormedSExpr Text -> Either Error Exp
toExp (WFSAtom text) = fromAtom text
toExp (WFSList [WFSAtom operatorText, sexp1, sexp2]) = do
  operator <- fromOperator operatorText
  e1 <- toExp sexp1
  e2 <- toExp sexp2
  return (operator e1 e2)
toExp list@(WFSList _) = Left [i|${list} should have exactly 3 elements|]

fromOperator :: Text -> Either Error (Exp -> Exp -> Exp)
fromOperator "+" = return Plus
fromOperator "*" = return Times
fromOperator text = Left [i|${text} is not a valid operator|]

-- | Either an integer or a variable.
fromAtom :: Text -> Either Error Exp
fromAtom text =
  case signed decimal text of
    Right (n, "") ->
      return (N n)
    Right (_, _) ->
      Left [i|extra garbage after numeric in ${text}|]
    Left _ ->
      return (V (Text.unpack text))

Pretty-printing

And we get pretty-printing for free from s-cargot if we turn our Exp into an S-expression first. I won't show the details, but you can use the basic S-expression printer or customize it with a lot options including indentation strategy. Let's just use the basic.

A sample test for our SExp.prettyPrint:

    prop "pretty-printing" $ \a b ->
      SExp.prettyPrint (Times (Plus (V "x") (N a))
                              (Plus (V "y") (N b))) `shouldBe`
       [i|(* (+ x ${a}) (+ y ${b}))|]

The code:

fromExp :: Exp -> WellFormedSExpr Text
fromExp (N n) = WFSAtom (Text.pack (show n))
fromExp (V x) = WFSAtom (Text.pack x)
fromExp (Plus e1 e2) = WFSList [WFSAtom "+", fromExp e1, fromExp e2]
fromExp (Times e1 e2) = WFSList [WFSAtom "*", fromExp e1, fromExp e2]

prettyPrint :: Exp -> Text
prettyPrint =
  S.encodeOne (S.setFromCarrier fromWellFormed (S.basicPrint id))
  . fromExp

Summary of S-expression parsing and pretty-printing

So there you have it: with a little bit of boilerplate you can get an experience similar to that of working in Lisp. Note that with even clever Template Haskell work with quasiquotation you could go further than the pure text templates we've used for convenience, and create pattern templates as well.

We didn't have to write a traditional parser, and we were able to separate well-formedness from further processing. This is really useful in many contexts: in my experience, the multi-level error checking makes good error messages easier to create. Also, not discussed here is how S-expressions can also help with prediction and completion.

Optional further notes on syntax for domain-specific languages

I wanted to point out that for some problem domains, such as this one that happens to be mathematical, it is sometimes popular to make things look mathematical. I've deliberately presented it without that attempt first, but now I'll show some syntactic variants.

Alphanumeric identifiers as operators

First, one can use operator syntax with backticks and precedence levels:

module SymbolicDifferentiation.AlphaOperatorSyntax where

-- | Variable in an expression.
type Var = String

-- | Precedences for our expression constructors.
infixl 6 `Plus`
infixl 7 `Times`

-- | Expression.
data Exp
  = N Int          -- ^ number
  | V Var          -- ^ variable
  | Plus Exp Exp   -- ^ sum
  | Times Exp Exp  -- ^ product
  deriving (Show, Eq)

-- | Derivative of expression with respect to a variable.
deriv :: Exp -> Var -> Exp
deriv (N _)         _ = N 0
deriv (V v')        v = N (if v' == v then 1 else 0)
deriv (Plus e1 e2)  v = deriv e1 v `plus` deriv e2 v
deriv (Times e1 e2) v = e1 `times` deriv e2 v
                        `plus`
                        deriv e1 v `times` e2

-- | Precedences for our expression "smart" constructors.
infixl 6 `plus`
infixl 7 `times`

-- | Smart constructor that simplifies while combining subexpressions.
plus :: Exp -> Exp -> Exp
N 0  `plus` e    = e
e    `plus` N 0  = e
N n1 `plus` N n2 = N (n1 + n2)
e1   `plus` e2   = e1 `Plus` e2

-- | Smart constructor that simplifies while combining subexpressions.
times :: Exp -> Exp -> Exp
N 0  `times` _    = N 0
_    `times` N 0  = N 0
N 1  `times` e    = e
e    `times` N 1  = e
N n1 `times` N n2 = N (n1 * n2)
e1   `times` e2   = e1 `Times` e2

Note that nothing has really changed, except the use of infix function definitions and calls, and use of precedence to remove parentheses, such as in the big expression for the derivative of a product of expressions. But clarity is starting to be lost, for those not already familiar with the problem domain and conventions.

Symbolic identifiers as operators

One can go further and use symbolic identifiers in place of the backticked alphanumeric operators. This is where many of us start wondering what is going on:

module SymbolicDifferentiation.OperatorSyntax where

-- | Variable in an expression.
type Var = String

-- | Precedences for our expression constructors.
infixl 6 :+:
infixl 7 :*:

-- | Expression.
data Exp
  = N Int        -- ^ number
  | V Var        -- ^ variable
  | Exp :+: Exp  -- ^ sum
  | Exp :*: Exp  -- ^ product
  deriving (Show, Eq)

-- | Derivative of expression with respect to a variable.
deriv :: Exp -> Var -> Exp
deriv (N _)       _ = N 0
deriv (V x )      y = N (if x == y then 1 else 0)
deriv (e1 :+: e2) v = deriv e1 v .+. deriv e2 v
deriv (e1 :*: e2) v = e1 .*. deriv e2 v
                      .+.
                      deriv e1 v .*. e2

-- | Precedences for our expression "smart" constructors.
infixl 6 .+.
infixl 7 .*.

-- | Smart constructor that simplifies while combining subexpressions.
(.+.) :: Exp -> Exp -> Exp
N 0  .+. e    = e
e    .+. N 0  = e
N n1 .+. N n2 = N (n1 + n2)
e1   .+. e2   = e1 :+: e2

-- | Smart constructor that simplifies while combining subexpressions.
(.*.) :: Exp -> Exp -> Exp
N 0  .*.  _   = N 0
_    .*. N 0  = N 0
N 1  .*. e    = e
e    .*. N 1  = e
N n1 .*. N n2 = N (n1 * n2)
e1   .*. e2   = e1 :*: e2

Depending on your taste, you might find that this funny syntax makes the tests look nicer:

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "symbolic differentiation" $ do
    prop "d/dx (x + n) == 1" $ \x n ->
      deriv (V x :+: N n) x `shouldBe` N 1
    prop "d/dx (x + y) == x, if x /= y" $ \x y ->
      x /= y ==>
      deriv (V x :*: V y) x `shouldBe` V y
    prop "d/dx (a * x + b) == x" $ \a x b ->
      deriv (N a :*: V x :+: N b) x `shouldBe` N a
    it "d/dx (x * y * (x + 3)) == (x * y) + y * (x + 3)" $ do
      deriv (V "x" :*: V "y" :*: (V "x" :+: N 3)) "x" `shouldBe`
        (V "x" :*: V "y") :+: (V "y" :*: (V "x" :+: N 3))

All this looks kind of cute if you're used to it, but I think it can look really weird otherwise; and I know that many non-Haskellers seeing this before seeing the vanilla way get the wrong idea that you have to write this way in Haskell and turn away in disgust and confusion. This is why I showed the vanilla way first, and show this only to illustrate that there are libraries out there that do try to be very suggestive in symbolic operator usage, and also that there is nothing special going on here: it's just a different way of saying exactly the same thing as the first version, with the second version (backticked alphanumerics as operators) being a transitional step toward this third version. It's good to know about all three variants, regardless of which one you prefer to read and write.

But what about the S-expression route, which is to decouple the user (represented by the tests) side of things from the abstract syntax and the Haskell syntax? My intuition is that there are real benefits in at least providing an alternate S-expression syntax for whatever other concrete syntax is made available.

Conclusion

S-expressions are a time-honored way of representing data. The s-cargot library comes with ways to build custom S-expression parsers and pretty-printers and also comes with useful defaults.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 9: Template Haskell goodies: here, interpolate, file-embed

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 9

(Reddit discussion)

A stray negative remark I made on day 8 regarding Haskell and its unergonomic support for multi-line string literals and interpolation led to good comments that I was being misleading because there actually exist good solutions. I already use one of them, but had not brought them into the picture because I didn't want to be distracting in that post by bringing in other libraries, especially since they are implemented in Template Haskell, the GHC extension that is "macros for Haskell", enabling compile-time metaprogramming (see the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2014-12-22-template-haskell.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2014-12-22-template-haskell.html">2014 Day of Hackage article about Template Haskell</span>. On day 2 I already introduced a package that uses Template Haskell, so it looks like I'll be continuing to do that today.

These packages require only that you turn on QuasiQuotes in modules where you use them, so our example source code will have the header

{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-}

Better string literals with `here`

I've been using here for "here" strings and interpolation. Check out the documentation for full details, but for context, here are some examples using data we already have.

Imports:

import Data.String.Here (hereLit, here, hereFile, i)
import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldBe)

A trimmed multi-line literal, where leading and trailing white space are removed, making it particularly easy to just copy and paste blocks of text in between the here quasiquoter brackets.

    it "makes trimmed multi-line strings prettier" $ do
      -- In this case we want trimming.
      let original = "words 3\n\
                     \I 2\n\
                     \have 2\n\
                     \so 2\n\
                     \for 1\n\
                     \like 1\n\
                     \many 1\n\
                     \to 1"
      let trimmedHereDoc = [here|
words 3
I 2
have 2
so 2
for 1
like 1
many 1
to 1
|]
      trimmedHereDoc `shouldBe` original

For more control (typically what I do for small examples), use hereLit:

    it "makes literal multi-line strings prettier" $ do
      -- In this case assume we want the trailing newline.
      let original = "words 3\n\
                     \I 2\n\
                     \have 2\n\
                     \so 2\n\
                     \for 1\n\
                     \like 1\n\
                     \many 1\n\
                     \to 1\n"
      let literalHereDoc = [hereLit|words 3
I 2
have 2
so 2
for 1
like 1
many 1
to 1
|]
      literalHereDoc `shouldBe` original

But why stop at copy/paste? Much better to embed an actual file with hereFile. We use our own little HSpec discovery test/Spec.hs file as an example:

    it "allows file embed" $ do
      [hereFile|test/Spec.hs|] `shouldBe`
        "{-# OPTIONS_GHC -F -pgmF hspec-discover #-}"

Finally, some interpolation, using i. Although it is very convenient, I have some reservations about overusing this quasiquoter, because it is engaging in "stringly typed" programming that just makes use of anything that implements Show and Typeable. It is easy to accidentally write code that compiles but does the wrong thing when operating at this implicit level. Still, it's useful:

    it "makes interpolation prettier" $ do
      let list = [1 :: Int, 2]
      let num = 42 :: Int
      [i|number: ${num}, stuff: ${map (+1) list}|] `shouldBe`
        "number: 42, stuff: [2,3]"

`interpolate`

interpolate is another package that does the same sort of thing. You might like its unindent feature, which facilitates the copy/paste mode of embedding blocks of text into your code.

`file-embed`

file-embed is also useful, because you can use it to embed contents of entire directories. It also has a unique feature of injection into an executable.

Conclusion

You don't have to settle for the built-in syntax for creating strings out of literals in Haskell. With libraries using Template Haskell, you can use much prettier representations of strings. Check out here, interpolate, and file-embed.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 8: multiset; I wish this were in the standard containers package

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 8

(Reddit discussion)

I don't remember when it was, but one day I got sick and tired of reimplementing in Haskell the same boilerplate logic when keeping track of many objects classified under the same key. This is a data structure known as a multiset, also known as a bag, in contrast with a regular set, which only keeps track of one unique object per key.

I was surprised that by the lack of a multiset module in the standard containers package, although not completely surprised because you can implement a multiset on top of a set, so in some sense a multiset is "superfluous". Still, I was used to having a multiset available without any work (however trivial), because of long using a multiset in C++, which I'd used back in the 1990s from the original implementation of the Standard Template Library, and also Python's collections library has a Counter class which serves a similar purpose.

Today I'll briefly show some code using multiset and talk about why something like this maybe should be in the standard library.

The classic example of multiset use

Multisets are often used for counting things. Word count is a time-honored use case for multisets, so let's implement a very simple word count program that break up text into "words" separated by spaces, while treating non-letters as spaces, count the words, and finally output a report which consists of a line for each word and its count, in descending order of count but ascending order of word.

For a bit more realism and efficiency even for a toy program, let's have the input not be String, but the Text type from Data.Text.Lazy module of the text package. Let's also build up the final Text report efficiently.

A sample HSpec test

Here's a sample test (for fun you may wish to write a reasonable QuickCheck generators and tests for this problem). I apologize for the illegible Haskell multiline string literal; I wish Haskell had multiline string literals, interpolation, and all that good stuff other languages have!

(A tangent from day 9)

A number of people commented that I made a misleading remark above about string support in Haskell. It is true that the core Haskell syntax for strings is limited, but it is easy to work around that with Template Haskell, so see Day 9 for how to do this. I totally recommend using one of the libraries mentioned.

In brief, the ugly string literal I wrote can be written

      let expected = [hereLit|words 3
I 2
have 2
so 2
for 1
like 1
many 1
to 1
|]

The code

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

module MultisetExampleSpec where

import MultisetExample (wordCount)

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldBe)
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)

-- | Required for auto-discovery.
spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "multiset" $ do
    it "wordCount" $ do
      let input = "I have so   many words; words I so like to have words for!?"
      let expected = "words 3\n\
                     \I 2\n\
                     \have 2\n\
                     \so 2\n\
                     \for 1\n\
                     \like 1\n\
                     \many 1\n\
                     \to 1\n"
      wordCount input `shouldBe` expected

The solution

The code almost writes itself from a natural language description of the problem.

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

module MultisetExample where

import qualified Data.MultiSet as MultiSet
import qualified Data.Text.Lazy as LazyText
import qualified Data.Text.Lazy.Builder as LazyBuilder
import Data.Text.Lazy.Builder.Int (decimal)
import Data.Ord (Down(..))
import qualified Data.Char as Char
import qualified Data.List as List
import Control.Arrow ((>>>))
import Data.Monoid ((<>))

wordCount :: LazyText.Text -> LazyText.Text
wordCount =
  LazyText.map replaceNonLetterWithSpace
  >>> LazyText.words
  >>> MultiSet.fromList
  >>> MultiSet.toOccurList
  >>> List.sortOn (snd >>> Down)
  >>> map summarizeWordCount
  >>> mconcat
  >>> LazyBuilder.toLazyText

replaceNonLetterWithSpace :: Char -> Char
replaceNonLetterWithSpace c
  | Char.isLetter c = c
  | otherwise = ' '

summarizeWordCount :: (LazyText.Text, MultiSet.Occur) -> LazyBuilder.Builder
summarizeWordCount (word, count) =
  LazyBuilder.fromLazyText word <> " " <> decimal count <> "\n"

Let's go through this step by step. Note that we're using my favorite left-to-right composition operator >>> as opposed to the right-to-left composition operator . because it looks much more natural to me for pipelines, and because my description below top to bottom matches this syntax.

(Update on syntax)

Here is the pipeline part of the code in more traditional right-to-left syntax. I think it's important to be able to read and write in both styles:

-- | Same thing, using traditional right-to-left composition.
wordCountTraditional :: LazyText.Text -> LazyText.Text
wordCountTraditional =
  LazyBuilder.toLazyText
  . mconcat
  . map summarizeWordCount
  . List.sortOn (Down . snd)
  . MultiSet.toOccurList
  . MultiSet.fromList
  . LazyText.words
  . LazyText.map replaceNonLetterWithSpace

Get the words from text

First, replace all non-letters with spaces for the purpose of this problem, then use the words from Data.Text.Lazy (which we imported as LazyText) to break up into words (real tokenization would have more sophisticated rules). By the way, this is done very efficiently because GHC performs fusion in order to do the replacement and the breaking up into words in a single pass, rather than two as written in the code. Fusion is a really, really cool optimization that we rely on for our Haskell code to be super-efficient:

wordCount =
  LazyText.map replaceNonLetterWithSpace
  >>> LazyText.words

Put the words into a multiset

Next, we get the list words into a multiset. MultiSet conveniently has a constructor for that, fromList :: Ord a => [a] -> MultiSet a, and it does this in O(n log n) time because of the use of comparison through Ord to construct a tree (exercise for you if you wish: use one of the hash table libraries in Hackage to create a MultiHashSet instead).

  >>> MultiSet.fromList

Count the words

We grab a list of word/count pairs (in ascending order of words) using toOccurList :: MultiSet a -> [(a, Occur)] where type Occur = Int:

  >>> MultiSet.toOccurList

Sort the word/count list

We sort using the "Schwartzian transform" for efficiency using Data.List.sortOn of type sortOn :: Ord b => (a -> b) -> [a] -> [a]; recall we want the count (the second element of the tuple we get back from the multiset) to be descending.

Documentation of Data.Ord.Down explains how this "newtype hack" is used to change the default ordering comparison during a sort.

  >>> List.sortOn (snd >>> Down)

Make a report for each word/count

  >>> map summarizeWordCount
  >>> mconcat

where our summarizing function, for efficiency in avoiding unnecessary allocations, does not construct a Text but rather a builder, since we don't need this information for each as Text but plan to combine the reports for all the lines into one Text at the end.

summarizeWordCount :: (LazyText.Text, MultiSet.Occur) -> LazyBuilder.Builder
summarizeWordCount (word, count) =
  LazyBuilder.fromLazyText word <> " " <> decimal count <> "\n"

(If you're curious how the builder works, check out the source code. It uses higher-rank types, unsafe operations, and strictness annotations.)

Make the final report

Just materialize the Text from the builder:

  >>> LazyBuilder.toLazyText

What should go into a standard library?

I mentioned that I think this should go into the standard library, for convenience. The argument for not putting something into the standard library is always, everyone think their useful thing should be in there, but there's no way that can happen, and so choices have to be made. Given that, I cannot really argue based on my own experience or perception of my experience that an entire community would benefit from my favorite things being made "standard". I'd like to think that we have the technology now to collect real data to determine people's real needs and change the way we make libraries discoverable and usable. Even something like mining Stack Overflow questions could bring up many interesting statistics about what people need. Such data gathering would not substitute for expert curation, of course, but surely would be useful.

There is another argument for not having something like multiset be incorporated: it's easy to implement once you have the regular set. If you look at the source code, the following basically says it all. A multiset is just a map from a key to a count.

newtype MultiSet a = MS { unMS :: Map a Occur }

type Occur = Int

Everything else is a straightforward wrapper.

But that's like saying a language should not have any syntactic sugar. I think "library sugar" is as valuable as syntactic sugar.

Conclusion

Multisets are useful. You could implement one yourself. Or you could use the multiset package someone already wrote for us.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 7: semigroups; NonEmpty list and a case study of types and tests

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 7

(Reddit discussion)

How often has the following runtime error happened to you, whether in Haskell or in some other language?

*** Exception: Prelude.head: empty list

Basically, code blew up that assumed a list was nonempty but it wasn't.

In fact, posted on Reddit recently was a question about code that failed with

** Exception: Prelude.foldl1: empty list

which is the same problem.

Today, I present a case study: refactoring that code to take advantage of an important data type that is going to be part of the Haskell standard library, the NonEmpty list type. This is part of Edward Kmett's semigroups package that is going into the standard library.

In general, should we adopt defensive or confident programming?

It's easy to say, "well, we should program defensively and not call unsafe functions like head and foldl1 but should always check for an empty list". But what if we know that the list is supposed to have at least one element, perhaps because we validated that fact earlier on in our data model. For example, say you are buying tickets for a concert. You have to buy at least one, but could buy more than one. So the business logic for the ticket pickup should always assume that there is at least one ticket for you. It should not perpetually check for emptiness because that should have been caught up front when you ordered.

The situation is exactly analogous to the problem of NULL in many languages: languages that use NULL don't distinguish at the type level between something that is possibly-nonexistent (0 or 1 element) and something that is always there (1 element). It is unfortunate when we know something about our data but aren't saying it in our type. In the case of lists, the situation is that a possibly-empty list can have 0 or more elements, while a nonempty list can have 1 or more elements. Both situations are extremely common (think of regex matching that distinguishes between x* and x+) and should be modeled by different types!

I believe that the real solution to this kind of problem is not to go defensive and litter all our code with random NULL or isEmpty kinds of runtime checks. The solution is also not to just go "cowboy hacker" and invite possible and actual runtime exceptions by skipping all checking.

Instead, the solution, when practical, is to use the right types so that in the appropriate delimited scope of our code, runtime exceptions cannot possibly occur and therefore within that scope we can program confidently rather than defensively. If we don't use our language's type system to our advantage, we are just doing ordinary dynamically typed programming in a typed language and missing out on the full benefits of types. Since we made some sacrifices in adopting a statically typed language instead of a dynamically typed one, we should take advantage of what we got ourselves into. There's an interesting asymmetry in the programming world: it is impossible to write statically typed code in a dynamically typed language, but it is easy to write dynamically typed code in a statically typed language!

A nonempty list type

Let's look at the NonEmpty list. You can already use it today before it becomes part of the standard library, by just adding semigroups to your dependencies.

What are the requirements for a nonempty list?

Roughly, a NonEmpty list should

support operations to interconvert with a regular possibly-empty list
support analogues of standard list operations (like map and filter) that carefully take into account whether the output is possibly-empty.

QuickCheck for specifying laws (properties)

On day 3, I mentioned that QuickCheck is very useful for specifying requirements when designing a new module. Ideally, when designing an API around a new type, we treat it as an abstract data type and check the behavior of operations on that type. The NonEmpty list is simple enough that you might think it's overkill to do that, but I just wanted to present a taste of what one might do up front if one were starting out with property test-driven development. Let's imagine we are creating a module Data.List.NonEmpty:

{-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-}

-- Part of a hypothetical test module for the semigroups package.
module HypotheticalSemigroupsSpec where

import qualified Data.List.NonEmpty as NonEmpty

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldBe, shouldSatisfy)
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)
import qualified Test.QuickCheck as QuickCheck
import qualified Data.Maybe as Maybe

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "semigroups" $ do
    describe "Data.List.NonEmpty" $ do
      describe "constructor NonEmpty.nonEmpty" $ do
        it "fails on trying to construct from an empty regular list" $ do
          NonEmpty.nonEmpty ([] :: [Int]) `shouldBe` Nothing
        prop "succeeds on any nonempty list" $ do
          \(QuickCheck.NonEmpty (xs :: [Int])) ->
            NonEmpty.nonEmpty xs `shouldSatisfy` Maybe.isJust
      describe "conversion to regular list" $ do
        prop "converts back to the original regular list" $ do
          \(QuickCheck.NonEmpty (xs :: [Int])) ->
            let Just nonEmptyXs = NonEmpty.nonEmpty xs
            in NonEmpty.toList nonEmptyXs `shouldBe` xs

Basically, nonEmpty is a safe constructor:

nonEmpty :: [a] -> Maybe (NonEmpty a)

There is also an unsafe constructor called fromList. I wouldn't use that except in case I really know that a list was not empty, because it was returned from an API that guaranteed it but not in a typed way. For example, I've faced this annoying problem when writing parsers using libraries such as parsec, because combinators such as many1 have a type

many1 :: Stream s m t => ParsecT s u m a -> ParsecT s u m [a]

even though the library guarantees that if the parse succeeds, the resulting list has at least one element! So in a situation like this, I would feel justified in using the unsafe NonEmpty.fromList to immediately unsafely wrap to get my known-to-be-nonempty-list into a more refined type.

A note on QuickCheck internals: QuickCheck.NonEmpty (ignore the coincidence of the token NonEmpty in common with our module and type in question!) is just a newtype in QuickCheck to generate regular lists [a] that happen to be nonempty at runtime (as in they are of the form (x:xs)). Imagine if QuickCheck had been written when the NonEmpty type we want had existed. Then it could just generate a real NonEmpty rather than a fake newtype!

If you don't use QuickCheck or similar generative testing libraries, check them out! These methods of testing are far more useful than the example-based tests that I've provided so far in these articles just for illustrative purposes. When possible, generative tests should be written instead of manual example-based tests.

(The use of [Int] type annotations is because QuickCheck requires a monomorphic type in order to generate concrete data to test. ScopedTypeVariables is a GHC extension that I wish were just part of the standard Haskell language; it was <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2014-12-20-scoped-type-variables.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2014-12-20-scoped-type-variables.html">covered in a 2014 Day of GHC Extensions</span>.)

(Update of 2015-12-14) Using `NonEmpty` for a parser

On day 14, I used NonEmpty to represent in a principled way the result from a parser.

A few notes on the full `NonEmpty` API

map behaves as expected, because it doesn't change the number of elements and therefore mapping over a NonEmpty is clearly a NonEmpty:

map :: (a -> b) -> NonEmpty a -> NonEmpty b

However, filter on a NonEmpty returns a regular possibly-empty list, as it should, because the predicate can potentially fail on every element:

filter :: (a -> Bool) -> NonEmpty a -> [a]

And foldl1, unlike that of the regular list, is safe. It cannot fail, because it always starts off the reduction with the first element as the seed.

There are a whole bunch of other useful list functions.

Oh, and the internal implementation is what you might suspect: it's just a tuple of the first element with the possibly-empty tail, with a special "cons" operator :| that resembles the normal list's :.

data NonEmpty a = a :| [a]

A case study in refactoring

Let's look at refactoring some code posted on Reddit that was throwing an exception unexpectedly at run time.

We won't go into how the code might be written in a completely different way, but just focus on identifying and removing unsafe code that might throw exceptions.

The code uses the excellent package split which I am a happy user of. I have taken the liberty of adding comments to the code and explicit imports for presentation here.

Original unsafe code

import qualified Data.List.Split as Split

totalArea :: [(Int, Int, Int)] -> Int
totalArea xs = foldl (\acc x -> (acc + partialArea x)) 0 xs

partialArea :: (Int, Int, Int) -> Int
partialArea (l, w, h) = 2 * (l*w + w*h + h*l) + slack
  where areas       = [l, w, h]

        -- 'maximum' is unsafe
        smallSides  = filter (< maximum areas) areas

        -- 'foldl1' is unsafe
        slack       = foldl1 (*) smallSides

parseFile :: String -> [(Int, Int, Int)]
parseFile xs = map (splitDimensions) (breakLines xs)

breakLines :: String -> [String]
breakLines = Split.splitOn "\n"

-- | 'read' is unsafe. '(!!)' is unsafe.
splitDimensions :: String -> (Int, Int, Int)
splitDimensions xs = (item 0, item 1, item 2)
                   where item n = read ((Split.splitOn "x" xs)!!n)

This crashes on foldl1:

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "UnsafeListExample" $ do
    it "totalArea crashes for a particular input" $ do
      let contents = "1 x 1 x 1"
      evaluate (totalArea (parseFile contents)) `shouldThrow` anyException

I've already identified the problems above.

We'll ignore the fact that read and list indexing (!!) are unsafe, because that's not what is of interest here today.

But maximum and foldl1 are both unsafe on lists because they crash on empty lists.

It turns out from manual inspection, acting as a human static analyzer that the use of maximum is OK here, because it's operating on a 3-element list [l, w, h] created just before being passed to maximum. But this safety is not reflected in the types.

How about foldl1? If you carefully think about what filter returns, you can deduce that it might return an empty list, and if you can't guarantee that it's nonempty, then the foldl1 will crash hard. And it does.

That was a lot of human thinking we had to do. Luckily, tests were run that discovered the bug, but still, the code ended up posted to Reddit asking what the bug was, so it's not trivial to find these kinds of lurking bugs. Is there a better way?

Refactoring to `NonEmpty` lists

Let's use NonEmpty. First of all, we change totalArea to take a NonEmpty because that's what we really want.

totalArea :: NonEmpty (Int, Int, Int) -> Int
totalArea xs = foldl (\acc x -> (acc + partialArea x)) 0 xs

Note that we only had to change the type of the parameter, not any of the code, because foldl has been implemented on NonEmpty as well as regular lists.

Next, we change the body of partialArea:

partialArea :: (Int, Int, Int) -> Int
partialArea (l, w, h) = 2 * (l*w + w*h + h*l) + slack
  where
    areas :: NonEmpty Int
    areas = NonEmpty.fromList [l, w, h]

    -- 'maximum' is safe on 'NonEmpty'
    -- But 'smallSides' can be empty because of 'NonEmpty.filter',
    -- and 'NonEmpty.fromList' is unsafe!
    smallSides :: [Int]
    smallSides = NonEmpty.filter (< maximum areas) areas

    -- unsafe!
    smallSides1 :: NonEmpty Int
    smallSides1 = NonEmpty.fromList smallSides

    -- 'foldl1' is safe on 'NonEmpty'
    slack = foldl1 (*) smallSides1

We made a number of changes:

since we're creating a nonempty list, we turn it immediately into a NonEmpty
maximum is defined for NonEmpty so we don't have to change the text of the code, but we know that maximum is guaranteed to be safe for NonEmpty
NonEmpty.filter, as we discussed, returns a regular list, not a NonEmpty.
at the end, we want to safely compute slack, but we can't unless we use a safe foldl1
working backwards, we must convert a regular list to a NonEmpty, but there's only one way to do that, and it's unsafe!

So by refining the types used in the program, we have identified the exact point at which we could not write the necessary code without resorting to NonEmpty.fromList. So, strictly speaking, we haven't made a run time error turn into a compile time error, but we have narrowed down what is going on purely mechanically by means of following the types.

The real problem in the code here seems to be that we wanted smallSides to be nonempty. The attempt to use only safe code automatically resolved one possible source of unsafety (maximum) and pointed at a more complicated situation requiring a proof obligation on the result of the filter. partialArea could be written to avoid the proof obligation, by not using a list type at all for areas to perform the desired logic.

Maybe the real problem is that we shouldn't use lists at all here

You may have protested at this entire NonEmpty exercise all this time, because NonEmpty is just the wrong type for all of this work! There's no point in trying to use some kind of fancy type that doesn't fit the problem. There was no reason for the list [l, w, h] to be created at all. If you're using a type and you still run into proof obligations, often that means the type is not the right one.

In partialArea, if we state the logic of what we really wanted (the two smallest values out of three), then we can just write what we mean:

-- | Don't use lists at all!
bestPartialArea :: (Int, Int, Int) -> Int
bestPartialArea (l, w, h) = 2 * (l*w + w*h + h*l) + slack
  where
    (side0, side1, _) = sort3 (l, w, h)
    slack = side0 * side1

where we created a utility module Sort3:

module Sort3 (sort3) where

-- | Sort exactly 3 values.
sort3 :: Ord a => (a, a, a) -> (a, a, a)
sort3 (a0, a1, a2) =
  if a0 > a1
  then if a0 > a2
       then if a2 < a1
               then (a2, a1, a0)
               else (a1, a2, a0)
       else (a1, a0, a2)
  else if a1 > a2
       then if a0 > a2
            then (a2, a0, a1)
            else (a0, a2, a1)
       else (a0, a1, a2)

Yes, I did look on Hoogle (as recommended in my article yesterday on searching for utility modules), and although I did not find this exact function, I found the logic for it embedded in a context of optimal sorting of vectors, in the Data.Vector.Algorithms.Optimal module of the excellent vector-algorithms package that I highly recommend when working with vectors. I copied and pasted the logic in order to work on a simple triple.

The value of tests

QuickCheck is a great tool. Suppose we didn't want to or couldn't refine the types in our code, for some reason. We can often still make of testing to try to weed out easy-to-discover bugs. For example, we could have written a sanity check test on totalArea by generating a whole bunch of random input and checking that the result is what we expect, or at least something reasonable:

import UnsafeListExample (totalArea, parseFile)

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldSatisfy, shouldThrow, anyException)
import Test.Hspec.QuickCheck (prop)
import Test.QuickCheck (Positive(..))
import Control.Exception (evaluate)
import Text.Printf (printf)

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "UnsafeListExample" $ do
    it "totalArea crashes for a particular input" $ do
      let contents = "1 x 1 x 1"
      evaluate (totalArea (parseFile contents)) `shouldThrow` anyException
    prop "totalArea gives something reasonable on any triple of ints" $ do
      \(Positive (l :: Int)) (Positive (w :: Int)) (Positive (h :: Int)) ->
        let contents = printf "%d x %d x %d" l w h
        in totalArea (parseFile contents) `shouldSatisfy` (> 0)

Very quickly we get a counterexample reported by QuickCheck:

  1) UnsafeListExample totalArea does not crash on any triple of ints
       uncaught exception: ErrorCall (Prelude.foldl1: empty list) (after 4 tests)
       Positive {getPositive = 2}
       Positive {getPositive = 2}
       Positive {getPositive = 2}

Also, you may have wondered about that complicated optimal sort of 3 values. Did I copy and paste the logic correctly? For peace of mind, I wrote a QuickCheck test for it:

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "Sort3" $ do
    prop "sort3 sorts correctly" $ do
      \(triple :: (Int, Int, Int)) ->
        let (a0', a1', a2') = Sort3.sort3 triple
        in a0' <= a1' && a1' <= a2'

I love QuickCheck. What would life be without it?

Some bonus refactorings

Some other type-oriented refactorings into NonEmpty as much as possible that I won't discuss in detail because they were mostly irrelevant here:

parseFile :: NonEmpty Char -> NonEmpty (Int, Int, Int)
parseFile xs = NonEmpty.map (splitDimensions) (breakLines xs)

-- | We ended up not needing the fact that the input is nonempty, and
-- converted it to a regular list.
breakLines :: NonEmpty Char -> NonEmpty String
breakLines string1 = ourSplitOn "\n" (NonEmpty.toList string1)

-- | 'read' is unsafe. '(!!)' is unsafe.
splitDimensions :: String -> (Int, Int, Int)
splitDimensions xs = (item 0, item 1, item 2)
                   where item n = read ((Split.splitOn "x" xs)!!n)

-- | Using unsafe 'NonEmpty.fromList' is safe because we know
-- the result 'from Split.splitOn' is nonempty. Note that the elements
-- themselves can be empty.
ourSplitOn :: Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> NonEmpty [a]
ourSplitOn subList list = NonEmpty.fromList (Split.splitOn subList list)

The most interesting thing was a tangential observation that Split.splitOn always returns a nonempty list of lists. So in principle we could wrap the result into a NonEmpty. I even wrote a little passing QuickCheck test:

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "split" $ do
    prop "splitOn always results in nonempty list" $ do
      \subList (list :: String) ->
        Split.splitOn subList list `shouldSatisfy` not . null

Note: split already has a huge set of property tests for its own purposes. I love the split library. I think it's been very well-tested. Check it out.

A brief note on semigroups `Semigroup`

A Semigroup is a type class representing an algebraic structure requiring a single associative operation to be defined on it, "append", which in this library is provided as an operator <>.

import Data.Semigroup ((<>))

A QuickCheck test verifying what we already know, which is that String has a Semigroup instance, string append, and is associative as required:

    describe "Data.Semigroup.Semigroup" $ do
      prop "<> is associative for String" $ do
        \(x :: String) y z -> (x <> y) <> z `shouldBe` x <> (y <> z)

You may already use this operator <> in Monoid, which is already in the standard library, but the Monoid type class should really be a subclass of Semigroup and that's what's going to happen in a future version of Haskell (conceptually, it should have been there all along, but Haskell was invented 25 years ago in 1990 and Semigroup was apparently not considered important enough to put into the type class hierarchy then). The difference is that a Monoid also requires an identity element mempty.

There's no space here to say anything about why semigroups and monoids are useful in computing. Monoids in particular have become an everyday word in Big Data circles because of MapReduce, which based on monoids for performance.

A few Haskell oriented resources on monoids to check out:

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Monoids" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Monoids">On Wikibooks</span> (The <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell">Haskell Wikibook</span> is a great resource for Haskell in general)
A really nice article with code <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://izbicki.me/blog/gausian-distributions-are-monoids" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://izbicki.me/blog/gausian-distributions-are-monoids">"Gaussian distributions are monoids</span>

Conclusion

The main takeaways today: consider using NonEmpty when you have a list that you know is not empty, so that you can confidently perform operations on it without throwing an exception. It's just one additional Cabal dependency away! Also make sure that you actually wanted a list, and not a tuple or fixed-size vector or something like that. And use QuickCheck.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 6: finding utilities with Hoogle and Hayoo: MissingH, extra

Sun, 06 Dec 2015 13:00:00 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 6

(Reddit discussion)

It will never be the case that everything everyone will find useful will already be in the "standard library" for any language ecosystem. However, one of the coolest features of the Haskell ecosystem (which wows all non-Haskellers when I show them), is the ability to search for useful functions by type signature, using Hoogle or <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/examples" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/examples">Hayoo</span>. You can use other criteria also, such as names; this can be useful if you have a guess at what some useful function might be named.

There seem to be two philosophies as far as using other people's utility libraries (or even making one's own to share between different projects):

reuse is great, let's do it
every dependency is a potential liability, so it's better to reinvent, or copy and paste, rather than use something of uncertain quality or maintainability

I tend to prefer reuse, but there have been times when I have copied (and even modified) only just what I need, because I don't want the rest of what is inside a sprawling library that depends transitively on a whole lot of stuff I don't need. I think this is a granularity issue. Many people have proposed the idea that since we have a Web now, in theory the concept of "library" should go obsolete in favor of micro-libraries, so to speak, maybe sometimes even to the level of single standalone functions, and maybe even having a unique identifier, but this topic is outside the scope of this article. (For just one idea, check out Gabriel Gonzalez's "The internet of code".)

The situation is also complicated by the fact that often, so much can be reinvented with only a couple of lines of Haskell code, so why even bother looking for someone's implementation of it?

But let's assume for this article that you are interested in finding and using utility libraries. I show how to find some example functions and reach two utility libraries that I use, very cleverly and informatively named MissingH and extra.

List/string example

A while ago I was manipulating strings (I was given String, as opposed to Text or ByteString) and needed to replace all occurrences of a substring in a file path with a different substring. For example, as an HSpec test item for a hypothetical function creatively named replace:

  it "replaces all substrings within a string" $ do
    replace "abc" "d" "123abc123abc" `shouldBe` "123d123d"

Sure, it would not be hard to write code to do this, but why not see if it's out there already for me to use?

What type should we search for? Maybe

String -> String -> String -> String

i.e.

String     -- ^ matching substring
-> String  -- ^ replacement for the match
-> String  -- ^ original string
-> String  -- ^ result string

OK, let's try this type as a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/?query=String+-%3E+String+-%3E+String+-%3E+String" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/?query=String+-%3E+String+-%3E+String+-%3E+String">Hayoo search</span>. Hmm, the results are not too promising. At the top is some weird undocumented regex thing, and that's probably not what we want.

An important search technique: make the fewest assumptions

Probably the single most important tip for getting good search results from a type is to make the type as generic as possible: the more type variables, the better, and also use only type class constraints you need. The operation we want is not really string-specific. Rather, it was a list operation. So the real type we want is

Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [a] -> [a]

This utility function makes the least assumptions necessary to get the job done, while working for String because String is just [Char] and Char is an instance of the Eq type class. But for the purpose of replacements, we don't care about whether we're comparing characters: we only care that whatever element type is involved in these subsequences, we can compare for equality.

The <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/?query=Eq+a+%3D%3E+[a]+-%3E+[a]+-%3E+[a]+-%3E+[a]" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/?query=Eq+a+%3D%3E+[a]+-%3E+[a]+-%3E+[a]+-%3E+[a]">Hayoo search</span> immediately brings up much more promising results than with String, from packages such as utility-ht, MissingH, and extra. pandoc also popped up, but that's a huge text-processing tool, not a library I would pull in for just one tiny utility function! (Note that pandoc was covered in a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2013-12-12-24-days-of-hackage-pandoc.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2013-12-12-24-days-of-hackage-pandoc.html">2013 day of Hackage</span>.

The Hoogle search at hoogle.haskell.org search works pretty well also. (Note that the Hoogle search at the old site gives bad results.)

Modifying our tests to check the function with the more generic type

I briefly mentioned refactoring HSpec tests on day 3. Here's how to test multiple implementations of the same desired function (let's go with MissingH and extra), and also test replace on different input types: both String (which is just [Char]) and [Int]:

module MissingHExtraExampleSpec where

-- | From MissingH
import qualified Data.List.Utils as ListUtils

-- | From extra
import qualified Data.List.Extra as ListExtra

import Test.Hspec (Spec, hspec, describe, it, shouldBe)

-- | Required for auto-discovery.
spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "MissingH and extra" $ do
    describeReplace "MissingH" ListUtils.replace
    describeReplace "extra" ListExtra.replace

But the following fails to compile! Why?

-- | Fails to compile!
describeReplace
  :: String  -- ^ description
  -> (Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [a] -> [a])  -- ^ replace
  -> Spec
describeReplace description replace =
  describe description $ do
    it "replaces all substrings within a string" $ do
      replace "abc" "d" "123abc123abc" `shouldBe` "123d123d"
    it "replaces all int sublists within an int list" $ do
      replace [0 :: Int, 1] [100, 101, 102] [0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 0, 1, 4]
        `shouldBe` [100, 101, 102, 2, 3, 0, 100, 101, 102, 4]

A note on the critical use of higher-rank types for refactoring

The error message is useful if you know what is going on, but not useful but if not. Yes, we need higher-rank types.

    Illegal polymorphic or qualified type:
      Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [a] -> [a]
    Perhaps you intended to use RankNTypes or Rank2Types
    In the type signature for ‘describeReplace’:
      describeReplace :: String
                         -> (Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [a] -> [a]) -> Spec

Higher-rank types are a supported GHC extension discussed in a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2014-12-18-rank-n-types.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2014-12-18-rank-n-types.html">2014 Day of GHC Extensions</span>. Higher-rank types are tremendously useful and a feature that is missing from type systems in most other languages.

Briefly, the replace function we want has the type

forall a. Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [a] -> [a]

where we have explicitly quantified the type variable a so that the Eq constraint applies inside its scope. Read the type as "for all types a such that a is a member of the Eq type class, [a] -> [a] -> [a] -> [a]". Ordinary Haskell without the extension doesn't allow you to write down this type as a parameter into some function, because it doesn't have explicit forall and implicitly inserts a forall for you at the top level for everything, but then that is the wrong scoping for what we want to say.

So we need to add the directive and change the replace parameter type to have explicit quantification, and all is OK:

{-# LANGUAGE RankNTypes #-}

describeReplace
  :: String  -- ^ description
  -> (forall a. Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [a] -> [a])  -- ^ replace
  -> Spec

A note on implicit quantification in Haskell and related languages

I kind of wish type variable quantification were explicit in Haskell, i.e., requiring forall annotations, as PureScript does, because understanding type variable quantification is important for fully understanding what is going on at the type level in languages such as ML and Haskell.

For example, here's a good article about <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2015-03-27-unsafe.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2015-03-27-unsafe.html">how to understand the value restriction and monomorphism restriction</span>, which can be puzzling if you don't have the mental model of what is going on underneath.

The joy of browsing libraries

One thing that can happen if you find a utility function useful, is you can browse around in the module that contains it, or the whole library, just looking for stuff you might find useful in the future. For example, I find Neil Mitchell's extra pleasant enough (good names and great documentation on Hackage) that I use it when I can, and I recommend checking it out. The GitHub repo of MissingH suggests that it is not really being updated any more, so I'm downplaying my use of it.

In the world of physical books and magazines, I still go to my local libraries and browse both the new book/magazine/DVD shelves as well as the look around on the shelf of an item I find in the stacks to see if there's something related that I might enjoy checking out.

Digging more deeply

Also, note that if you're on the hunt for possibly useful libraries, but without an immediate need, you can also find them just by looking at the dependency list that popular libraries already use. I confess that I have sometimes clicked away on dependencies on a Hackage page. If you transitively click around on Edward Kmett's lens dependencies, you will reach a huge number of useful libraries, because he is the master of the universe of code reuse.

The physical book or paper analogy here, of course, is looking at the references or bibliography to find more things to read.

Conclusion

For day 6, I gave an example of how to search for a function on Hoogle and Hayoo, and go polymorphic for a good result. I recommend using the quality extra utility library.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 5: should-not-typecheck: making Haskell sort of dynamically typed with deferred type errors

Sat, 05 Dec 2015 13:20:32 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 5

(Reddit discussion)

Have you ever been frustrated when using a statically typed language because there's a type error somewhere in your code base but you want to run your program anyway, either because you don't care about that remote type error that has nothing to do with what you're working on, or because you want to step through your code and debug what the type error really is? I certainly have.

Also, have you ever wanted to write a unit test to verify that your typed code disallows code you want to disallow, but you are frustrated because how do you write code in a typed language that says, "This code (that you won't typecheck) won't typecheck" and passes the typechecker and runs?

Welcome to the land of GHC's "deferred type errors", a feature that has been part of GHC since version 7.6.1 in 2013. Since this was not covered in Ollie's <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/pages/2014-12-01-24-days-of-ghc-extensions.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/pages/2014-12-01-24-days-of-ghc-extensions.html">2014 series "24 Days of GHC Extensions"</span>, I decided to bring it up here, and in the context of a cute package, should-not-typecheck that hooks up with HSpec to make assertions that something won't typecheck.

Installation

Since LTS does not know about this obscure package, Stack helpfully tells us exactly what to add to our stack.yaml to bring it in:

extra-deps:
- should-not-typecheck-2.0.1

Let's write some tests

The full documentation of should-not-typecheck is right there on its Hackage page.

First, we need to enable the GHC option -fdefer-type-errors in the test module, with a directive:

{-# OPTIONS_GHC -fdefer-type-errors #-}

Our first test

import ShouldNotTypecheckExample

import Test.Hspec ( Spec, hspec, describe, it
                  , shouldBe
                  , shouldThrow, anyException
                  )
import Test.ShouldNotTypecheck (shouldNotTypecheck)

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "should-not-typecheck" $ do
    it "should not allow mapping negation over a list of strings" $ do
      shouldNotTypecheck (map not ["hello", "world"])

That's self-explanatory. We can't do a Boolean negation on a string. Haskell is not a "truthy"-based language, but a truth-based language.

Some puzzling code

Now let's look at the ShouldNotTypecheckExample module:

{-# OPTIONS_GHC -fdefer-type-errors #-}

module ShouldNotTypecheckExample (thisWorks, thisFails) where

thisWorks :: String
thisWorks =
  fst ("hello", ["world" / True, "!"])

thisFails :: String
thisFails =
  snd ("hello", ["world" / True, "!"])

Pause for a moment, and think of what should happen when thisWorks and thisFails are used, and in what way, and why. In both cases, we have a tuple and are returning the first element or the second element of the tuple. The second element is a list that is clearly ill-typed, because it contains something that is nonsensical (division of a string by a boolean).

The role of laziness

To understand what happens in the following tests, you need to understand how laziness works in Haskell. The word "lazy" has come to be used for many different ideas and constructs in different programming languages, but Haskell's "laziness" is unique. A full discussion is outside the scope of this article, but I thought that showing what happens with deferred type errors might be a gateway toward better understanding the execution model of Haskell.

Never reached

    it "you can run code even if it contains ill-typed parts" $ do
      thisWorks `shouldBe` "hello"

This works because tuples in Haskell are lazy, and therefore in ordinary typechecking, taking the first element of a well-typed tuple succeeds no matter what is in the second element of the tuple. The difference when operating in deferred typechecking mode is that the tuple doesn't even need to be well-typed, and the second element can be complete junk, as it is here. So this example is straightforward if you consider that what GHC does is somehow push the type error into a reasonably small context so that outside of it, things still typecheck and run normally.

Laziness all the way down

So what happens if we get the second element of the tuple, it is junk, and take its length?

    it "deferred type errors are only lazily reached" $ do
      length thisFails `shouldBe` 2

The answer is that everything is still fine, because the embedded list inside the lazy tuple is a lazy list (because lists in Haskell are lazy), and length never looks at the elements of the list, only counts their number, so it passes over the junky thunk for "world" / True perfectly fine without needing to evaluate it.

Forcing the laziness

To explicitly force laziness into fully evaluated data (the kind of data in standard programming languages), we need to use the deepseq package. It's work to fully, deeply evaluate something in Haskell! We use force from that package.

In order to catch, in HSpec, the exception we expect to finally get, we also need to use evaluate from Control.Exception in base, the main package of the ecosystem (discussed in a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-23-24-days-of-hackage-base.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-23-24-days-of-hackage-base.html">2012 Day of Hackage post</span>).

import Control.Exception (evaluate)
import Control.DeepSeq (force)

Our test (which for simplicity is coarse in that it catches any exception, rather than the specific typechecking exception):

    it "deferred type errors cause an exception only when reached" $ do
      evaluate (force thisFails) `shouldThrow` anyException

The deep evaluation will go all the way down to the junky expression in the list in the tuple of our example, and a typechecking error is thrown there at run time, as expected.

Suppose we were just evaluating thisFails from code, say within GHCi. This is what we get:

*Main> import ShouldNotTypecheckExample
*Main ShouldNotTypecheckExample> thisFails
"*** Exception: /Users/chen/Sync/haskell/twenty-four-days2015-of-hackage/src/ShouldNotTypecheckExample.hs:14:26:
    No instance for (Fractional Char) arising from a use of ‘/’
    In the expression: "world" / True
    In the expression: ["world" / True, "!"]
    In the first argument of ‘snd’, namely
      ‘("hello", ["world" / True, "!"])’
(deferred type error)

Haskell is not really being dynamic here

So is Haskell dynamically typed then, when running in this mode? Not really. It's faking it. What it's basically doing is that the typechecker is still finding the type error at compile time, but then secretly creating the exception information at the site of the crappy code and replacing that code with a call to throw that exception. The technical details are in this paper.

This is completely different from the dynamic checking where nothing is checked at compile time and an error is discovered during the course of run time execution. Here, the error is discovered up front, stashed away, and kept a secret until or unless it is demanded.

For more on laziness and forcing

Simon Marlow's free book "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell" has chapters on evaluation strategies, starting with chapter 2. This stuff is subtle.

Conclusion

For day 5, I introduced the should-not-typecheck package and briefly discussed Haskell's lazy evaluation and how it interacts with GHC's deferred type errors. A later Day of Hackage will venture into the world of doing "real" dynamic typing in Haskell.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 4: wreq: Web client programming; with notes on lens and operator syntax

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 22:05:23 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 4

(Reddit discussion)

In the late 1990s, I eagerly bought the book "Web Client Programming with Perl" and used the LWP library to scrape the Web in automated fashion. I continued doing that into the 2000s. I am happy that nowadays, I can just use Haskell to do this kind of programming, in a succinct way also.

Today's topic is wreq, Bryan O'Sullivan's high-level library for doing Web client programming designed specifically for usability.

wreq makes use of the aeson ecosystem for JSON and lens and ecosystem, including lens-aeson, so you may want to check out Ollie's 2012 Days of Hackage posts on <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-07-24-days-of-hackage-aeson.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-07-24-days-of-hackage-aeson.html">aeson</span> and <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-09-24-days-of-hackage-lens.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-09-24-days-of-hackage-lens.html">lens</span>.

Since wreq already has an extensive tutorial and reference documentation, I'm not going to repeat its explanations. Instead, I'm going to give an example of use that should be simple enough to be understood from context, then discuss the issue of using operator syntax in Haskell.

The task

I'm a member of many groups on Meetup. It's often useful for me to get information using the official Meetup API rather than go around clicking on a Web site on or a mobile app. Why do by hand what I can do much more efficiently and correctly with code?

Here's a very simplified example of something I might want to do with Meetup. I've been active in the Pittsburgh Code and Supply community, which has a Meetup site with a packed calendar of events (it's on hiatus now in December for the holidays, but is otherwise very active). Maybe I want to find out what upcoming events they are, and search for events of interest according to some criteria. For our toy example here, let's say I want to find the ten upcoming events and get their names and venue names, and make sure there's at least one event that has a name and venue name already set up (sometimes, an event is proposed but no venue has been found yet).

A test

Yesterday, day 3 of this article series, I mentioned liking using HSpec, so let's use HSpec.

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

import WreqExample (GroupId, eventName, venueName, getMeetupEventInfos)
import Test.Hspec ( Spec, hspec, describe, it
                  , shouldSatisfy, shouldNotSatisfy
                  )
import qualified Data.Text as Text

We are using the text packed Unicode string type, because that's what wreq uses. OverloadedStrings is a convenient GHC extension that allows string literals in code to be treated as Text values rather than String. Ollie discusses this extension in his <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-12-17-overloaded-strings.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-12-17-overloaded-strings.html">2014 Days of GHC Extensions</span>.

Also, since I'm operating in test-driven development style, I wrote this test first, before writing the WreqExample module: I only wrote the imports for what I need for the test.

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "wreq" $ do
    it "there are named, located Pittsburgh Code and Supply events coming up" $ do
      -- Warning! This is a stateful test going out to the Web.
      events <- getMeetupEventInfos pittsburghCodeAndSupplyId
      events `shouldNotSatisfy` null
      events `shouldSatisfy` any
        (\event -> (not . Text.null . eventName) event
                   && (not . Text.null . venueName) event)

pittsburghCodeAndSupplyId :: GroupId
pittsburghCodeAndSupplyId = "13452572"

Module signatures

If Haskell had <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2015-01-08-modules.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2015-01-08-modules.html">module signatures, like Standard ML and OCaml do</span>, I would write an explicit module signature for the module I intend to implement that will conform to that signature, but Haskell doesn't, so the best we can do is operate in "duck typing" manner at the module level, relying implicitly on compilation to fail on import of a conforming module implementation rather than on matching against an explicit signature without the need for an implementation.

Here are the types we need (in a pseudo-syntax as though Haskell had module signatures):

type GroupId    -- abstract

type EventInfo  -- abstract

-- abstract type accessors
eventName :: EventInfo -> Text
venueName :: EventInfo -> Text

getMeetupEventInfos :: GroupId -> IO [EventInfo]

Implementation

Imports

import Network.Wreq (Options, defaults, param, getWith, asValue, responseBody)
import Data.Text (Text)
import Data.Aeson (Value)
import Control.Lens (view, set, toListOf)
import Data.Aeson.Lens (key, _Array, _String)

Types

-- | Information that we care about from a Meetup event.
data EventInfo =
  EventInfo { eventName :: Text
            , venueName :: Text
            }
  deriving (Show)

-- | A valid Meetup group ID.
type GroupId = Text

The Web client part

Since we're only making one request, and are not doing any error handling, but letting wreq throw exceptions instead, the Web client part is very brief. The Meetup API allows returning information as JSON.

meetupEventsUrl :: String
meetupEventsUrl = "https://api.meetup.com/2/events"

We perform a GET with query parameters. wreq uses lens as its domain-specific language for creating options for GET, so let's create a wreq Options value, by setting the parameters one after another using a builder pattern starting with the wreq defaults:

eventsOptions :: GroupId
              -> Options
eventsOptions groupId =
  set (param "page") ["10"] (
    set (param "order") ["time"] (
      set (param "status") ["upcoming"] (
        set (param "group_id") [groupId] (
          set (param "format") ["json"] defaults))))

We begin by going out to the Web to get back a response, which is a lazy ByteString:

getMeetupEventInfos :: GroupId -> IO [EventInfo]
getMeetupEventInfos groupId = do
  response <- getWith (eventsOptions groupId) meetupEventsUrl

The JSON part

Then we parse the lazy ByteString response, including the headers and the body, into an untyped JSON object, an aeson Value:

  jsonResponse <- asValue response

More precisely, Value is unityped:

type Object = HashMap Text Value

type Array = Vector Value

data Value = Object !Object
           | Array !Array
           | String !Text
           | Number !Scientific
           | Bool !Bool
           | Null

The lens part

It was annoying figuring out from the official Meetup API site what fields I needed from the response and what their types were supposed to be. In practice I just saved off JSON from a representative query and looked at some events to see what I wanted. I was told where to find the automatically generated documentation of all the API methods but it was not ideal. A later Day of Hackage will discuss what I did about this problem.

We extract the list of events, using a traversal to get the whole list, which is encoded as a JSON array in the top level JSON object's results field:

  let events = toListOf (responseBody
                         . key "results"
                         . _Array . traverse
                        ) jsonResponse

Here we use toListOf from lens with a traversal and a JSON object to pull out everything from that traversal.

Finally, since we only want, for each event, its name and its venue's name (the venue's name is actually a field in a venue object):

  return (map jsonToEventInfo events)

We again use lens, at the level of an individual event object, to extract what we want from it:

-- | Extract our typed data model from an untyped JSON object.
jsonToEventInfo :: Value -> EventInfo
jsonToEventInfo json =
  EventInfo { eventName = view (key "name" . _String) json
            , venueName = view (key "venue"
                                . key "name" . _String) json
            }

Here we use the view function of lens, to apply a lens to the JSON object to pull a field out of it.

And we're done! We've written a script that looks pretty much like what you'd write in Perl or Python. It will also "fail" in similar ways, because we're basically not using any types at all; even the final result just has strings, which may or may not be empty, whatever that's supposed to mean. For example, if you try to find a field by a string key that doesn't exist, the particular code here will just silently give back an empty string. Can we do better? Yes, there are various ways to do better. Stay tuned for a later Day of Hackage.

Lens operator syntax

If you've already used wreq or lens, you may have noticed something strange above: I didn't use any lens operator syntax. This was deliberate. Although the wreq tutorial gives a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.serpentine.com/wreq/tutorial.html#a-quick-lens-backgrounder" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.serpentine.com/wreq/tutorial.html#a-quick-lens-backgrounder">little bit of background on lens</span>, the reality is that when some friends who were not experienced lensers or Haskellers asked me how I do Web client programming in Haskell, and I pointed to wreq as being pretty cool, they got immediately stuck on the lens stuff. Looking back at the tutorial, I do see that it jumps straight into operator soup. This is unfortunate. You can immediately use libraries like wreq without having the lens operators memorized already. You have to understand some facts (such as the use of the function composition operator to compose lenses) and have an idea of how the types work out, but one thing you don't need is the funny operators. I think it's best to understand how to do things without operators before starting to use them as a convenient shortcut.

For example, an idiomatic way to set the options object, as presented in the "whirlwind tour" section of the wreq tutorial, is:

import Control.Lens ((&), (.~))

eventsOptions :: GroupId
              -> Options
eventsOptions groupId = defaults
  & param "format" .~ ["json"]
  & param "group_id" .~ [groupId]
  & param "status" .~ ["upcoming"]
  & param "order" .~ ["time"]
  & param "page" .~ ["10"]

I don't like the idea of newcomers to this library just copying and pasting stuff without understanding what it does, or getting the impression that these operators are somehow built into the Haskell language or required for using the library. People really do get these impressions.

I happen to like the reverse function operator & a lot, although it's not as suggestive as the exact same reverse function operator in many other languages (such as F#, OCaml, Elm, Elixir) in the form of a pipe instead |>, so I feel OK about using it.

But the .~ is I think not very suggestive to newcomers to lens. Is set lens newValue object so much worse to write or read than object & lens .~ newValue?

(Update of 2014-12-12) Thinking compositionally

One thing that is unfortunately lost if you use pipeline application operators such as & is the compositionality that underlies the power of lenses. So here is a refactoring of eventsOptions that shows how to best think of what we are doing, which is creating a "builder" and applying it:

eventsOptionsRefactored :: GroupId -> Options
eventsOptionsRefactored groupId = builder defaults
  where builder = eventsOptionsBuilder groupId

-- | Recall: type is sugar for GroupId -> (Options -> Options)
eventsOptionsBuilder :: GroupId -> Options -> Options
eventsOptionsBuilder groupId =
  set (param "page") ["10"]
  . set (param "order") ["time"]
  . set (param "status") ["upcoming"]
  . set (param "group_id") [groupId]
  . set (param "format") ["json"]

Note the separation of concerns here: instead of thinking of building an Options object as

starting with a default
successively applying an extra setting to it

we think of

creating an options builder through composition
applying the builder to the default

Partial application in functional programming is used here to implement the builder pattern: eventsOptionsBuilder takes one argument, and returns an Options transformer of type Options -> Options.

Code golf?

To illustrate both the up sides and down sides of using operators (but in this case mostly down sides, I think), here is a code golf version of the entire code:

import Network.Wreq (Options, defaults, param, getWith, asValue, responseBody)
import Data.Text (Text)
import Control.Lens ((&), (.~), (^.), (^..))
import Data.Aeson.Lens (key, _Array, _String)
import Control.Arrow ((>>>), (&&&))

meetupEventsUrl :: String
meetupEventsUrl = "https://api.meetup.com/2/events"

-- | A valid Meetup group ID.
type GroupId = Text

-- | For searching for events in a Meetup group.
eventsOptions :: GroupId
              -> Options
eventsOptions groupId = defaults
  & param "format" .~ ["json"]
  & param "group_id" .~ [groupId]
  & param "status" .~ ["upcoming"]
  & param "order" .~ ["time"]
  & param "page" .~ ["10"]

-- | Code golf version. Don't do this?
getMeetupNameAndVenues :: GroupId -> IO [(Text, Text)]
getMeetupNameAndVenues groupId =
  getWith (eventsOptions groupId) meetupEventsUrl
  >>= asValue
  >>= ((^.. responseBody
        . key "results"
        . _Array . traverse)
       >>> map ((^. key "name" . _String)
                 &&& (^. key "venue"
                      . key "name" . _String)
                 )
       >>> return
      )

In a way, this looks cool because the piping left to right reads well and naturally, if you know all the operators and are happy with operator sectioning syntax and point-free combinators. But when I showed this to friends who are not so fluent in Haskell, they didn't like this. Also, note that I made concessions in order to arrange this pipeline. I lost the comments, the intermediate named sub-computations (very useful for finer-grained testing), and even my custom result type (resorting to just tupling). I feel something has been lost by writing in this style even though part of me secretly likes it.

An interview with Bryan O'Sullivan

Recently (September 2015), The Haskell Cast interviewed Bryan O'Sullivan. I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. He had stories to tell about how he got into Haskell, how he ended up writing all these libraries, and how he goes about designing them and what his goals are when implementing them. Note that aeson and text, which everyone uses, are his creations. Thank you, Bryan, for all you've done for the Haskell community!

Lens resources

Gabriel Gonzalez wrote a lens tutorial that is useful. Thank you, Gabriel, for writing tutorials not only on your own libraries, but for others as well!

Conclusion

For day 4, I presented a tiny example of use of wreq with aeson and lens to perform a simple task of getting information from the Web, and tried to make wreq more accessible by not requiring use of lens operators up front.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 3: HSpec; the importance of testing

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 12:55:59 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 3

(Reddit discussion)

I spent my formative years writing software before "testing framework" was in my vocabulary, before "test-driven development" was a thing. I shudder to think of those years, because now I'm a believer in tests and even in test-driven development (TDD), according to my interpretation of what that means (since everyone has a different definition).

There are a bunch of testing tools that have been available in the Haskell ecosystem for some time. In fact, Ollie in his "24 Days of Hackage" covered

QuickCheck <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-08-24-days-of-hackage.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-08-24-days-of-hackage.html">in 2012</span>
doctest <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2013-12-18-doctest.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2013-12-18-doctest.html">in 2013</span>
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://documentup.com/feuerbach/tasty" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://documentup.com/feuerbach/tasty">tasty</span> <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2013-12-03-24-days-of-hackage-tasty.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2013-12-03-24-days-of-hackage-tasty.html">in 2013</span>

and I heartily recommend looking those up.

But today I'm going to show use of HSpec (noting that a framework like tasty or test-framework are a lot fancier).

Why tests?

I first got into writing tests for two reasons:

Using languages like Perl, it was essentially impossible to be productive without writing tests.
Such languages spawned the tooling to ease the pain of writing, running, and getting feedback from tests.

But after getting started, I didn't look back, even when using other languages such as Scala and Haskell. Today, no matter what language I'm using, I expect there to be a decent testing framework I can immediately start using. I even did the experiment of learning a brand new language, Elixir, through writing tests. I cannot take a language ecosystem seriously if there is not at least some reasonable default standard testing framework that is part of it.

There's a myth (or joke) about using languages like Haskell that have a decent type system: that you don't need tests because you have types. Hence the unfortunate phrase "tests versus types". I completely disagree with this. I want my types and I want my tests too: I want to use every possible tool to help me design, verify, and troubleshoot my code! At Pittsburgh TechFest 2014, I gave a talk "Exploring type-directed, test-driven development" giving my personal view of making the best use of both types and tests as part of an iterative process of refining understanding and expression of a solution for a task (this was before the term "type-directed development" became the title of a coming book on using Idris, "Type-directed development with Idris", whose completion I look forward to!).

The general topic of how best to combine types and tests is well outside the scope of this article, but I just want to make one claim: the primary benefits of tests come from their role as explicit documentation of intent during a design process. Ideally, we prefer to write down expressive types to fully encode intent, and dependently typed languages such as Idris enable transforming a lot of what used to be runtime tests into compile-time tests encoded as type checking, and you can do a bunch of this with Haskell already if you work hard enough (and Dependent Haskell is in progress), but there is nothing wrong with writing tests today that someday you might turn into types.

Breaking news!

By sheer coincidence, a new testing framework was just announced for OCaml.

And today, right after I initially published this article, I found in my news feed an announcement about QuickFuzz, a grammar fuzz tester for Haskell!

It's great that testing is being taken more seriously everywhere and by everyone.

Why HSpec?

Why do I use HSpec, and not one of the fancier testing frameworks? I'm not ruling out migrating to one of those in the future, but for now, HSpec just feels really easy and comfortable to use, and is good enough for me. I am so freaking lazy that I might not write tests if I get intimidated by any possible sources of friction. And I'll admit that its Web site is pretty good! Marketing matters, I guess.

Also, when I was using Ruby, I got accustomed to using RSpec, which of course was the inspiration for HSpec.

It's all about auto-discovery

Before even saying anything more about HSpec, I want to say that one selling point of HSpec for me was auto-discovery. Check out the manual for full details.

Auto-discovery means that given a simple boilerplate setup, you can use "convention over configuration" and just give test module file names matching *Spec.hs and sticking them anywhere embedded inside your test/ directory and they will all be picked up when you run stack test. This means being able to write test modules at will, rename, delete, add, refactor them and not have to worry about manually writing a boilerplate driver module that tediously imports all the test modules and wires them up into a single project test suite.

Here's the setup I have for all my projects that use HSpec. I provide it from my sample project template described on day 1, so you can now generate a starter project with HSpec all ready to go by running

$ stack new my-new-project franklinchen

There is a test/ directory with a single file in it, the auto-discovery file named test/Spec.hs, which has a single line of code, actually a comment:

{-# OPTIONS_GHC -F -pgmF hspec-discover #-}

This works because when you have HSpec installed, a program hspec-discover also gets installed, and it's called by GHC to do the work of auto-discovery. Each test module should export spec, because that's what the auto-discovery program will collect to call.

Writing and refactoring tests

I didn't mention it in yesterday's post about using a regex to solve a problem, but when I wrote out examples of strings that are supposed to match a regex and examples of strings that are not supposed to match it, I simply copied and pasted those examples from tests I had written.

Let's walk through writing PCREHeavyExampleSpec.hs, step by step.

Initial version of test code

First, I'll present code that I never actually wrote initially, because I skipped this step and immediately refactored it in my mind. But I decided that to showcase Haskell's strength as a language for embedding a domain-specific language (DSL), I retroactively wrote the most obvious code that shows how HSpec works without introducing non-HSpec considerations. (The code is on branch boilerplated-hspec.)

module PCREHeavyExampleSpec where

import PCREHeavyExample (mediaRegex)

import Test.Hspec (Spec, describe, it, shouldSatisfy)
import Text.Regex.PCRE.Heavy ((=~))

-- | Required for auto-discovery.
spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "pcre-heavy" $ do
    describe "match" $ do
      it "has audio" $ do
        "@Media:\thas-audio,   audio" `shouldSatisfy` (=~ mediaRegex)
      it "has video" $ do
        "@Media:\thas-video,video" `shouldSatisfy` (=~ mediaRegex)
      it "has audio but missing" $ do
        "@Media:\thas-audio-but-missing, audio, missing" `shouldSatisfy` (=~ mediaRegex)
      it "has video but unlinked" $ do
        "@Media:\thas-video-but-unlinked  , video,      unlinked" `shouldSatisfy` (=~ mediaRegex)
    describe "no match" $ do
      it "no audio or video" $ do
        "@Media:\tno-audio-or-video" `shouldSatisfy` (not . (=~ mediaRegex))
      it "missing media field" $ do
        "@Media:\tmissing-media-field, unlinked" `shouldSatisfy` (not . (=~ mediaRegex))

The main thing to understand is that for simplest use (without fixtures, effects, etc.), a basic description-labeled spec item is introduced with it, and a labeled describe can contain many of those as well as sub-describes.

Here, we have two sub-Specs, one for examples that should match the regex and one for examples that should not.

Note that we imported and used mediaRegex from module PCREHeavyExample.

Unlike in our example program yesterday, which used scan from pcre-heavy to collect match bindings, we only care whether something matched, so we use its =~ operator instead that takes an input string and a regex, and returns a Bool.

The test code is concise enough, and the problem domain well understood enough, that even if the syntax looks strange, I hope it is clear what is going on, even if not clear how it's being done.

A note on syntax in Haskell code

Now is a good time to talk about the issue of syntax in Haskell code, because I'm expecting that if you are reading this, you might not already be familiar with HSpec, and I also cannot assume that you are already a seasoned Haskell developer, because I'm writing this article series not for advanced Haskellers but for those starting to dip into the library ecosystem and even friends with limited experience with Haskell.

It is convenient to use operator sectioning syntax above, but I could have written

text `shouldSatisfy` (\inputString -> inputString =~ mediaRegex)

Furthermore, it is also convenient to use infix syntax for named functions when sensible, but it is not required. I could have written in bare-bones style

shouldSatisfy text (\inputString -> inputString =~ mediaRegex)

And the cute (not . (=~ mediaRegex)) can be written as

\inputString -> not (inputString =~ mediaRegex)

I mention these facts about syntax because I have often been told by people looking into Haskell that it's confusing because of all the operator syntax. But you don't have to use this syntax if you don't want to: much that looks weird in Haskell is not something about the language itself, but just about optional syntax for which there is "normal" syntax if you prefer that. It's not just about operators, but about a lot of other optional syntax as well; if you are still relatively new to Haskell syntax, Gabriel Gonzalez wrote a nice "syntax decoding" tutorial covering some of that here.

But saying "you don't have to write it" is no use if "everyone is doing it" and you have to read it anyway. So it is the community as a whole that sets the tone for what gets written and what gets read.

One reason I like HSpec is that it does not go overboard with syntax. HUnit, an older testing framework, provided funny operators that really turned me off, such as ~=?. I like Gabriel Gonzalez's article "How to make your Haskell code more readable to non-Haskell programmers". It applies also to making the code more readable to experienced Haskell programmers!

I admit to having been guilty of some practices he calls out. I have mixed feelings about giving them all up, all the time. For example, it seems idiomatic to use the infix function operator $ for embedded DSLs such HSpec, rather than parenthesize everything. I'm curious what you think. Would you prefer to read the following, which is what the $ operator avoids requiring?

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "pcre-heavy" (do
    describe "match" (do
      it "has audio" (do
        "@Media:\thas-audio,   audio" `shouldSatisfy` (=~ mediaRegex)
        )
      -- ...
      )
    describe "no match" (do
      -- ...
      )
    )

I personally think that languages with a begin/end kind of block (such as Pascal, Ruby) instead of braces or parentheses have an advantage because that is more readable (to me), and recent research <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2534973" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2534973">"An empirical investigation into programming language syntax"</span> claims to have evidence of this.

Meanwhile, we make do with the language we have, and learn and teach its quirks and features. It's regrettable that English and Chinese are really hard languages to use too, but we make do if we want to be part of the community in the United States or in China. It goes both ways: if we want to be part of the community, we have to invest in understanding how it operates, and if the community wants to grow, it has to reach out to newcomers rather than just say "you're on your own, deal with it". Think of the immense amount of effort that goes into promoting universal literacy.

A one-minute review of test-driven development

Let's continue with the test writing process.

When doing test-driven development, we write an HSpec spec first, before even writing any implementation code. Test-driven development is where you show how something is supposed to work before you actually write that something. In a typed setting, this means we get a compile-time error when first trying to run the test, which we fix by creating PCREHeavyExample as a new module with a stub:

module PCREHeavyExample (mediaRegex) where

mediaRegex = undefined

Of course, every test fails (in the terminal, the failures are highlighted in red):

$ stack test
PCREHeavyExample
  pcre-heavy
    match
      has audio FAILED [1]
      has video FAILED [2]
      has audio but missing FAILED [3]
      has video but unlinked FAILED [4]
    no match
      no audio or video FAILED [5]
      missing media field FAILED [6]

Failures:

  test/PCREHeavyExampleSpec.hs:13:
  1) PCREHeavyExample.pcre-heavy.match has audio
       uncaught exception: ErrorCall (Prelude.undefined)

  test/PCREHeavyExampleSpec.hs:15:
  2) PCREHeavyExample.pcre-heavy.match has video
       uncaught exception: ErrorCall (Prelude.undefined)

  test/PCREHeavyExampleSpec.hs:17:
  3) PCREHeavyExample.pcre-heavy.match has audio but missing
       uncaught exception: ErrorCall (Prelude.undefined)

  test/PCREHeavyExampleSpec.hs:19:
  4) PCREHeavyExample.pcre-heavy.match has video but unlinked
       uncaught exception: ErrorCall (Prelude.undefined)

  test/PCREHeavyExampleSpec.hs:22:
  5) PCREHeavyExample.pcre-heavy, no match, no audio or video
       uncaught exception: ErrorCall (Prelude.undefined)

  test/PCREHeavyExampleSpec.hs:24:
  6) PCREHeavyExample.pcre-heavy, no match, missing media field
       uncaught exception: ErrorCall (Prelude.undefined)

A tangent on GHC's error reporting

A super-annoying thing, and a long-standing embarrassment for GHC, is that using undefined doesn't trigger useful error reporting. I look forward to GHC 8.0's new feature of implicit parameters providing callstacks/source locations. This stuff is important! It's time we got line numbers and call stacks for errors without having to jump through hoops.

Skipping to the end, assume we finished the implementation

OK, let's assume we finished the implementation, which is simply writing the regex for mediaRegex. Then the tests pass (and in the terminal they display in green):

PCREHeavyExample
  pcre-heavy
    match
      has audio
      has video
      has audio but missing
      has video but unlinked
    no match
      no audio or video
      missing media field

Finished in 0.0010 seconds
6 examples, 0 failures

Tests are code too!

It's easy to not take test code seriously and not hold it up to the same standards as "regular" code. That is a mistake: test code should actually be cleaner and tighter than main implementation code because it is our executable documentation and what we need to make as easy to read, write, and modify as requirements change.

Refactoring, part 1

Notice the tremendous amount of code duplication in the tests. We can do better than this item-by-item copy-and-paste job. We can write code to generate all the matching examples, by refactoring the relevant data into a table and a function that maps over the table to get a composite Spec.

Here is a table that pairs a test description with each example input string:

matchExamples :: [(String, String)]
matchExamples =
  [ ( "has audio"
    , "@Media:\thas-audio,   audio"
    )
  , ( "has video"
    , "@Media:\thas-video,video"
    )
  , ( "has audio but missing"
    , "@Media:\thas-audio-but-missing, audio, missing"
    )
  , ( "has video but unlinked"
    , "@Media:\thas-video-but-unlinked  , video,      unlinked"
    )
  ]

Here is a function that generates a spec item given a description/input pair.

matchSpec :: (String, String) -> Spec
matchSpec (description, text) =
  it description $ do
    text `shouldSatisfy` (=~ mediaRegex)

Similarly for the non-matching examples.

And the refactored Spec:

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describe "pcre-heavy" $ do
    describe "match" $ do
      mapM_ matchSpec matchExamples
    describe "no match" $ do
      mapM_ nonMatchSpec nonMatchExamples

Refactoring, part 2

Uh oh, I said "similarly". Usually when something is "similar", there's more refactoring that might be doable.

But Haskell makes refactoring joyful.

Haskell is a expressive language, where "might" usually means "can", and "can" often means "should". In my experience, Haskell's single best quality in terms of user experience is its support for refactoring at will and with confidence that everything will still mean exactly the same thing after as before the refactoring.

I particularly look forward to the ongoing development of a universal Haskell IDE engine refactoring even easier, e.g., folding in HaRe support.

We see a pattern of positive examples and negative examples using a predicate and its negation. Let's abstract this pattern out. Let's collect the positive and negative examples in one place. For simplicity, let's tuple them.

And now that we're dealing with arbitrary predicates, we no longer have to hardcode (=~ mediaRegex) or String everywhere. We can go polymorphic in the predicate type, replacing matchSpec and nonMatchSpec with a single predSpec.

The final result:

spec :: Spec
spec =
  describePredicate "pcre-heavy"
    ("match", (=~ mediaRegex))
    (matchExamples, nonMatchExamples)

describePredicate :: Show a =>
     String                           -- ^ description
  -> (String, a -> Bool)              -- ^ (base description, predicate)
  -> ( [(String, a)], [(String, a)] ) -- ^ positive and negative examples
  -> Spec
describePredicate description
                  (baseDescription, predicate)
                  (positiveExamples, negativeExamples) =
  describe description $ do
    describe baseDescription $ do
      mapM_ (predSpec predicate) positiveExamples
    describe ("not " ++ baseDescription) $ do
      mapM_ (predSpec (not . predicate)) negativeExamples

predSpec :: Show a => (a -> Bool) -> (String, a) -> Spec
predSpec predicate (description, a) =
  it description $ do
    a `shouldSatisfy` predicate

Note that describePredicate and predSpec can then be pulled out into a test utilities module for use by other specs using the same pattern.

Unfortunately, this refactoring, although good in some ways, came with a cost. It doesn't look so great to me. Does it to you?

Refactoring, part 3?

One reason the refactored code doesn't actually look so great now is that our refactoring led to many nested primitive types ("primitive obsession") and an explosion in number of positional arguments to our new describePredicate. Let's face it, calling describePredicate is cryptic, calling out for "keyword arguments" (in a language that supports them).

In Haskell, "keyword arguments" means there's a configuration data type crying to be defined. A related code smell is that documenting the parameters to describePredicate is now super-awkward. Each of those parameters should be a thing in itself, not just parenthesized, bracketed, tupled glop.

If we are really serious about refactoring, we should wrap these things into new data types that are an explicit model of what we want to do when classifying and testing examples. We might even turn the whole thing into its own embedded sub-DSL of HSpec.

This illustrates how refactoring can sometimes lead to new complexity that didn't exist before. There are tradeoffs constantly. Abstraction for its own sake does not always make things clearer. For this reason, I did not actually go this far initially for the example code yesterday: I did not feel it was worth the trouble. I've left it in the refactoring-2 branch of the GitHub repo.

Combining testing frameworks

One last thing about HSpec: you can use it within a larger testing framework, or you can embed another testing framework into it as well. For example, I like to use QuickCheck through HSpec as part of "type-directed development".

Conclusion

Testing is important, but few love to do it. Making it easy to write and use tests goes a long way toward actually doing it. I like HSpec because it's easy to write, and because of auto-discovery. I hope you consider using it for your own projects if you don't already use it or some other testing framework.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 2: Regexes with pcre-heavy; standalone Haskell scripts using Stack

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 12:50:12 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

A table of contents is at the top of the article for day 1.

Day 2

(Reddit discussion)

Don't laugh, but once upon a time, I made Perl my main programming language of choice (between around 1999 and 2010). There were many reasons for this, but one reason was that Perl made it very easy to do text processing using regexes.

If you are a seasoned Haskeller, you might be thinking, "Why not use a real parser instead?", such as the venerable parsec, which was covered in a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-10-24-days-of-hackage-parsec.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-10-24-days-of-hackage-parsec.html">2012 day of Hackage</span>? (Or, today, one could consider one of several other newer alternative libraries for parsing. A later day of Hackage will say more about this!)

After all, Jamie Zawinski famously once wrote, "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems." I even gave a talk at Pittsburgh Tech Fest in 2013, "Stop overusing regular expressions!", in which I promoted writing parsers rather than writing regexes.

But, sometimes I do want to use a regex. In that case, I have been using an obscure but useful package, pcre-heavy.

Today I'll show how to use pcre-heavy, and while at it, also show how to ship one-file standalone Haskell scripts that only require Stack.

Why use regexes at all?

Before going into pcre-heavy, I thought I should explain when I use regexes.

Back when I was doing a lot of text extraction, cleaning, including correction, restructuring of messy data, regexes seemed the only choice really. I had to not lose any "intended" information even if it was obscured by garbage or misspellings or the like. I therefore could not use some kind of approximate statistical technique, but had to iteratively do do a lot exploratory work with some interactive prompting in order to gradually clean up the data. Super-powerful regex constructs of the Perl variety seemed perfect for this task.

But even outside of such use cases, there's no hiding from the fact that regexes can be very convenient for simple tasks. Also, because regexes are used so much in our programming world in general, if we are migrating to Haskell some already-working regexes from already-written code in some other language, it's convenient to just stick with regexes.

Which Haskell regex library to use?!

A newcomer to Haskell must be overwhelmed by the lack of a single standard library and syntax for regexes. I mean, take a look at this wiki page.

Today, I'm presenting pcre-heavy, a regex library that I've been using when I want regexes at all (I try not to want them). It's pretty new and not even mentioned on that wiki page.

Some of my criteria for choosing a regex library:

I want Perl-style regexes. That's what I'm used to and are a kind of standard across regex support in many programming languages.
Nice syntax is a plus. One of the selling points of using regexes is that the conciseness of writing patterns, binding matches, etc. Without such conciseness, I just think "Why not just write a real parser? It only takes a couple of lines in Haskell anyway."
High performance is a perfectly legitimate reason to use regexes.

Given these criteria, using a PCRE-based library seemed the way to go. OK, the wiki page lists a bunch of PCRE-based libraries.

pcre-light is a good way to go.

It does require installation of the C library for PCRE.

I'm mainly on Mac OS X, so I have PCRE installed through Homebrew with $ brew install pcre. I have PCRE working on Linux. Unfortunately, I don't use Windows, so if someone can verify that pcre-light installs OK on Windows, that would be great. I would feel sad if I picked a library that is problematic for Windows users.

Recently, out came pcre-heavy, a wrapper around pcre-light that uses Template Haskell, the GHC extension that is "macros for Haskell", enabling compile-time metaprogramming (see the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2014-12-22-template-haskell.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2014-12-22-template-haskell.html">2014 Day of Hackage article about Template Haskell</span>.

I liked it, so I use it.

Example program using `pcre-heavy`

pcre-heavy has decent documentation on its Hackage page, so I recommend reading that for the full details on how to use it. I'll give just a simple example here in the context of a complete program that does something.

Specification and some test cases

Say we have a file of lines of text that are supposed to have a comma-separated format of

a fixed header
a text transcript's file path
an "audio" or "video" field indicating the type of associated media
an optional annotation about whether the associated media is missing or not yet linked into the transcript

(I made up this example based on the structured text specification called CHAT that happens to include a single line of this format, e.g. <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://talkbank.org/data-orig/Meeting/SCOTUS/2008/08-205.cha" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://talkbank.org/data-orig/Meeting/SCOTUS/2008/08-205.cha">this coded Supreme Court oral argument transcript for "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission"</span>.)

Examples that should match:

@Media:	has-audio,   audio
@Media:	has-video,video
@Media:	has-audio-but-missing, audio, missing
@Media:	has-video-but-unlinked  , video,      unlinked

Examples that should fail to match:

@Media:	no-audio-or-video
@Media:	missing-media-field, unlinked

Creating a regex

Here is a pcre-heavy regex, using the re Template Haskell quasiquoter that builds a PCRE-compiled Regex:

mediaRegex :: Regex
mediaRegex = [re|^@Media:\t([^ ,]+)\ *,\ *(audio|video)(\ *,\ *(?:missing|unlinked))?|]

Regex string validated at Haskell compile-time

One selling point of pcre-heavy for me is that because it uses Template Haskell, a bad regex string results in a Haskell-level compile-time error rather than a runtime error.

Example of a compile-time error:

-- This Haskell code fails to compile!
mediaRegex :: Regex
mediaRegex = [re|^@Media:\t([^ ,]+)\ *,\ *(audio|video)(\ *,\ *(?:missing|unlinked)?|]

Loading this in GHCi or compiling with GHC results in

    Exception when trying to run compile-time code:
      Text.Regex.PCRE.Light: Error in regex: missing )
    Code: template-haskell-2.10.0.0:Language.Haskell.TH.Quote.quoteExp
            re
            "^@Media:\\t([^ ,]+)\\ *,\\ *(audio|video)(\\ *,\\ *(?:missing|unlinked)?"

Using the regex

We'll use scan to extract the matches (if any) against our regex on a string.

scan returns a lazy list of all possible matches:

-- Simplified type signature for our purposes.
scan :: Regex -> String -> [(String, [String])]

Each match is a pair (String, [String]), where the first component is the whole string that matched, and the second is an ordered list of parenthesized groupings in the regex. In our regex, we had three parenthesized groupings, so a match could result in a three-element grouping list:

*Main> scan mediaRegex "@Media:\tfoo, audio, unlinked"
[("@Media:\tfoo, audio, unlinked",["foo","audio",", unlinked"])]

Since we only want the first match (if any), we can just compose it with listToMaybe from Data.Maybe, which has type

listToMaybe :: [a] -> Maybe a

so listToMaybe . scan mediaRegex has type String -> Maybe (String, [String]).

*Main> (listToMaybe . scan mediaRegex) "@Media:\tfoo, audio, unlinked"
Just ("@Media:\tfoo, audio, unlinked",["foo","audio",", unlinked"])

Extracting useful information

Finally, what we really wanted to do after matching is apply additional business logic and get stuff into a real type as soon as possible, rather than engage in "stringly-typed" programming and context-dependent list lengths.

Let's say that for our task, we only care about matched lines that are not missing or unlinked, and skip those that are missing or unlinked. We define a data type and use pattern matching to get out of the untyped world into the typed world of our data model.

data Info =
    Skip
  | Audio FilePath
  | Video FilePath
    deriving (Eq, Show)

-- | Extract information about a media file if it is present.
extractIfPresent :: (String, [String]) -> Info
extractIfPresent (_, [name, "audio"]) = Audio name
extractIfPresent (_, [name, "video"]) = Video name
extractIfPresent (_, _) = Skip

Presentation as a report

Finally, now that we are done with the regex world, and have a data model, all that is left is a driver to complete an example command-line program.

We have all the information needed to print out a report for each line.

-- | Output a report.
reportOnInfo :: Maybe Info -> IO ()
reportOnInfo Nothing = putStrLn "no match"
reportOnInfo (Just Skip) = putStrLn "match, but missing or unlinked"
reportOnInfo (Just (Audio path)) = printf "audio at %s\n" path
reportOnInfo (Just (Video path)) = printf "video at %s\n" path

And the final driver, piping everything through from standard input:

main :: IO ()
main = do
  s <- getContents
  mapM_ (reportOnInfo
        . fmap extractIfPresent
        . listToMaybe
        . scan mediaRegex
       ) (lines s)

Using Stack to ship standalone scripts

We can try our program from within the GHCi REPL by just typing main or :main at the REPL prompt and typing in lines of text. We can also do stack build to native-compile into a shippable binary.

But another option is to ship the source code as a standalone one-file script. This can be very convenient in some circumstances, when you can rely on the recipient simply installing Stack.

Here's how we can turn our program into such a standalone script: just add the following two lines and make the file executable:

#!/usr/bin/env stack
-- stack --resolver lts-6.9 --install-ghc runghc --package pcre-heavy

Stack will read the embedded command in order to install GHC, if needed, and first download and install the packages listed (here pcre-heavy), if needed. We have pinned down the exact version of LTS in order to guarantee what versions of everything will be used by Stack. (Note: in this case, because of FFI with a C library, the recipient has to install PCRE first.)

So if you have short programs that don't need to be organized into full-scale Cabal projects, you can treat Haskell as a "scripting language" with full access to the libraries of Hackage!

$ app/PCREHeavyExampleMain.hs < input.txt > output.txt

A warning

Although this Stack-as-Haskell-interpreter feature is kind of cool, I prefer to write modular, separately testable libraries, while having the main driver of the Main module of a program just use library modules that do most of the real work. Furthermore, I prefer to build and use native-compiled libraries and binaries because they're just much faster to start up and also run: runghc is a Haskell interpreter rather than a native optimizing compiler. But the beauty of the GHC Haskell world is you can run in either mode, and flip from one to the other seamlessly.

Here's our complete example standalone program

#!/usr/bin/env stack
-- stack --resolver lts-6.9 --install-ghc runghc --package pcre-heavy

{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-}

module Main where

import Text.Regex.PCRE.Heavy (Regex, re, scan)
import Data.Maybe (listToMaybe)
import Text.Printf (printf)

-- | Match a media name, audio/video, and optional missing/unlinked.
mediaRegex :: Regex
mediaRegex = [re|^@Media:\t([^ ,]+)\ *,\ *(audio|video)(\ *,\ *(?:missing|unlinked))?|]

data Info =
    Skip
  | Audio FilePath
  | Video FilePath
    deriving (Eq, Show)

-- | Extract information about a media file if it is present.
extractIfPresent :: (String, [String]) -> Info
extractIfPresent (_, [name, "audio"]) = Audio name
extractIfPresent (_, [name, "video"]) = Video name
extractIfPresent (_, _) = Skip

-- | Output a report.
reportOnInfo :: Maybe Info -> IO ()
reportOnInfo Nothing = putStrLn "no match"
reportOnInfo (Just Skip) = putStrLn "match, but missing or unlinked"
reportOnInfo (Just (Audio path)) = printf "audio at %s\n" path
reportOnInfo (Just (Video path)) = printf "video at %s\n" path

-- | Driver, in traditional right-to-left syntax.
main :: IO ()
main = do
  s <- getContents
  mapM_ (reportOnInfo
        . fmap extractIfPresent
        . listToMaybe
        . scan mediaRegex
       ) (lines s)

Some additional notes

One limitation faced by a short expository article with example code is that we don't like to waste space and attention, and therefore tend to present quick-and-dirty code, rather than production-level code (which is efficient, has sensible error recovery, well-commented). I've been thinking about the dilemma of how not to give the wrong impression and set a bad example by showing simplistic example code. There's no easy answer, but I felt it might be useful to provide optional "advanced" notes sometimes, on how to write real code.

pcre-heavy allows matching not only of String, but also of ByteString and Text types. In practice, for efficiency, we want to use bytestring and text as much as possible, rather than the inefficient String type. (<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-12-24-days-of-hackage-text.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-12-24-days-of-hackage-text.html">A 2012 day of hackage article talks about text</span>.) Since the underlying PCRE C library uses bytes, I generally hand bytestrings to pcre-heavy.

The sample driver code uses lazy I/O to get the lines from input. This is superficially elegant and concise for pedagogical purposes, but in real life is a source of resource leaks and other problems and even causes people to think "Haskell is inefficient". For real work, I like to use pipes, which was covered in another <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-16-24-days-of-hackage-pipes.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-16-24-days-of-hackage-pipes.html">2012 day of Hackage</span> and also has an extensive, beautiful tutorial by its author, Gabriel Gonzalez, who also has a fantastic, long-running, active blog "Haskell for all" that every Haskeller should follow.

Finally, was a regex the right choice here? It was simple enough for this problem, but you can see from the ad hoc pattern matching and hardcoded strings and fragile positional ordering and number of groups that things could get error-prone really quickly if the regex got any more complex or we wanted to do proper error handling in case of a failed match.

Conclusion

Regex support is not a strong point of the Haskell ecosystem, which is geared to more structured parsing, but there are options if you really want to use regexes, and I like the Perl-style pcre-light family of libraries that now includes pcre-heavy.

Also, I showed how to add two lines to the top of a Haskell program to turn it into a Stack script.

(Update from day 9)

Day 9 covers more libraries based on Template Haskell.

All the code

All my code for my article series are at this GitHub repo.

Haskell tidbits: 24 days of Hackage, 2015: day 1: Introduction and Stack

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 21:20:11 GMT

Table of contents for the whole series

Day 1: Introduction and Stack
Day 2: Regexes with pcre-heavy; standalone Haskell scripts using Stack
Day 3: HSpec; the importance of testing
Day 4: wreq: Web client programming; with notes on lens and operator syntax
Day 5: should-not-typecheck: making Haskell sort of dynamically typed with deferred type errors
Day 6: finding utilities with Hoogle and Hayoo: MissingH, extra
Day 7: semigroups; NonEmpty list and a case study of types and tests
Day 8: multiset; I wish this were in the standard containers package
Day 9: Template Haskell goodies: here, interpolate, file-embed
Day 10: s-cargot: using S-expression syntax
Day 11: monad-loops: avoiding writing recursive functions by refactoring
Day 12: json-autotype: inferring types from data
Day 13: hint: runtime eval for Haskell
Day 14: Earley: a promising newer parser library for Haskell
Day 15: IOSpec: testing IO; and some QuickCheck tricks
Day 16: safe; what is safety anyway?
Day 17: ansi-wl-pprint: avoiding string hacking
Day 18: vector, vector-algorithms: unleash your inner C programmer!
Day 19: ghc-core-html, list-fusion-probe; checking GHC's fusion rewrite rules for erasing intermediate data from existence
Day 20: dimensional: type-checked computation on physical quantities with units
Day 21: hood, GHood, Hoed: observation oriented debugging in Haskell
Day 22: Shake: the dynamic build system
Day 23: Liquid Haskell: refinement types for the real world
Day 24: conclusion and thanks

(The Haskell user group in Brazil's translation of the series into Portuguese is included at their blog.

Day 1

(Reddit discussion)

A couple of days ago, I happened to see a tweet from Ollie Charles that he didn't have time to do his usual annual December "24 days of..." Haskell blog posts this year (2015) and felt sad because I've learned a huge amount from <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/">reading them</span>. In both 2012 and 2013, he wrote "24 days of Hackage", daily short and sweet blog posts that showed how to use selected Haskell packages you can get from the community archive Hackage, and in 2014 he covered GHC language extensions.

With some trepidation, I decided that I would do a "24 days of Hackage" series myself to cap off this year, to share a selection of the huge number of Haskell packages I find useful. I thought it would be particularly appropriate to do this given that 2015 was the year that I migrated to using Haskell as my main language for most new work and personal projects, and therefore this has been a year of considerable discovery for me.

All the code

All my code for my article series will be at this GitHub repo.

My selection criteria

How to choose what to cover? I like what Ollie wrote in his <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-01-24-days-of-hackage.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-12-01-24-days-of-hackage.html">2012 inaugural post</span>: "This will be a whirlwind tour of some modules that I use on an almost daily basis, including modules that have inspired me, modules that have changed the way I think about code, and some modules that are so amazing I’m not even smart enough to use them!"

My own intention: some of what I'll cover is already popular and well-known, some may be just minor but useful utilities, some may be completely obscure, but the underlying theme will be "stuff I use and can briefly say something useful about".

Stack

It was a no-brainer to choose the first day's topic: Stack, the main new thing for Haskell in 2015 other than GHC 7.10.

Stack changed my (Haskell) life.

Stack is a game changer for the Haskell community. It is an all-in-one solution for creating Haskell projects, managing dependencies, building, and more. Since Stack came out, I've been slowly migrating old projects to use it, and I use Stack for all new projects, including the repo for this article series.

I'm not giving a full-blown tutorial on Stack here today, just a little taste, and you can read the official documentation for details, but what I want to emphasize is that Stack is useful not only for experienced developers, but especially also for newcomers, so part of today's article is geared specifically to newcomers (or those who tried Haskell once and are interested in a fresh start with better tooling).

"How do I get started with Haskell"?

When I launched <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://pittsburghhaskell.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://pittsburghhaskell.org/">Pittsburgh Haskell</span> in February this year (2015), I faced a huge hurdle: helping newcomers to Haskell get started. I created an introductory workshop session, but a huge number of people were discouraged by my best shot at creating a now-obsolete set of Haskell installation instructions that would work for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, and people had major problems installing a basic tool chain, and versioning issues if they already had an old version of GHC installed. Too much time was wasted on trying to help people with installation.

Pittsburgh Haskell happened to go on hiatus in April as I got busy with many other things and there was no momentum at the time to keep it going, but I believe one huge problem in trying to create a new local Haskell community from newcomers was the tooling/setup annoyance.

Stack solves this problem. If I gave an introductory Haskell workshop again, I would definitely use Stack.

An example of getting started with Stack using a custom template

If you don't already use Stack, download it.

The Stack Web site already has documentation on how to get started with Stack using a default template. Here, I want to promote the idea of using and sharing custom templates. This is not documented so well, but I think will become more and more important for newcomers, and is also of course useful for any of us who end up creating the same boilerplate project setups.

Using an official template

I've created a custom template called franklinchen that is part of the official stack-templates repo.

If you run

$ stack new stack-template-demo franklinchen

you will be prompted for information to create a new project called stack-template-demo.

Using your own local template

Note that the template specified does not have to be in the official stack-templates repo. It can also be on your local file system. For example, before I submitted my template to stack-templates, I used to run

$ stack new stack-template-demo /path/on/my/computer/to/franklinchen.hsfiles

where franklinchen.hsfiles is my template (read below on creating your own template).

(I've put up an instance of the generated project up on GitHub if you want to look at its structure without installing and running Stack right now.)

Getting started with the newly generated project

Enter the project directory:

$ cd stack-template-demo

Stack downloads GHC for you

Run

$ stack setup

If you do not already have an appropriate version of GHC installed, Stack will automatically download and install it for you, into an area in Stack's configuration directory ~/.stack/. The important thing to note is that when using Stack, multiple versions of GHC can coexist as desired for different build configurations and setups. This feature is really important, because not everyone uses the same version of GHC and you can build your project against multiple versions of GHC easily.

This automatic-downloading feature is particularly useful for newcomers who don't need to mess around with some kind of separate global installation requiring special privileges.

The output, if Stack needs to download anything:

Preparing to install GHC to an isolated location.
This will not interfere with any system-level installation.
Downloaded ghc-7.10.2.
Installed GHC.
stack will use a locally installed GHC
For more information on paths, see 'stack path' and 'stack exec env'
To use this GHC and packages outside of a project, consider using:
stack ghc, stack ghci, stack runghc, or stack exec

Launching the GHCi REPL

The most important thing for a newcomer to Haskell is to get started with the GHCi REPL, so let's do that right away. Doing this within the context of a project while preloading the modules of the project is simple with Stack.

Run

$ stack ghci

Note that only the first time you do this (or other commands that require getting library dependencies), Stack may take a while to download and build them. The dependencies will actually end up being installed and cached such that other projects in the future that use them can reuse them. This is a huge advantage of using Stack versus the old days before Stack, when there was always an issue of redownloading and recompiling the same libraries for different projects; that was a tremendous time and space waster! Stack intelligently figures out for you what can be shared consistently or not.

Stack launches a GHCi REPL with our modules preloaded:

Ok, modules loaded: Lib, Main.

In src/Lib.hs of the sample project, we have a silly module illustrating some Haddock documentation comments:

-- | A library to do stuff.
module Lib
    (
      ourAdd
    ) where

-- | Add two 'Int' values.
ourAdd :: Int  -- ^ left
       -> Int  -- ^ right
       -> Int  -- ^ sum
ourAdd x y = x + y

We can access the Lib module from the REPL:

*Main> ourAdd 2 3
5
*Main> Lib.ourAdd 4 5
9

We can also access Main, which is defined in app/Main.hs:

module Main where

import Lib (ourAdd)

import Text.Printf (printf)

main :: IO ()
main = printf "2 + 3 = %d\n" (ourAdd 2 3)

*Main> main
2 + 3 = 5

Building and running the project

You could have explicitly compiled the project first, before launching the REPL. In practice in real projects, I start by compiling a project to get the dependencies compiled, before I use GHCi, but the above does it for you too:

$ stack build

Because I defined a native-compiled binary executable named stack-template-demo in our Cabal file stack-template-demo.cabal, we can run the executable:

$ stack exec stack-template-demo
2 + 3 = 5

I supplied unit tests for Lib in test/LibSpec.hs that can be run:

$ stack test
Lib
  Lib
    works
    ourAdd is commutative

Finished in 0.0007 seconds
2 examples, 0 failures

Installing the library and executable

You can now install the library and executable for your own use later:

$ stack install
...
...
Copying from /Users/chen/stack-template-demo/.stack-work/install/x86_64-osx/lts-3.16/7.10.2/bin/stack-template-demo to /Users/chen/.local/bin/stack-template-demo

Copied executables to /Users/chen/.local/bin:
- stack-template-demo

For example (since ~/.local/bin is in my PATH):

$ stack-template-demo
2 + 3 = 5

Your own Stack template configuration

When using Stack templates, it's useful to set up a configuration so that information can automatically be filled out for you when you generate new projects. The documentation for configuration is here. Create a file in ~/.stack/config.yaml. Mine has:

templates:
  params:
    author-email: "franklinchen@franklinchen.com"
    author-name: "Franklin Chen"
    category: test
    copyright: "2015"
    github-username: "FranklinChen"

Other bells and whistles

I try to use Travis CI for any public code I put up, so my template generates a .travis.yml file that uses Stack. I've started to migrate my former Travis setups based on multi-ghc-travis to use Stack instead.

Creating a custom Stack project template

It was surprising to me that how to create a custom template is not covered in the main Stack documentation. Instead, I found it at the stack-templates site.

The method of creating a custom template is kind of clumsy, involving creating a single file with embedded directives to indicate generated file name and directory structure, but it's a start.

Conclusion

For day 1 of my "24 days of Hackage, 2015", I've briefly introduced how to use Stack, the Haskell tool that I'm using to build and run all the sample code for this article series.

Next up: some real code!

Clever chess tactics that were not what they seemed

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 07:25:52 GMT

In round 3 of the current 6-round Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament, I played a very tense game that led to an unusual position with beautiful tactical possibilities. My opponent, Melih, is a strong player who is a winner of the 2015 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship earlier this year, and had won the last two tournament games we have played, so I came into this game anxious and also thirsty for revenge.

The game proved to be very challenging for both of us. I achieved a better position out of the opening as Black but was too cautious to press more aggressively. After more than 3 hours (!) of play, we ended up in a simplified late middlegame in which I had only a small but clear advantage. We were both clearly physically and mentally exhausted, and starting to run out of time (these tournament games have a time control of 2 hours per person with a 5-second delay per move). It was up to me to try to find a way to win by inducing errors in his play.

Get ready to be quizzed!

What ended up happening was in retrospect both remarkable and comic. To maximize your entertainment as well as challenge your tactical skills, I recommend pausing at each diagrammed position below in order to ask yourself what move you would play, and why, before gradually uncovering the whole story.

Note: an interactive chess board with all variations is provided at the end of this article.

First, assess a quiet-looking starting position

For context, here is the position after 21 moves, after Black played 21...Qc6.

Questions

What opening do you think this middlegame came from?
Who stands better and why?
What is White's best plan, and what is Black's best plan?

Answers

Congratulations if you guessed this was a French Defense, Advance Variation, gone totally wrong for White!

Black stands better and has a simple plan:

attack White's backward Pawn on c3 on the half-open file, and perhaps also the e5 Pawn as well; and the a2 Pawn and b4 Pawn are also potential targets
use the half-open c-file for the Rooks, and the dark-squared Bishop against White's Pawns, and get the Queen involved as well
using these attacks, overload White's defenses somehow in order to win at least one of those Pawns to enter a probably winning endgame

White's only possible counter-plan:

defend the weak Queen side Pawns
maybe plant the Knight on a good outpost such as d4
defend the Pawn on e5 with maybe an f4 advance, and hope to attack Black's King side with perhaps an f5 break

Progress after seven moves?

Black has just played 28...Rc4.

Questions

Who has made more progress in the last seven moves: White or Black?
What is the nature of the progress made?

Answers

White has played to wait to see what Black is up to; meanwhile, Black has made some progress on the Queen side by:

doubling Rooks on the half-open c-file
using the Queen to bear down on White's a-Pawn, which White has (mistakenly) advanced to a3.

White played a surprising move

White has just played 29 Rac2.

Questions

On the 29th move, White moved the Rook from a2 to c2, leaving the defense of the a3 Pawn.

What is the meaning of this strange move?!
Can Black just take the Pawn with the Queen?

Answers

You may be thinking "White is provocatively setting a trap for Black to fall into". You get credit if you can see the trap.

Black fell into a trap?

I played 29...Qxa3.

But wait, I took the Pawn! Did I fall into a trap?

Questions

What is the trap you saw earlier, if you saw it?
Is it really a trap?

White closed the trap?

White has played 30 Ra2.

Answers

So the Rook moved back to a2, apparently trapping Black's Queen. But again, was it really a trap?

Black refuted the trap?

Black played 30...Rxd4.

You get credit if you saw this move taking White's Knight on d4, and saw that White's Queen is overloaded such that retaking the Rook in either one of two ways leads to losing back the Rook on c1 and therefore losing a piece overall and the game.

I was very proud of seeing this tactic. (If you saw a different move for Black, we'll discuss that further down below.)

White refuted the refutation?

White played 31 Qc2.

When Melih moved his Queen to c2, I was in shock and disgust at myself: in my fatigue near the end of this game, and overexcitement at believing I had "refuted" a "trap", I had completely failed to take into account that White was not actually required to take my Rook on d4!

Amusingly, it turns out that Melih, after playing 29 Rac2 setting the "trap", saw to his horror the resource 30...Rxd4, and thought he was lost, but then saw 31 Qc2. So neither of us had originally seen this saving resource for White.

Questions

Is Black's Queen trapped for real now?
What should Black do? Is Black lost? Or is Black still winning? Or should Black start looking for a draw?

Black panicked, trying to draw

Yes, Black's Queen is trapped for real. You get credit if you saw that Black's flashy 30...Rxd4 had this flaw.

The only question for me was how best to give up my Queen.

I chose poorly. In a daze, I could not think straight. I chose to give back a Rook with 31...Qxc3, in order to force a trade Queens on c3 and go into an endgame an exchange down for two Pawns, and hope for a draw.

I was correct that the resulting position was objectively equal and drawable, but in a time scramble, it's obviously easier to play White, and for the rest of the game, both sides made major errors (with White botching up winning positions and Black botching up drawn positions) until a simplified position was reached (Rook and two Pawns for each side) with only seconds left on the clock, and a draw agreed. I consider myself lucky to have drawn. The final position was:

But Black could have played to win

You get credit if you chose instead to sacrifice the Queen with 31...Qxc1+ to get the Rook and Bishop and Pawns against White's Queen, with advantage and a good chance of winning. After 32 Qxc1 Bxb4, Black is about to win White's c3 Pawn:

In fact, if you saw all this when thinking about whether to take the Pawn on a3 in the first place, then you get bonus points for seeing a way to an advantage through the sequence of tactical blows. Neither Melih nor I saw any of this up front, unfortunately.

I chickened out and did not take this continuation because after being shocked that my Queen was disappearing, I experienced a visceral fear that I needed to bring down White's Queen also, else it with White's Rook might be dangerous to my King.

It turns out that my fear was objectively unwarranted, as Black's defenses are sufficient because of the power of the dark-squared Bishop to hit White's e5 Pawn and even the f2 Pawn, but I was not thinking straight any more as time was running out for the four-hour game and it was already around 11 PM at night on a weekday.

One possible position

Here is a position that might have arisen if I had gone into this variation:

The thing is, even though the computer says Black has an advantage, it could be scary playing against White's Queen.

Another possible position

But analysis also shows that White has to be very careful. For example, if White is greedy and wastes time taking Black's a7 Pawn above, Black quickly gets a winning attack:

In time pressure, anything can happen, and I think it would have been very likely that White would have grabbed the a7 Pawn, after which Black's position play itself.

Finally: Black's real refutation!

I said you get extra credit for seeing everything to the point of sacrificing Black's Queen for an advantage. But you only get full credit if you saw the real refutation of White's "trap" earlier in the game! I kicked myself for not having seen it.

Questions

Was there a point at which Black could have deviated and won the game outright?
Hint: which of Black's pieces have we not focused on in the variations covered so far?

Answers

Black could, after White "trapped" the Queen with 30 Ra2, used a different and better deflection of White's overloaded Queen than 30...Rxd4, which was OK but not best.

We haven't looked at Black's Bishop enough. I only saw this upon recovering from the draw and analyzing the game later at home: the winning shot is 30...Bg5!

If White blocks the threat to the Queen with 31 f4, then Black just lops off the Pawn with 31...Bxf4 and now:

if White takes the Bishop or otherwise moves the Queen, Black will win either the Rook on a2 or the Rook on c1
if White takes Black's Queen, then Black takes White's Queen on d2 with tempo and will eventually win all three of White's weak Pawns on dark squares (c3 followed by e5 and b4)

Either way, the endgame is an easy win for Black.

Neither Melih nor I saw this winning resource for Black during the game. We just weren't looking at that quiet Bishop because it hadn't participated in anything up till that point.

Conclusion

Chess never ceases to surprise me. Tactical possibilities are everywhere, and in this game, both Melih and I missed various possible continuations, playing moves thinking we knew what had to follow. I hope you enjoyed this story of missed opportunities and incomplete calculations.

My thanks to Melih for a challenging and fascinating game, and sharing his thoughts with me afterwards.

Appendix: interactive playable board

#demo-moves { overflow-y: auto; } </style>

Report on my talk "A gentle conceptual introduction to functional programming"

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:25:12 GMT

On behalf of the relatively new Pittsburgh Functional Programming, I gave an introductory talk held at Google Pittsburgh that I called "A gentle conceptual introduction to functional programming".

This presentation is part of an experiment, a big shift in how I'm trying to talk about not only "functional programming", but any kind of programming and more generally any topic at all (whether it's cooking or music) for a wide audience. As I've been doing more teaching and collaboration in many areas of my life, I've been trying to figure out ways to better reach people. In particular, when presenting something new, it's useful to motivate it and somehow connect it to something they already know, even if it's different.

I'll write more later about what I did differently in this talk than I've done in the past, and why. For now, I'll just say that one big addition I made was that I prepared feedback forms to be filled out, both to help me understand what I can do better and also to help Pittsburgh Functional Programming plan further events and topics that people want to see. So I will summarize the feedback I got (fifteen participants filled out feedback forms).

Slides

For those who are curious about an outline of my talk, there are slides, with the caveat that much of what I said or did are not on the slides. In fact, one of the most commented-on helpful aspects of the presentation was not on the slides at all: my use of a whiteboard. I was happy I specifically requested that the venue provide me with a whiteboard. I knew it was going to make a difference.

Comments and suggestions

Logistics

Some mentioned that I should have used a microphone. Point taken. This is not the first time I've forgotten to ask for a microphone. When there's a large room and thirty people, even though I think I'm speaking loudly, it may not be loud enough.

Presentation

I was happy that commenters felt I did a good job providing an introduction that was not too elementary (I knew that there would be a wide range of experience among those who attended). They also appreciated my use of concrete examples and metaphors (such as the pizza order).

My use of a whiteboard to draw pictures of immutable data structures and step through the structural sharing that happens when you update them was particularly well-received. I'm convinced even more than ever that helping with visualization and process is key.

My giving concrete pointers to libraries and other resources for using FP in various languages (such as Python and JavaScript) was noted. Just saying "people are doing this, search for it" is not helpful.

A few quotes that made me feel I succeeded in my objectives, which were to give an introduction that would open a world and inspire further exploration:

<blockquote> I much better understand now the paradigm behind FP. So now I have a reason to explore it. </blockquote>

<blockquote> Thinking about immutable data in new way. </blockquote>

<blockquote> It provided the foundation I was hoping for. I liked the data visualization. </blockquote>

<blockquote> While I have encountered most of these topics before, the speaker did an excellent job of giving a wide view of functional programming and details beyond just the theory. </blockquote>

Some things people are interested in learning and using

On the feedback form I requested suggestions for talk topics, hands-on workshops, and study groups.

Here are some examples:

How to use FP in a traditionally OO language
FP for practical tasks such as command-line and Web
FP design patterns
Concurrency in FP

Languages people were interested in learning and using for FP (I list those with at least two people writing them in):

Haskell (4 responses)
Clojure (3 responses)
Elm (2 responses)
Scala (2 responses)
Python (2 responses)
JavaScript (2 responses)

I should note that in the discussions, where not everyone submitted a written feedback form, I gathered there was a lot of curiosity about Elm.

Conclusion

This wasn't much of a report on the presentation, and I'll need to write up details on our session, but I haven't been writing much at all, so I thought this brief summary of the feedback is better than nothing, in order to continue to move forward.

I'm very grateful for the hosting at Google Pittsburgh and all who came out to attend my presentation and gave me such detailed feedback in person or on paper.

Thoughts on learning that I have eaten English muffins wrong all my life

Sun, 28 Jun 2015 22:25:34 GMT

Today, I found out I had been eating English muffins wrong my whole life.

The story

This morning, while at breakfast in a hotel before Abby and I were checking out before returning home, I suddenly decided I might as well change things up and eat my egg and sausage patties inside the halves of an English muffin (yesterday I had eaten them alone, and an uninspiring crappy plain bagel on the side).

As I was about to bite into my sandwich, Abby interrupted me and said, "You need to toast the English muffin." I said, "I've never toasted an English muffin." She made a face of disgust and said, "Eww, that's wrong, English muffins are designed to be eaten toasted! They are disgusting raw."

I disputed that there was a "right" way to eat English muffins, but allowed her to toast the muffin halves for me.

The resulting sandwich tasted pretty good. I then realized that I had been eating English muffins wrong my entire life. How could this be?

My breakfast growing up in America

You have to understand that I spent the first couple of years of my remembered childhood, as the first child of immigrant parents to America, eating a breakfast that often consisted of congee (rice porridge) with toppings (I particularly liked pickled cucumbers and rousong, a dried pork product).

Bread was not part of my usual diet until I went to Kindergarten in New York City, where I ate free lunches and was introduced to such bizarre concepts as the grilled cheese sandwich.

I did increasingly eat "American" foods as I grew up, but still, I was never introduced to the full variety of breakfast foods for a long time. It wasn't until I was over ten years old, for example, that I took the initiative and convinced my mother that we should try out pancakes and waffles and cinnamon toast. Jellies, jams, syrup, butter really came into my life then.

But English muffins were somehow left out. My mother bought them but apparently we ate them wrong. We didn't toast them. And because they didn't taste so good to me, I never really ate them again. For the next decades of my life, given a choice, I never took an English muffin if I could instead eat a donut, cupcake, bagel, or ordinary sliced bread. I had come to associate English muffins with "not tasty".

Lessons learned from my conversion today

Well, this morning I learned that toasted English muffins are actually pretty good. They have a particular texture, form factor, aroma, crispness when toasted. Although I currently try to limit my intake of bread in general, in the future if I am confronted with the usual free hotel breakfast, I will definitely choose English muffins!

After we returned home, I actually looked online to find out the "truth" about English muffins. Well, it turns out that a lot of people online do note that raw English muffins don't taste so good.

What broader lessons have I learned?

It is possible for an immigrant to live in a country for decades and yet not fully understand what a native does, simply because of early choices or misleading experiences in some aspect of life.
Just because something tastes bad in one form doesn't mean it has to taste bad in all its possible forms (I am always learning this; I only recently learned to enjoy Brussels sprouts.
Although there is no such thing, objectively, as preparing or eating something the "wrong" way, you might find some ways (including generally accepted traditional practices) to have merit.
People don't always tell you when you're doing something "wrong". Some might just be polite and remain silent. Others might let the oddity slip because they think you are just being weird and truly enjoy raw English muffins. Don't make the assumption that people are doing what they really like; they could just be operating out of habit and not knowing or having explored an alternative.

Conclusion

I enjoyed learning that English muffins are actually edible after all. I don't really expect to ever eat a raw English muffin again.

Has anyone ever pointed out something to you that you weren't aware of even though maybe you "should" have known? Did you feel embarrassed or argue, or did you try out the new suggestion? When you see someone doing something weird, do you ever step in and offer a suggestion, or do you prefer to be polite and not be nosy?

Postscript

This evening when discussing the breakfast incident with Abby, somehow the subject of bagels came up and she said something about toasting bagels, and I recoiled in horror, because I was pretty sure that bagels are not supposed to be toasted. Again, I had to consult the Internet to find out the "truth".

As you might expect, the truth is that I grew up with bagels living in New York City and the East Coast in general, before moving to the Midwest. "Real New Yorkers don't toast their bagels". If you have access to a fresh, good bagel, it's pretty wrong to toast it, right? Well, as the article points out, there are differing opinions, admittedly, and nobody argues that a crappy stale bagel or a frozen one shouldn't be toasted. Still, out of sheer habit, I have never toasted a bagel, even if it might deserve toasting. Interesting, huh? It's just a habit. I see the logic of reviving a bagel as needed. So I will consider toasting crappy bagels in the future if they need that treatment.

The importance of stalemate in chess: how chess is completely different from life

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 02:16:19 GMT

I just saw a cute end to a top-level chess game that ended in a forced draw because the would-be losing side managed a swindle by giving away all his pieces by force in order to create a stalemate. If you don't play chess, a stalemate is what happens when it's your turn to move and you have no legal moves. You can claim a draw when you are totally trapped in this way. So one way of saving an otherwise losing game, when you are outnumbered and about to be checkmated (losing when your King comes under attack and it's your move and you cannot stop the check), is to find a brilliant way to be unable to move.

Is this a totally bizarre concept or what? Why was this rule of chess invented anyway? Wouldn't it make more sense if being trapped meant losing, like it does in real life conflicts?

History of stalemate

Stalemate was apparently standardized to be a draw in the 19th century. Before that, conventions differed on what the outcome of the game was supposed to be.

Now and then, notable chess players have called for the abolishment of his rule, to replace the stalemate with a win for the side that trapped the other side, because this is "logical" and corresponds to what you would expect in war or in some other "real life" situation in which you have pressed hard for a long time, accumulated a lot of force, and can cause your opponent to not be able to move at all.

I like that stalemate is illogical

I'm going to be blunt: I like that stalemate is "illogical"! It creates tremendous difficulty for the side with more material to win in endgames. I like that it gives the underdog a chance to avoid losing by being clever. If stalemate were not a draw, then it would be trivial to win many games in which one side has made a mistake and lost a Pawn, because then all that has to be done is trade everything off until all that remains is a King and Pawn versus King, and declare victory. Stalemate means that the side with the extra Pawn has to work super hard to avoid trading everything off, to avoid just mechanically fighting battles with equal losses on both sides until one Pawn is left.

I like stalemate because in real life, often it is too easy for one side to win just because of an early error by the loser. Chess is not real life, and I like it that way. Stalemate and other rules of chess add bizarre whimsy and creativity to the game, just as the rule of checkmate at all is counter to real life. In real life, you can kill the general of an army and still lose the war. In chess, it's always like in the movies, on the other hand: you can have a lone hero defy all odds to get at the enemy King and sacrifice everything else for this objective, and have a happy ending. There is something romantic about chess that is part of its appeal to me. Chess is a game of logic but according to weird heroic rules, where sheer material wealth is not enough to guarantee a win.

Conclusion

It is unfortunate that many top-level chess games end in a draw, but to abolish stalemate would change the capricious character of the game in a way that ruins its appeal to me (on a lower level of play).

If you are not a chess player, what do you think of the stalemate rule? If you are a chess player, what do you think of it?

Aegis and Cook: what happens when an open source developer dies?

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 01:37:39 GMT

By sheer accident, while I was looking for something else online, I came across a Web site for Aegis, a distributed version control system I used at work back in 1995-1997. I was surprised this software was still alive after twenty years. A lot of software has a very short life span, and since I had not heard anything about Aegis all this time, I would have guessed that it had died.

I remembered that we had used this software along with another tool the author developed, called Cook, which was a replacement for Make. I was unsuccessful in locating any official Web site for Cook, so I assume it is more or less dead.

Meanwhile, I found by coincidence that actually, the author, Peter Miller, died less than a year ago (July 2014). There was enough memory of him that someone wrote that Wikipedia page on his contributions to open source software. However, his Web site http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~millerp/ , sadly, has died with him, and with that, the site he had on Cook.

But we know that the Web is "forever", right? Let's see.

I found this old photo, for example.

Wayback Machine

Basically, I checked the Wayback Machine, and it has some snapshots of his site. The last working snapshot was from 2009.

Here is his old software page. Yes, it includes a link to a Cook site, but it leads to a nonexistent snapshot.

I stopped because I am not that interested in reliving the early history of Cook. I never met the guy, although I believe I exchanged email with him when it was just his personal project and he was "tech support".

I wonder how historians fifty years from now will be working. So much is no longer on paper, but stored in random archives on hard drives somewhere.

Conclusion

Software dies, people die. It was just weird for me to accidentally do a bit of sleuthing to find more information about someone whose software I once used a lot.

I haven't made a "will" for my code. I suppose I should have a plan in place for whatever I value.

Do you have a plan for your Web site or code or writings? Or do you expect them to disappear? How do you feel about leaving something behind?

(Update of 2015-06-29)

By accident, while reading an old blog post by Graydon Hoare about bors, which is used for continuous integration for the Rust project, I noticed his shoutout to Peter Miller for Aegis. It's great that Peter Miller's work inspired others to build systems that are used today. One random person's ideas and software made a lasting difference in the world!

How learning about the Magna Carta in high school changed my life

Sat, 13 Jun 2015 19:35:30 GMT

I couldn't help noticing the headlines in the news lately about the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, that historical document from 1215 in England. As I write, apparently there is a celebration being held on the River Thames, even. And I just found a Web site devoted entirely to this 800th anniversary.

The Magna Carta has not been on my mind for over thirty years since I first learned about it in a social studies class in the ninth grade high school in the early 1980s. But when I think about it, the surprising truth is that learning about the Magna Carta was a turning point in my life as a new teenager (age twelve or thirteen), and the lessons I learned have informed me throughout my life.

What is the Magna Carta associated with?

The Magna Carta in popular imagination is associated with "liberty", with "the people" rising up in revolt against arbitrary monarchy and making King John sign a document guaranteeing basic rights, such as the right to a fair trail and no taxation without representation; and "equality", putting the king himself under the scope of law.

The Magna Carta is thought of as an inspiration for subsequent milestones in history such as the United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The truth as I learned it

I took a required "social studies" class in the ninth grade in high school. It was one of the most interesting and life-changing classes I ever took. I remember more from that class than probably any other in all of high school. I loved the class because it was a small honors class, didn't follow a standard textbook, the teacher had us engage in discussions, and we did many interesting activities such as watch films and play games and do simulations. She used a kind of "Socratic method" to direct us and get us thinking and offering our opinions with reasons. This was the one of the first (and few) times in school in which I felt I was being treated as an independent adult-to-be, not as a child.

This is what I learned in ninth grade social studies class from the coverage of the Magna Carta:

King John was just one of a line of random kings in history who gained their power from accident of birth rather than anything else.
Our teacher made fun of an artist's fictional depiction of King John's "signing" the Magna Carta, arguing that since King John was illiterate, he could not have signed it, and usual practice was to press his seal on documents. (Amusingly, there is still online discussion of this detail decades after my class.)
The whole Magna Carta thing came out of a civil war. It wasn't like one side was really right and the king was particularly evil as far as kings went back in the day.
A bunch of landed nobility colluded to protect their collective interests. Basically, they tried to form the first "union" against royal interests.
This document did not have anything to do with "the people" as such (who in those days lived in abject misery whether under the nobility or the king). The Magna Carta was not for the "little people". Its clauses were specific about whom they applied to, i.e., "free men".
The Magna Carta was the product of a power struggle among those who already had power. It was about power and money. A bunch of rent-seeking nobility didn't like that the king was arbitrarily cutting in on them.
The Magna Carta was originally a flop: civil war continued, King John ignored its rules. But it proved useful later symbolically when conditions changed, proved to be something to rally around and reinterpret for a new age.

No untarnished heroes

The biggest question that arose in discussion was, should we be cynical about the Magna Carta because of what it was originally for, as opposed to what it later became to stand for or how it inspired more far-reaching change? I think we can ask that of anything, especially, for those of us in the United States, of our own perception of our Founding Fathers and the nature of the American Revolution, which all occurred five hundred years after the Magna Carta.

I learned from the study of history (which I enjoyed so much I took two non-required world history courses in the tenth grade before the required American history sequence in the eleventh grade) that there are no easy answers, and that it is important to be skeptical of mythologizing the past. I have remembered these lessons long after not thinking about the Magna Carta again after that class in the ninth grade.

The noblemen who came up with the Magna Carta may have been thinking only of themselves, but might have unwittingly paved the way for others. Intention is one thing, but the final result is another thing. (And history shows that there never is a final result either.)

Some interesting resources on the Magna Carta

Here's a medieval studies textbook section on the Magna Carta.

I did not touch upon the religion aspect of the power struggles in the medieval era (such as King John's fights with the Pope; three hundred years after King John, the whole Church of England finally split off from Catholicism when King Henry VIII wanted to annul a marriage but the Pope wouldn't let him), but here is a Catholic encyclopedia article about the Magna Carta.

Here's an article about a Magna Carta skeptic, a British judge who calls it an insignificant, "turgid document".

You can search online for a whole lot more commentary, given the hugeness of this 800th anniversary.

Here's that fictional depiction

<p><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Chronicle_of_England_-Page_226-John_Signs_the_Great_Charter.jpg#/media/File:A_Chronicle_of_England-Page_226-John_Signs_the_Great_Charter.jpg"><img alt="A Chronicle of England - Page 226 - John Signs the Great Charter.jpg" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/A_Chronicle_of_England-Page_226-John_Signs_the_Great_Charter.jpg" height="480" width="598"></a><br>"<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Chronicle_of_England-Page_226-John_Signs_the_Great_Charter.jpg#/media/File:A_Chronicle_of_England-Page_226-_John_Signs_the_Great_Charter.jpg">A Chronicle of England - Page 226 - John Signs the Great Charter</a>" by <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_William_Edmund_Doyle" class="extiw" title="en:James William Edmund Doyle">James William Edmund Doyle</a> - <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_William_Edmund_Doyle" class="extiw" title="w:James William Edmund Doyle">Doyle, James William Edmund</a> (<span style="white-space:nowrap">1864</span>) "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=YcM_AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA226">John</a>" in <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=YcM_AAAAYAAJ">A Chronicle of England: B.C. 55 – A.D. 1485</a>, <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London" class="extiw" title="en:London">London</a>: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, pp. p. 226 Retrieved on <span style="white-space:nowrap">12 November 2010</span>.. Licensed under Public Domain via <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/">Wikimedia Commons</a>.</p>

Extrapolations

Today, all around us we see fights that are supposedly about principle but are really power struggles. Instead of landed nobility, we have powerful lobbying groups, multinational corporations, you name it. When any of these interests collude to win a battle over some other one, they might not be in the game for you and me, but for themselves. The purported idea of "democracy" is in fact under siege today on many fronts. In future blog posts, I will begin exploring what some of these are; they mostly involve technology-based power.

(Update of 2015-06-14)

In the local paper, I just read this really interesting article by University of Pittsburgh law professor Bernard Hibbits on the opportunistic use of the Magna Carta by Americans throughout history.

(Update of 2015-06-16)

A random news article about the celebrations feature nothing but photos or descriptions of an Archbishop, the Queen, various Dukes, a Prince, a Princess, a Lord, a Prime Minister who inherited much wealth (a lot hidden in tax shelters), and had no photos of "regular people", or quotes from them asking what they thought of the lavish occasion.

Yeah, same old, same old, 800 years later.

Conclusion

Learning about the Magna Carta as a twelve-year-old was an important part of my growing up in life. I learned that people are human and selfish and have different motivations, but sometimes can work toward agreements at least among themselves as equals, and some other party as well. But I also learned the lesson that there are always those who are left out at the bargaining table, and that the nobility are always looking out for themselves.

When did you learn about the Magna Carta in school? Did you learn it in the same gritty way that I did, or in a more romanticized way? Are there things you learned in history classes in school that changed your life, changed what you believe and how you act (as a voter or activist)?

How Ornette Coleman changed my life

Sat, 13 Jun 2015 03:59:40 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

The legendary jazz musician Ornette Coleman recently died at age 85. He had not been on my radar for a long time. In fact, I never actually listened to much of his music at all.

Yet, my immediate first thought on hearing this news was, Ornette Coleman permanently changed the course of my life. How can this be?

First reactions to Ornette Coleman's music

In 2000, during a huge transition in my life that turned everything upside down, I began experimenting with listening to a lot of kinds of music I had never experienced before. I was exploring Cuban, Brazilian, Argentinian music. I was exploring Western classical music of the 20th century (I had a fairly narrow taste up till then focused primarily on the Classical 18th century and Romantic 19th century, with little before or after this range). In jazz, I was expanding beyond the swing, bebop, hard bop eras of jazz. I frequently reached areas that made me confused or disgusted. For example, in jazz I got as far as I could with John Coltrane as Coltrane ventured into "free jazz".

I decided to try out Ornette Coleman for another approach to "free jazz", and checked out the album "The Shape of Jazz to Come" (1959).

"Lonely Woman"

Immediately, I was struck by the track "Lonely Woman". Conventional concerns such as being strictly "in tune" were out the window, in favor of extremely flexibility of pitch and raw, wailing emotional expression. It showcased Coleman's lyrical side and was easy to love. OK, not too weird.

Other tracks

But bam, that was just a warmup. For example, check out "Eventually". It's very free indeed, a lot of notes, an expression of hyperactive motion, conventional tonality unimportant. Still, not too harsh, and not totally random.

Overall, what I really understood from his music was that he was doing what came naturally to him. It did not feel forced, it was not to prove a point. He was enjoying what he was doing. This sense of freedom really impressed me. It wasn't reaction, it wasn't rebellion. I respected that.

"Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation"

The next album I checked out was "Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation"

This was a step beyond, and confusing to me because of the simultaneous playing that often seemed chaotic. I confess to taking no huge pleasure in attempting to listen to it all at once (note that apart from lack of conventional structure, it also keeps going on and on at length). I found it more enjoyable to listen to only a couple of random minutes, trying to absorb some stretch of order.

However, although this was not really my thing, it opened up my mind to "why not?" Maybe this particular experiment didn't work, but I could imagine a simpler setting, say, with fewer instruments, in which collective improvisation could work out better.

Check it out yourself:

"Something Else!!!!"

Finally, I checked out "Something Else!!!!", which actually was his first album and closer to bebop and so forth.

I don't have much to say about it, but it's not too confusing to enjoy, because of still audible ties to some traditional forms and styles.

Freedom

In the end, I didn't continue exploring Coleman's music.

But the sense of freedom, of permission to ignore boundaries and go wherever, musically, really affected me. Was what he was doing "jazz"? Listening to him, I made up my mind that I was never again going to get involved in debates about what jazz "really is" or what classical music "really is" or even what music "really is". These labels stopped being meaningful to me.

That was what I really learned from him and his life. By coincidence, I just read this Rolling Stone article, "Vernon Reid on Ornette Coleman: 'He set a lot of people free'", that echoes exactly what I felt I learned fifteen years ago from my brief exposure to him.

In the past year or so, there have been times when, alone and not likely to bother anyone, I pull out my bass recorder (ha, my lowest instrument) and just go wild, play some melodic shapes, make up rhythms, go multiphonic, whatever, for the sheer joy of it. And I'm not embarrassed, because I remember Ornette Coleman and he gave us all permission to express our unconscious in whatever honest way it comes out. And he gave us permission to accept and encourage each other to do that, whether or not we personally like or understand everything that comes out of tapping the unconscious.

Conclusion

I hadn't expected to think so much upon hearing of Ornette Coleman's death. But he set an example that I respected deeply, forever changing not only my perceptions of music but of what musicians can and should be allowed to do.

Are you an Ornette Coleman fan or detractor? Did he change your life? If so, how exactly?

What unexpected life lessons have you learned from your father?

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 02:15:56 GMT

I came across a great story by a guy who wrote an article, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32961309" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32961309">"How my father gave me a terrifying lesson at 10"</span>.

Please read the whole thing before reading further below, where I'll share some stories about my own father.

The misunderstood lesson

(Warning: this is a spoiler if you haven't already read <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32961309" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32961309">the story</span>.)

Did you guess what the lesson was going to be before reaching the end of the story? At what point did you get the idea that the author of the story did not grasp for twenty years?

I saw it coming as soon as terrifying accidents started happening down in the coal mine.

Basically, the father was trying to terrify his son out of becoming a coal miner like him. It was an act of manipulation but also of compassion. And it worked, but not without his son bearing resentment for the apparently mean and senseless prank for twenty years.

My stories

I was reminded of some less drastic manipulation that I faced in my childhood that had unexpected benefits that I didn't understand at the time.

Like the author, I was about ten years old when these incidents occurred: old enough to feel embarrassment, shame, self-consciousness.

The cigar

One day my father came home from work with a box of cigars. I guess it was some kind of present. Neither he nor my mother smoked at all, so I was surprised that he lit one up and handed it to me to try out.

Note that this was around 1980, when I had lived ten years in the 1970s when I still saw a lot of smoking in old TV show and movies, and I saw the Marlboro Man everywhere in print (he just <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/01/27/3207091/marlboro-man-dies-smoking/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/01/27/3207091/marlboro-man-dies-smoking/">died last year from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease </span>. Today's anti-smoking culture in America did not exist yet then. I knew lots of people who smoked: my relatives, doctors, you name it. In fact, in the blue-collar neighborhood where we lived, half the teachers smoked, probably half my schoolmates smoked by the time they got to around age 12, our next door neighbors and their children all smoked. The local chess club my father took me to, located in the basement of the community center, was always filled with smoke.

Anyway, I had not yet reached an age when I might have started running around with a smoking crowd and gotten into it myself. I had a little bit of curiosity, but not much. Still, enough that I was excited that my father was going to share something "grownup" with me.

I had no idea what I was doing, took a puff, and coughed with total disgust. I didn't know at the time that there were proper ways to handle a cigar; I guess it was a good thing I didn't know that. All I knew was that I was in agony, the special treat from my father was bullshit, that I never wanted anything to do with a cigar, or by extension a cigarette, again in my life. I was angry that he did this thing to me. We never talked about this incident again.

And therefore, I have never smoked in my life. The memory of that experience was just too painful, and also by middle school, I started hearing preaching by some other adults (and some crusading classmates as well) about the health dangers of smoking. I was so traumatized that this information alone put me off permanently, overriding any natural curiosity I had about how pleasurable smoking had to be that people would take risks and pay money to engage in it.

The beer

Something similar happened with alcohol. One day my father had some cans of beer around, probably left over after some office party. We never had alcohol around. My parents did not drink. At least, so I thought.

Anyway, to my surprise, he opened a can and said to take a sip and try it out. I knew this was a "grownup" thing to do that I wasn't supposed to, so I eagerly tried it out. The taste was revolting. Meanwhile, he drank the whole thing. Then he quickly got very red and acted funny. I learned a couple of lessons immediately from this: he shouldn't be drinking, I hate beer, and I don't want to get all red and funny.

Therefore, I was completely immune, all the way through high school, to any peer pressure to drink. Never mind that eventually I learned that you may have to get used to the taste, or that there were entire other worlds of alcohol, such as wine, that tasted different. For a long time, I just didn't feel like experimenting.

The first time I drank alcohol again was right before college, some champagne at an awards ceremony for a science competition that took place the summer after I graduated from high school. I don't know if I got red, but I was told that I was acting funny, and so I went to my room and fell asleep.

I went to a party the first week of college and there was beer, and now under the influence of many new friends, I drank some. But I still didn't like it, didn't like how everyone ended up behaving funny, wasn't too happy that we were all underage, and so I never drank again in college.

Since college, I have now and then partaken of beer and wine, and acquired more of an appreciation, but because I get very dizzy and sleepy quickly, currently I almost completely avoid drinking. It's just for the best.

Conclusion

Lecturing one's children not to do something doesn't always work, but sometimes trickery apparently works. I'm not praising it or condemning it, because I've endured other forms of trickery from my parents that backfired. I'm just surprised by how strongly I reacted and how susceptible I was to first negative experiences.

Do you have happy or sad examples of this kind of parental manipulation? Did they work on you or not, and was this to your long-term benefit or not? If you are a parent, are you above this trickery, or do you deliberately and cleverly use it?

Revisiting Bach's Air on G String, from a singing and dancing viewpoint

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 03:46:26 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

Three years ago, I wrote a post comparing three very different performance styles for Johann Sebastian Bach's famous music, Air on G String and indicating which I preferred.

I have received an unexpected number comments over the years, and thought it was time to write an update of my thoughts in response.

Primarily, I am responding to those who (correctly) criticized the unfortunately chosen exemplar of the style that I preferred. I tried to find better versions that might illustrate my perceptions. I also integrated some thoughts based on how I perceive music as a singer and as a dancer.

Better than the rushed Croatian Baroque Ensemble's performance?

I agreed quickly with the first commenters that the Croatian ensemble's performance was too perfunctory, even downright brutal and unpleasant in various ways. I wish I had chosen a better example of what I actually like rather than prefer to the other two versions.

I searched YouTube for period-style performances that are closer to what I envision than either the Croatian ensemble's or Koopman's. It proved impossible for me to find a perfect performance.

A period performance I like more: Christopher Hogwood

I like this version by the late Christopher Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music:

There is a sweetness and bouncy lightness to this version that I like, but it is also somewhat anemic. Personally, I would play up more contrast and fullness of sound and passion, but the overall tempo and breathing to this version seems right to me.

"Voices of Music": richer sound

"Voices of Music" here in a good performance:

I like the richness of sound in this performance. I miss the lighter, more bouncy feeling that Hogwood brought out though. This performance is a bit too legato for me.

I care about singing

I approach this music from the viewpoint of singing.

The bouncy lightness is very important to me, along with the rhythmic characterization. I feel this music as a song (it is an "air", after all), and I cannot help singing along when I hear it. Therefore, when it's taken too slow for me to sing and make it to natural breathing points in phrases, that considerably lessens my pleasure.

Yehudi Menuhin, solo violin

Here's an interesting old black and white video of a performance by a young Yehudi Menuhin on violin with accompaniment. It's not a period performance, but moves along at a decent "singing" tempo, as befits violin, that singing instrument.

I confess that I rather like this performance for its virtues, although it distorts Bach's music by so emphasizing just the musical line, at the expense of the balance of the other voices and the essential character of the dissonances among the voices.

More Menuhin, but as conductor

Here's Yehudi Menuhin not as violin soloist but as conductor of the Bath Festival Orchestra in 1960. Again, not a period performance, but he takes the music briskly, and has the violins create sufficient phrase delineations that I feel the music alertly as though it sings.

It's direct and clear, maybe not the most subtle and warm, but I like it.

Dancing is possible too

I also like to dance to expressive music. A pioneer of modern dance, Doris Humphrey, famously choreographed a dance to a slowish performance of this music:

This is not how I would dance to it, because I feel the music differently. Surprisingly, I could find few examples on YouTube of dancing to this music. I may consider choreographing a dance myself as a project to express my own personal vision.

One thing I would like to mention is that I feel that the walking bass is very important in this music and gives it the impetus. When played too slow, the walking bass no longer feels like it's walking.

I feel this music in my legs, not just in my lungs. Yes, I have actually hummed it to myself while walking in time to the bass leisurely in the local park. There is a limit to how "leisurely" I can walk without feeling frustrated.

Ice dancing

I found this somewhat frenetic but nevertheless beautiful ice dancing performance from the 1992 World Figure Skating Championships:

Recorder quartet

A final performance to enjoy: the Japanese "Sekishi Recorder Quartet" playing their hearts out in 2009. I think it's lovely: impeccable phrasing, transparency, and rich ensemble balance and tone. (As a twist, the melody line performer adds his own ornamentations.)

Conclusion

I was inspired by the accumulated comments on my previous post on Bach's "Air on G String" that I decided to flesh out my thoughts by using more example performances, as well as relate the orchestral music to singing and dancing. I hope you have enjoyed these explorations. There is no single "right" way to experience music, but I wanted to share how I experience it.

If you've read my previous post, does this one help clarify where I'm coming from with my musical values? Do you dance or sing? Does this affect how you perceive this piece of music and like to perform it or hear it performed?

Why I have never considered using a treadmill desk

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 01:34:04 GMT

Ten years ago, in 2005, a friend of mine sent me an article about a trend among some people to use a treadmill desk in order to squeeze in some exercise while working. He seemed to think it sounded like a cool idea that wouldn't interfere much with work.

I have never considered using a treadmill desk. Because of a recent article that seems to confirm my thoughts from a decade ago, I'm posting my reaction here, along with a link to the article.

My response in January 2005

<blockquote> <p> At one point years ago I was thinking about stuff like that, but a few experiments showed how pointless and soulless it is, for me. My enjoyment of exercise is completely ruined if extraneous stuff is brought in, like reading or listening to music. I learned that the whole profound pleasure and meaning of physical activity comes from being completely engaged in it, with nothing else on the mind. So the former fantasies of multitasking are now completely antithetical to my current life values.

<p> It's not the quantity [of treadmill movement] that's the issue. That's still one foot per second of continuous movement, requiring irrelevant constant muscular pulses. Note that I cannot read a simple newspaper in a car or a bus or a plane.

<p> I fidget all the time, especially when playing chess, but the movements are not arbitrary and disembodied, but are connected with feelings of comfort or with emotional states relevant to my mental processes. It's not like a treadmill commanding me to go a foot every second. It's my personal choice when to shake my leg or shift my foot or whatever, and for how long. </blockquote>

Philosophy and practice

You may be wondering, from how I phrased my reasons, whether I have a primarily theoretical, ideological opposition to a treadmill desk, or simply a pragmatic one.

I don't really make a distinction: I take what works and doesn't work and make my observations a basis for a possibly more general philosophy, rather than adopt an ideology and make my practice fit it.

Basically, I actually have tried multitasking in various ways for the purpose of "saving time" and it just doesn't work for me. Furthermore, sometimes I multitask despite knowing it doesn't work, and I pay the price. For example:

I have tripped or fallen on runs or hikes when I "zoned out" and wasn't paying attention to the terrain but was thinking of something!
I have listened to music while reading a news article and failed to follow the music at all.

It's not saving time if I try to do two things and end up not even doing one of them well.

The research

The article I just read was a news article, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/the-downside-of-treadmill-desks/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/the-downside-of-treadmill-desks/">"The downside of treadmill desks"</span>. I was pretty shocked and amused to read, "... surprisingly little research had examined whether treadmill desks affect someone’s ability to get work done."

<blockquote> <p> The results, when the researchers compared the treadmill walkers with the people sitting at their desks, substantially favored sitting. The people who had walked during the testing performed worse on almost all aspects of thinking, including the ability to concentrate and remember, compared with those who had been seated.

<p> And they were much worse at typing, being substantially slower and more error prone than the sitting group. </blockquote>

The irony is that the researcher interviewed still wants to believe in benefits:

<blockquote> But even with that caveat, he said, he believes that the health benefits of a treadmill desk should outweigh any declines in productivity and, in fact, he plans to buy one for himself. </blockquote>

Alternatives?

My alternative to sitting all day, which indeed is by now known to be terrible for health, is simple:

Get up now and then and take a break from my task and walk around.

But doesn't this take time and stop the flow of work? Actually, no. There's only so much focus I can have while working on something continuously without a break anyway. So forcing myself to take a walk is actually a win-win situation, not even just a mere tradeoff.

Conclusion

Treadmill desks do not appeal to me at all, and I believe I have sound scientific reasons based on what psychology has learned about the working of the human mind. However, I understand that different people's minds may work differently from mine.

Have you used a treadmill desk? Why or why not? Do you believe in your ability to multitask without a performance hit?

The many faces of "Stella by Starlight"

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 05:08:23 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

Recently I got obsessed with the classic 1944 jazz standard "Stella by Starlight".

I thought I'd share some very different interpretations of this music.

Harry James, 1947

Here's the original version, not jazz, but slow, sentimental, lush: a sentimental serenade perfect for dancing foxtrot to. Pretty good, if you like "oldies". And if you don't like oldies, you need to hear this anyway, to understand why the piece was so interesting: there is inherently beautiful harmonic movement and color that would attract jazz musicians to adopt this tune and transform it, and they still continue to do that.

Miles Davis quintet, 1964

A really quirky version that starts with a slow intro before everyone starts swinging, and then it goes fragmented again, and then the cycle continues with all kinds of different ideas. Ten minutes long.

Tito Puente, around 1983?

Tito Puente and his Latin jazz band, Michel Camilo on piano. Puente himself starts off soloing on vibraphone: beautiful, haunting rhythmic playing. Later, there is an electric guitar solo. But mostly, this whole performance is melodic, and with its steady and standard Afro-Cuban rhythmic drive, utterly danceable for salsa. Something different!

This is the performance that inspired me to write this blog post, because I'd never encountered this version before, but it was so enchanting. From foxtrot original to salsa... who would have thought?

Chet Baker quartet, 1987

Live video footage from Tokyo. Baker is near the end of his tragic life. He starts off with a fragmentary approach, and makes use of long-held but gently played notes that creates soft but extended dissonances against what's going on.

Learn Jazz Standards

A wonderful backing track from "Learn Jazz Standards", not for listening to but playing against:

One day I'll take up the challenge of improvising an own performance of "Stella by Starlight", but I have to confess that right now it seems too hard for me.

Conclusion

I love "Stella by Starlight". It will endure forever as a jazz standard, I'm sure. I hope you like it too.

Yes, I want my writing to be dated!

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 02:55:05 GMT

I just finished migrating both this blog and my programming blog from Octopress 2 to Hugo. During this process, I made sure to preserve my old URLs as well as Disqus, because nothing is as distressing to me, as a reader, as moved or broken links when I'm looking for old blog posts.

That said, there's always the possibility of changing the "real" URLs and just using an alias with a URL redirect for the sake of old URL schemes. One possibility was to remove dates from my URLs, e.g., change something like /blog/2015/05/31/first-hugo-post/ to /blog/why-i-switched-from-octopress-2-to-hugo/. Matt Gemmell, among many others, has argued for permalinks that do not include the clutter of embedded dates.

However, I made the decision years ago, when I had the choice, to keep the embedded dates, and I still stand by my decision today. Here's why.

Are embedded dates actually bad user-interface design?

I'm not sure long date-embedded permalinks are really so bad visually:

Nobody goes around having to manually type in these links anyway.
I believe that in the long run, people actually do care about the date, and having it in the URL makes it that much easier to know the date.
Redundancy can be a good thing, if it exposes useful information that in theory one could determine more indirectly.

The bigger philosophical issues

However, the main reason I deliberately choose to expose the date of a post is that I disagree with Matt Gemmell's statement that one should prefer to boost one's article's "standing" by giving the impression that one is making a "definitive goddamned opinion" on a topic, some kind of timeless statement.

Relevance?

I understand that there are people who would be swayed by this psychological trick, and I totally confess that sometimes when I do a Web search and up pops a link to a four-year-old post, I wonder whether to read something else instead that might be more "relevant".

But as a reader who seeks genuinely useful information, no matter how recent or old, I overcome my initial twinge at encountering an "old" article, and check it out for its own merits. And often, I find that it is just fine. For example, there are some fantastic Haskell blogs filled with information still useful today. For example:

Any of Dan Piponi's articles are great, e.g., a random 2009 article on <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/01/haskell-monoids-and-their-uses.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/01/haskell-monoids-and-their-uses.html">monoids and their uses</span>, with an ungainly URL of https://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/01/haskell-monoids-and-their-uses.html.
Any of Gabriel Gonzalez's articles are great, e.g., a 2012 article on free monads with the URL https://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented-free-monads.html.

Furthermore, the dating is actually useful because once you see another article by the same author with a different date, you know which one came first and can retrace the history of the author's thinking just throw the URL. In fact, I track my own history through the fact that on my file system, my posts are in alphabetical order according to date.

The reality and humanity of transience

Finally, the main fact I want to emphasize when I write is precisely that I am not giving my definitive opinion about anything.

I have no "forever" opinions about any topic!

I change my mind as I continue to grow and learn, and I want my writing to reflect that, and in a way such that a reader can easily track what changed and when. I do not write to give an illusion that I am writing eternal truths. I do not write in order to be an authority on a topic, but to share a snapshot of what I understand at a particular moment in my life. When I change my mind, I do often go back and add a dated update section linking to a new article.

Conclusion

I have retained dated permalinks for my migrated blogs, despite some voices that argue otherwise, because of the extra information they provide.

Do you agree that dated permalinks are worth the ugliness or not? Is this your opinion as an author, a reader, a critic, or a search engine user?

Why I switched from Octopress 2 to Hugo

Sun, 31 May 2015 16:26:32 GMT

Until now, I haven't been publishing anything on any of my three blogs for half a year now. There are many reasons, but one of them was that I wanted to migrate away from <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://octopress.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://octopress.org/">Octopress</span> 2. Octopress 2 is ancient and slow and unmaintained, and I'd been waiting for Octopress 3 for over three years to arrive, so when I heard that Octopress 3 was finally going to be officially announced at JekyllConf, I decided it was time to migrate my blogs, to Octopress 3 or <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jekyllrb.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</span>, or something else entirely.

Factors to consider when choosing a static site generator

Some factors I kept in mind while evaluating a new static site generator:

Speed of full generation
Speed of incremental generation
Active progress in bug fixes, improvements, new features
Availability of themes
Community sharing, support
Languages used for using and writing own templates and plugins

Speed is critical for me

Speed was a huge consideration for me when I evaluated alternative static site generators, so I was particularly interested in evaluating

Hugo (written in Go)
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/">Hakyll</span> (written in Haskell)

The advantages of these two are that they are implemented in statically typed languages that compile to native executables.

Furthermore, Hakyll is a library, such that your configuration is actually merely a Haskell program using the library, without the indirection of configuration languages and interpreters of the languages, and you can compile your site into a specialized native executable. (For example, Hakyll uses Pandoc as a library for Markdown processing.)

Advantages of going to Jekyll?

Jekyll is the most popular static site generator, so I had to evaluate it despite knowing up front that it was not going to be a speed winner. It might well be fast enough. The benefits of using a platform with a large and passionate community are tremendous: bugs get fixed, cool features get added, people step in to help you out if you have questions, incremental improvements keep happening, themes abound that you can just take and use. I never evaluate using a technology based only on one consideration (such as speed).

Note that Octopress 3 is basically a really cool interface over an underlying Jekyll setup, so I will only refer to Jekyll below, with the understanding that all performance matters that apply to Jekyll apply to Octopress 3 as well.

Speed comparisons: Octopress 2, Jekyll, Hugo, Hakyll

Full generation from scratch

My personal blog has 585 posts. Here are the from-scratch full generation times, based on migrations away from Octopress 2 that I performed using a bunch of Perl scripts. Note that the sites are not completely equivalent, because I only wanted to get a rough idea, not compare total equivalence:

Octopress 2: 5:39.28
Jekyll: 15.90
Hakyll: 14.51
Hugo: 4.90

Jekyll and Hakyll don't do too badly, but Hugo was by far the fastest.

Although I suspect that as more features get added to Hugo, it may slow down some, I also trust that since the author and the Go community in general are obsessed with speed, Hugo is a safe bet for anyone concerned about speed.

Full generation but not from scratch

Hakyll stores a lot of information in a cache directory. If you've done a full generation and change nothing and do a full generation again (my-compiled-site-builder build), it comes back almost instantaneously. If you've modified a file (as in the incremental, server mode generation), my result was slightly slower than in server mode:

Hakyll: 2.23

Incremental generation

I brought each generator up in "server" "watching" mode, to see what would happen if I changed a single file, resulting in regeneration of everything affected. For example, I changed the most recent blog post, which affects its generation as well as potentially the main page, RSS, sitemap, archive, tags and categories.

Jekyll: 9.95
Hugo: 4.11
Hakyll: 1.50

It's interesting that Hugo's live "watch" functionality does not really improve over regenerating the site from scratch.

For Hakyll, there is tremendous improvement. I believe this may be because of the use of a cache directory but also because a Hakyll-compiled generator incurs no interpreter overhead once you have it running in server mode watching for changes.

9.95 seconds is still kind of slow for me, for making a quick change to a file in progress and wanting to see how it displays in the browser, so Jekyll is not optimal for me. But Hugo's 4.11 seconds is acceptable.

So why not Hakyll?

So, given that Hakyll looks so promising, and I would far prefer writing and debugging Haskell code, to hacking in some mixture of Go templating and other configuration languages, why did I not migrate to Hakyll?

There are many considerations that go into what I choose as a technology to solve a specific problem. For example, there's a reason I wrote all my one-shot little blog migration scripts in Perl, even though I no longer write Perl for any other purpose (although Perl was one of my main languages I used for nontrivial programs from 1999-2010).

Hakyll has a small community. I'm not sure I would even call it a community. It's basically one guy's project. It is completely unopinionated, such that to create any reasonable site you have to write your own code or copy and paste from someone else's. There is no formal concept of "theme" or an official theme sharing site.

Hakyll is pretty confusing to build if you don't use a Cabal sandbox, and even then, there have perpetually been build problems of some kind or another, for years. Last year, I could not get it to build at all.

Meanwhile, the Travis build is perpetually broken and doesn't even test multiple versions of GHC and Cabal. A call to get Hakyll into Stackage is still open.

I ran into a serious YAML-handling bug that still has not been addressed after over a year.

In other words, just because Hakyll seems to perform well on a simplistic toy migration of my personal blog (after all the workarounds for the bugs mentioned above) doesn't mean that I can trust it to work if I do more complicated things, or that bug reports will get addressed.

I'm writing this not to criticize the author of Hakyll, who by the way writes a lot of quite high-quality <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jaspervdj.be/posts.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jaspervdj.be/posts.html">blog posts on Haskell</span> and has a day job developing in Haskell. Open source projects are labors of love that just cannot be sustained by one person who has many things to do in life.

Winner: Hugo

It would be nice if there were a larger Hakyll community, but the reality is that there isn't, and therefore as someone who also has many things to do and prefers to write for my blogs rather than implement features for the blog engine, I chose Hugo as the clear winner for my current needs.

Hugo not only has an entire official discussion site but also an active Gitter room.

The official documentation is pretty good and continues to be updated.

Conclusion

Choosing a static site generator is like choosing any other software to perform a task: you have to evaluate many different factors and tradeoffs among the different choices available. For me, speed is very important, but also a thriving, growing community of maintainers, contributors, and users.

In the end, I chose Hugo, because it is fast, actively maintained, and has a sizable community revolving around it.

When did the United States stop being violently anti-Catholic?

Mon, 25 May 2015 03:10:50 GMT

I read a great article <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://aeon.co/magazine/society/is-it-ok-to-be-american-and-catholic/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://aeon.co/magazine/society/is-it-ok-to-be-american-and-catholic/">"The war on Rome"</span> on the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States. This led me immediately to remember some odd experiences of mine growing up.

My personal experience

Growing up in America in the 1970s, I thought Catholics were strange people. My classmates in school got to leave early sometimes to go to "catechism". I didn't ask what that meant, but that it was weird.

It didn't help that my mother (an immigrant from Taiwan) explained to me that Catholics worship Mary instead of Jesus, whom "Christians" (as opposed to "Catholics") worshipped.

Also, it didn't help that there were evangelical Protestant kids at school who openly made fun of Catholic classmates in various ways, and even claimed the pope and Catholic Church were the friend of the "Antichrist" and the "Beast". Never mind the complications added by the fact that I also had classmates who were openly Jewish (because they couldn't celebrate Christmas like "everyone else").

The social dynamics in elementary school were pretty confusing to me, a child of Asian immigrants, with no professed religion or religious instruction at home (at least one evangelical Protestant kid called me "heathen"). The Jewish kids and teachers treated me least weirdly; most of the others treated me as "foreign" in some way (note that I spent most of my childhood among non-Asians).

But things changed over time.

History

By the time I was in high school, the landscape had already changed for me: being Asian was no longer quite as exotic, I didn't see the same level of Protestant vs. Catholic stuff going on in school.

I just got to thinking that when I was growing up in the 1970s, it wasn't all that long after John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic president of the US. So maybe I was born just early enough to catch the tail end of attitudes passed down to my classmates from their parents? (Or for that matter, any misinformation my parents received before or after they came to the US. I informed my mother by the time I made a Catholic friend later in elementary school that Catholics were a kind of Christian and worship Jesus.)

Freedom?

From the article: "For most of US history, voters, ministers and lawmakers believed that there was something fundamentally un-American about Roman Catholics." And this sentiment had to do with a perception of what "freedom" meant: not being subject somehow to a pope.

Conclusion

The question implicitly raised at the end of the article was, will Islam eventually become accepted as OK in the US? Is Islam in America in a position similar to that of Catholicism once upon a time? I guess we'll see. I'm old enough to have seen many things change in this country... slowly.

What do you think? Is Islam too "foreign" to ever be accepted as being compatible with being "American"?

For that matter, Do you think it is more likely for an atheist to become president or a Muslim?

(Update of 2016-01-09)

Meanwhile, Protestantism is fracturing in interesting ways, and the effects are felt right here in the Pittsburgh area.

The Anglican Church, which historically included the American Episcopal, has been undergoing upheaval over cultural changes regarding the acceptability of homosexuality (changes that again, I am old enough to have seen firsthand over the past decades).

"Bishops of both dioceses of Pittsburgh — Dorsey McConnell of the Episcopal Church and Robert Duncan of the Anglican Church in North America, who preceded Archbishop Beach as its founding leader — agree that the stakes are huge."

Will there ever be an openly gay president of the United States?

What happens when you donate your used clothing?

Sat, 23 May 2015 02:39:14 GMT

I hate throwing stuff away, and that includes clothing I have that I no longer wear. Abby participates in clothing exchanges with local women in order to avoid wastage, and she takes my clothing also, to give away somewhere when possible.

I was interested to read an economics blog post about possible unintended consequences, however, of clothing donations that go to low-income countries.

Apparently, what happens is that this flow of used clothing thanks to globalization competes with local textile and clothing industries. The used clothing ends up being resold rather than donated. Interesting, huh?

Discovering the Eolina, a beautiful musical instrument

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:56:18 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

I just discovered a musical instrument that was new to me, the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.melodicaworld.com/post_reviews/ballone-burini-eolina-45/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.melodicaworld.com/post_reviews/ballone-burini-eolina-45/">Eolina</span>, which has a surprisingly beautiful sound, given that it is a form of melodica, which although a perfectly fine instrument I enjoy playing, does not have the loveliest, most refined sound.

I encountered the Eolina through my following the YouTube channel of Gerard van Reenen, who is just some random musician I found on YouTube at some point in the past couple of years through some music search that I have now completely forgotten.

His specialty is playing duets with himself, by playing a wind instrument with one hand while accompanying himself on a keyboard instrument. Remarkably, he often makes this work quite well.

So what exactly is an Eolina, and what does it sound like?

Example: a Handel sonata performed on Eolina and organ

Check out Gerard van Reenen's self-duet on Eolina and organ of George Frideric Handel's sonata in B-flat major, HWV 377. I really like this performance, showcasing his musicality on both instruments, and the expressiveness of the Eolina, which is an upscale melodica made of wood rather than plastic and therefore has more subtlety and smoothness.

Another example

I was so curious about the Eolina that I tried to find other uses of it on YouTube.

Here are some musicians performing Piazzolla's tango "Oblivion", with one of them playing an Eolina:

(Over two years ago, I had attempted to play "Oblivion" on my cheap melodica. I'd love to have access to an Eolina sometime!)

Conclusion

I always enjoy discovering a new musical instrument, and the Eolina counts as one, even if it is just a wooden melodica.

Had you heard of or heard an Eolina before you read this blog post? What do you think of the sound? What do you think of melodicas in general? They are not so commonly used except as teaching instruments for children, so does that affect your perception?

How I forgot to meditate after sixty days in a row of remembering and what that means

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 13:58:29 GMT

I woke up this morning feeling very tired. I also suddenly realized that yesterday, I forgot to set aside time for the daily meditation practice (just ten minutes a day) that I had successfully done for sixty days in a row, having deliberately started it shortly before Thanksgiving. I was pretty angry at myself. But I also thought about how it was possible that I slipped after sixty days, and what that means.

What's my meditation schedule?

The optimal way to maintain any habit is to make it as rigid and automatic as possible. Several years ago, when I went months at a time without missing a single day, my system was to meditate first thing in the morning, before eating or exercising or anything else.

I confess that I still don't have that kind of rigid schedule yet. Much of the time, I do meditate first thing. Other times, I feel pressed for time and want to get some work done. Or I'm feeling very hungry and decide to eat breakfast first. But usually I do complete meditation in the morning. Occasionally I "forget" but then remember well before bedtime, and get it in before sleeping.

What my forgetting yesterday says about my life

First of all, I was feeling tired when I woke, because of a week of accumulated fatigue from doing many things, including going out last night with Abby for the second week of blues dance class at <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.tartanswing.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.tartanswing.com/">Tartan Swing</span> at CMU. Adding an extra evening out every week is requiring some changes in how much other stuff I can get done in evenings, and apparently I have not scaled back enough to make up for that additional commitment; it is always a struggle for me to give up something to make room for something else, but especially on short notice, since we had not originally planned, in December, to start checking out Tartan Swing this January!

Also, yesterday was Friday, and I tend to feel I have many things to try to get done on Friday. I ate breakfast immediately, did work stuff, then since I was scheduled to go for a run, I did that. I've been ramping up on my run distances, and I ran my second longest distance so far this month: the length was the sum of the length of my Monday and Wednesday runs this week! So that took more energy than I am used to yet.

When I came home from work, I was extremely tired and hungry, to the point that I decided I wanted to eat a whole lot of food and do something different, so Abby and I went out for dinner. I came home totally stuffed. In any case, going out was an unscheduled, spontaneous decision, and by the time we came home, none of the whole day had gone according to my usual pattern. And so I somehow forgot to get in meditation before going to bed.

Lessons learned

The first lesson is that just because I missed one day of meditation after sixty in a row, that doesn't mean I've lost everything. I meditated today, and will continue my practice. It's important to recover as quickly as possible, to avoid what has happened to me before, which is to feel ashamed, start identifying (after too many days in a row missed) as a "non-meditator", and give up the practice.

The other is that I'm definitely overbooked and need to make sure I get rest, and get back on schedule for what I can manage to do. A busy week is coming up.

What do you do when you find out that you've missed a day of meditation, exercise, or some other daily practice? Do you feel bad about yourself? Do you make excuses? Do you examine what is really important? Do you set up a system to prevent having to rely on will power? What is your latest experience of slipping, and how did you deal with it?

For Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: some black American voices that spoke to me recently

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 20:58:34 GMT

I believe today was the first time in my life I've officially celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

This means many things to me as an American (I am an Asian-American, son of immigrants).

MLK Day became an official holiday at work, finally

First of all, I didn't go to work today.

This year, 2015, was the year that MLK Day finally became an official university holiday at Carnegie Mellon University! Our new president, Subra Suresh, decided to finally end the weird CMU tradition of observing MLK Day only as a half-day holiday for students, and turning it into a full-day holiday for everyone (see 2014's schedule of events for an example of how things used to be). I am proud of President Suresh for taking the step of turning MLK Day into a full holiday.

Some recent black American voices I heard

The media frenzy over the shooting last year in Ferguson may have ended, but I have not forgotten my vow last year to begin engaging more publicly in discussions about race in America.

So I'm starting off small, by linking to eloquent, heartfelt writings I've read and saved in the past year (independent of Ferguson, just part of what comes my way online) by black Americans who shared their various life experiences so that those of us who are not black can better understand what they have dealt with in their lives in the US. I've deliberately chosen articles by high achievers to highlight what still remains even after doing all the "right" things to try to live as normally as possible as a black American.

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/10/price-black-ambition" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/10/price-black-ambition">"The price of black ambition"</span>

This is an essay by a black female writer, Roxane Gay, daughter of Haitian immigrants, whose life was marked by great ambition and hard work. She kept hoping that it would be enough to overcome racism. She writes, "I have come to realize how much I have, throughout my life, bought into the narrative of this alluring myth of personal responsibility and excellence."

"The other side of diversity"

This poignant essay by a black woman discusses what it has been like to work in a predominantly white male tech community, thereby facing the dilemmas of minority status in two dimensions (race, gender). She has found it challenging to simply be who she wants to be, "...a black woman who happens to work in the tech industry", rather than something additional seemingly expected of her.

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/06/i-taught-my-black-kids-that-their-elite-upbringing-would-protect-them-from-discrimination-i-was-wrong/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/06/i-taught-my-black-kids-that-their-elite-upbringing-would-protect-them-from-discrimination-i-was-wrong/">"I taught my black kids that their elite upbringing would protect them from discrimination. I was wrong."</span>

This article by Lawrence Otis Graham talks about how he and his wife tried to shelter their children from racial discrimination by giving them an upper-middle-class upbringing. "My wife and I, both African Americans, constitute one of those Type A couples with Ivy League undergraduate and graduate degrees who, for many years, believed that if we worked hard and maintained great jobs, we could insulate our children from the blatant manifestations of bigotry that we experienced as children in the 1960s and ’70s." Especially check out the detailed "rules" of behavior that they taught their children in hope that they would not be mistakenly targeted through racial profiling!

MLK's <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">"Letter from a Birmingham jail"</span>

Finally, I want to simply quote MLK himself from his brilliant essay, "Letter from a Birmingham jail". The key to his work, often forgotten or deliberately obscured, is this:

<blockquote> I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. </blockquote>

Political "moderation" is often praised and held up as superior to "extremism", but in fact, the "moderate" is often a large part of the problem when it comes to change and doing the right thing. I have more to say about this general topic, but not right now.

Meanwhile, read the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">whole letter</span>, one of the most brilliant examples of the art and science of that rhetoric I have ever seen.

Conclusion

I observed MLK Day today by reviewing writings by black Americans and rereading MLK's "Letter from a Birmingham jail". In the US, we still have a long way to go in race relations, but we continue to make progress.

How did you observe MLK Day today? What is on your mind today? Did you participate in a reading or a march? Do you oppose what MLK did and believe there should be no holiday in his honor? Or do you feel he didn't do enough, that nonviolence didn't work?

Why I stopped saying something is easy or something is hard

Tue, 23 Dec 2014 22:19:38 GMT

Recently, I decided to monitor how I talk about learning some subject or topic, because of observing both of myself and other people what our reactions can be if I say that something is "easy" or something is "hard". I've come to the conclusion that there are serious drawbacks to saying that something is "easy" or "hard", and an entirely different vocabulary should be used in helping a learner. I haven't figured out exactly what that vocabulary is, but I've seen too many times some really disastrous results from overusing labels such as "easy" or "hard".

What's "easy" anyway?

I never learned to drive stick shift in my youth. Therefore, when in recent years Abby tried to teach me to, I had a lot of trouble. She became impatient with me and started using phrases like "but it's easy, you just do this". These phrases were delivered in a way that sounded frustrated, and meanwhile, I knew it wasn't "easy", else I would be getting it. I finally gave up, giving the excuse that it wasn't worth the trouble to go through hell to get this skill working, since my own car is an automatic anyway and I would have very little opportunity or reason to drive stick shift. But the real point is that learning became very stressful for me as I had to fight not only my multitasking physical clumsiness, but also this idea that I wasn't able to do something "easy". Part of me knew that rationally, I shouldn't care about labels, but part of me also kept on saying silently, "You have no idea how hard this is for me. This is how you started learning to drive. You have no idea what I'm going through."

I remember many other situations through my life where I was struggling with something supposedly "easy" and became very discouraged. In my youth, I may not have had quite as much metacognition to recognize that I shouldn't necessarily give up (and I didn't always give up), so it was particularly damaging when made fun of for not immediately grasping something "easy", whether hitting a ball with a bat or racket, speaking English fluently, or using perfect grammar in my writing. In some cases, where I persevered, I not only "caught up" (there's always some sense of "comparison" when someone uses the word "easy"), but excelled. In other cases, I just gave up, for decades (basically, anything athletic, I gave up before I finished elementary school), the shame was so great at being crappy at something "easy".

There was even a perverse overreaction that sometimes kicked in. If I couldn't do something "easy" (like draw in art class), I did the "sour grapes" thing and declared the subject stupid and not worth my time. I turned around and used "easy" as an excuse to make fun of those who could do it. And that leads to the dual problem of saying something is "hard".

What's "hard"?

A harmful effect of the "easy"/"hard" classification is that it encourages us to play stupid status games in which nobody wins and everyone is hurt.

Here's an example: it turned out that growing up, I found math "easy". As a result, math became a convenient way for me to stay lazy about my perseverance and will to improve. I considered math, which was considered by many to be "hard", as a way for me to impress and get approval (from those who thought math was "hard"). So I didn't work very hard at math. Meanwhile, I just "gave up" on art and gym classes. I didn't even try. All this because I got the idea that I was only punished for failing at stuff that was "easy" but rewarded for doing well at what was "hard". I gravitated toward all kinds of "hard" academic subjects, for the sole purpose of boosting my self-esteem. This was a big mistake in the long run. Note that these subjects were not necessarily the ones that I was passionate about, or even truly talented at. They were they ones that somehow presented themselves as the "biggest prizes" and so I either secretly underworked at something I found easy or I put an inordinate amount of work into something "hard" for the wrong reasons.

Meanwhile, I saw my peers give up on all kinds of pursuits when by middle school it became apparent that some subjects were getting "harder" than others for them. This was sad. Often there was no rhyme or reason to what seemed "hard" or not: bad luck with a single terrible teacher in some random subject, for example, had massive impacts on the life paths of many of us. Whether it was a music class or one particular favored sport or game, I saw discouragement and disillusionment everywhere among everyone.

So marking something as "hard" not only discourages some people, but encourages others to play the game of racking up points solely by focusing on excelling at the "hard" for the sake of competition. This is such a waste.

Solution?

Years of experience in learning many things I once thought were too hard for me have convinced me that every learner is different, and needs different motivations, contexts, kinds of help in order to achieve personal goals. In particular, not everyone is "ready" at any given time for something yet. And learning may come in unexpected spurts, sometimes sudden insight that comes after having been given enough encouragement to persist for a while even while struggling.

I'm not saying that learners cannot be irresponsible and lazy (I certainly sometimes am), but teachers should be aware that calling things "easy" or "hard" as a way to shame or encourage may well completely backfire, and there have to be better ways to concretely help learners make incremental progress at their own pace.

Think about your own learning and teaching experiences. Do you remember particularly negative or positive ones? How many involved some kind of "easy"/"hard" talk that caused demotivation? Or are you one who thrives on such labels, using them as a challenge?

How to think about Rust ownership versus C++ unique_ptr

Sun, 21 Dec 2014 19:31:36 GMT

The Rust programming language, which is nearing its important version 1.0 release, but already seen a lot of use, has many interesting features, the most prominent of which is its ownership static type system that prevents certain kinds of bugs common in many programs in C or C++.

For example, it is common in most applications to create graphs of objects pointing to each other, in which it is not clear how many pointers point to a particular object, who is to free the object's memory when it is no longer needed, and what happens to all outstanding pointers to that block. Languages supporting precise garbage collection use various algorithms to determine when memory can be freed, and have become particularly popular in the past twenty years, but there are still situations in which garbage collection is not ideal, hence the continued relevance of languages such as C++.

When I was working as a software engineer in the 1990s developing desktop applications with user interfaces for the X Window System, we used frameworks that included C++ smart pointers that used reference counting to handle graphs of interconnected data. The C++ standard itself lagged behind in standardizing smart pointers; it started with the terribly flawed and unusable auto_ptr that finally got deprecated in C++11, then moved on finally to unique_ptr and shared_ptr and weak_ptr.

When talking with C++ programmers about Rust, I have found that often they have been puzzled about how Rust's ownership system does anything better than what C++ unique_ptr already does. Here is an explanation (I will not be discussing analogues of shared_ptr and weak_ptr here).

Simplest example: compile-time type-checking vs. run-time segmentation fault

First, go read Steve Klabnik's <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.steveklabnik.com/uniq_ptr_problem/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.steveklabnik.com/uniq_ptr_problem/">article about the simplest possible example illustrating what Rust offers over C++ unique_ptr</span>.

Basically, in C++, unique_ptr is supposed to be a way to indicate that a given pointer is the unique "owner" of a piece of data. If you want to transfer ownership from one unique_ptr to another, you have to call move on it. After that, it is an run-time error to try to access the data using the original unique_ptr. This is great, except for two things:

By "it's a run-time error", we mean that the original unique_ptr's embedded pointer gets mutated to nullptr, so that you have to perpetually check your unique_ptr for nullptr, otherwise get a segmentation fault.
In many situations, we'd prefer to have a compile-time guarantee that we will never dereference nullptr, so that we don't have hidden memory safety bugs lying around in our code that don't happen until well into a long-running program.

Here is Steve's example of an unintended segmentation fault from C++:

#include <iostream>
#include <memory>

using namespace std;

int main ()
{
    unique_ptr<int> orig(new int(5));

    cout << *orig << endl;

    auto stolen = move(orig);

    cout << *orig << endl;
}

Steve shows an "equivalent" Rust program in which code attempts to move ownership fails to compile because of a type error (I edited to correspond more closely with the C++):

fn main() {
    let orig = box 5i;

    println!("{}", *orig);

    let stolen = orig;

    println!("{}", *orig);
}

Understanding C++ behavior by modeling it in Rust, safely

But it is not quite accurate to call the Rust program "equivalent" to the original C++ program. It's really a "cleaned up" or "restricted" version of that program (and the argument for using a type-safe language like Rust is that we often like these restrictions, as a tradeoff for safety or efficiency).

Here is a Rust program that more accurately models what the C++ unique_ptr actually does, which happens dynamically at run-time, not at compile time, hence the segmentation fault: the transfer of ownership by move on a unique_ptr is not type-checked at compile-time.

For illustration's sake, we have modeled C++ directly in safe Rust through indirection by treating a C++ pointer to T (C++ pointers can always be nullptr) as an Option<Box<T>>, where nullptr is modeled as None and a non-null pointer is modeled as Some(pointer_nonnull). This Rust code type-checks, compiles, and simulates a segmentation fault.

You can play with this code at this Rust playground link. (You may find it interesting to examine the assembly code generated.)

// Simulate a segmentation fault.
fn seg_fault() {
    panic!("segmentation fault");
}

fn main() {
    // Rough modeling in Rust of C++ unique_ptr<int>
    // because C++ pointers can always be null.
    let mut orig: Option<Box<int>> = Some(box 5i);

    match orig {
        // In C++, deferencing null seg faults.
        None => seg_fault(),
        Some(orig_nonnull) => {
            println!("{}", *orig_nonnull);

            // The equivalent of C++ unique_ptr move.
            let stolen = Some(orig_nonnull);
            orig = None;

            match orig {
                // We seg fault after the C++ style move.
                None => seg_fault(),
                Some(orig_nonnull) => println!("{}", *orig_nonnull)
            }
        }
    }
}

Nobody would ever write this kind of code in Rust, but implicitly, all C++ programs are semantically basically doing this, except that for efficiency, the nullptr checking is not done at the language level but just results in an actual segmentation fault at the operating system level.

An example of smart pointers inside a collection

The single most disturbing failure mode of the C++-based software product I worked on in 1995-1997 in C++ was segmentation faults resulting from mysteriously disappearing pointers. What I mean is, behavior like the following, where a container containing smart pointers to objects was meant to own them, but there was no compile-time way to verify this fact, because of the nature of the object graph. If someone didn't play by the uncheckable rules and inadvertently took ownership of (instead of "borrowing" through a raw pointer) something embedded in the collection, then nullptr appeared, and a segmentation fault happened.

#include <vector>
#include <memory>
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main() {
    vector<unique_ptr<int>> v;
    v.push_back(make_unique<int>(5));

    cout << *v[0] << endl;

    // C++ happily allows this.
    auto pointer_to_5 = move(v[0]);
    cout << *pointer_to_5 << endl;

    // Seg fault.
    cout << *v[0] << endl;
}

You can probably guess what some developers did to "fix" the segmentation fault. They started adding nullptr checks everywhere to prevent crashing, but this only resulted in corrupt user data and documents, because in fact, we lost data in those collections and smart pointers to the data should never have ended up nullptr!!

The complexity of the application and the deadline pressures made it impossible to fully figure out what was going wrong and where. I actually ended up writing an external "validation" utility program in Standard ML of New Jersey that parsed serialized object graphs and tried to fix them up in some fashion. This particularly helped the QA team a lot when dealing with old documents that were already corrupted.

The Rust version will not compile

The Rust type-checker rejects any attempt to move ownership out of a collection. (Try to compile it in this playground.)

fn main() {
    let v = vec![box 5i];

    println!("{}", *v[0]);

    // Attempted move: type error at compile time.
    let pointer_to_5 = v[0];
    println!("{}", *pointer_to_5);

    println!("{}", *v[0]);
}

illegal_move_out_of_vector.rs:7:24: 7:28 error: cannot move out of dereference (dereference is implicit, due to indexing)
illegal_move_out_of_vector.rs:7     let pointer_to_5 = v[0];
                                                       ^~~~
illegal_move_out_of_vector.rs:7:9: 7:21 note: attempting to move value to here
illegal_move_out_of_vector.rs:7     let pointer_to_5 = v[0];
                                        ^~~~~~~~~~~~

Often, you do want to share

I have to be honest: at first, Rust's ownership type system seems like quite a restriction, and adhering to it strictly would require the restructuring of certain kinds of programs. Static type safety of any kind in any language is always a matter of tradeoffs.

But note that Rust is flexible: you don't have to use Rust's default pointer type! You can use one of Rust's many other pointer types, such as Rc or Arc, that allow reference-counted shared ownership (like C++ shared_ptr), if that's what you really want. (Playground here.)

// Reference-counted smart pointer.
use std::rc::Rc;

fn main() {
    let v = vec![Rc::new(5i)];

    println!("{}", *v[0]);

    let pointer_to_5 = v[0].clone();
    println!("{}", *pointer_to_5);

    println!("{}", *v[0]);
}

Unsafe

Finally, Rust does allow you to go all out and write unsafe code, if you truly need to for raw C performance or FFI reasons. Most of the time you do not need to, because the whole point of Rust is to compile down to the same kind of assembly code you would get from C.

extern crate libc;

use libc::{size_t, malloc};
use std::mem;
use std::ptr;

fn main() {
    // How ugly it is to pretend Rust is unsafe C.
    unsafe {
        let mut orig: *mut int = malloc(mem::size_of::<int>() as size_t)
            as *mut int;
        ptr::write(&mut *orig, 5i);

        println!("{}", *orig);

        orig = ptr::null::<int>() as *mut int;

        // null pointer crash!
        println!("{}", *orig);
    }
}

Conclusion

I hope this little article shows a little bit about what Rust's ownership type system can do to make pointer-heavy code memory safe, unlike C++, and also gives you a taste of how Rust's flexibility also allows you to use C++-style reference-counting if desired, and even raw unsafe code. Personally, I am excited about the upcoming 1.0 release of Rust, and although I have not done low-level systems programming for almost two decades, if I ever was to do it again, I would immediately reach out for Rust as a language of choice for the ultimate combination of safety, expressiveness, and performance (in use of time and space).

All code for this article is available in a GitHub repository.

Remembering over 20 years of reading Dr. Dobb's Journal even till today

Wed, 17 Dec 2014 03:23:42 GMT

It was with sadness, but not surprise, that I read today about the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-dobbs/240169421" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-dobbs/240169421">end of Dr. Dobb's Journal</span>.

I've been reading this magazine for twenty-two years! I haven't read any other magazine on any topic for this long.

RSS

Of course, it's been years since my last printed copy of Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ) entered my mailbox. At some point I was simply regularly reading content from its online RSS feed.

I was particularly sad when reading of the discontinuation of the publication because I had been following for quite some time Andrew Koenig's multi-part article on binary search. In fact, I had just read part 9 and was looking forward to the eventual conclusion of the series! I've been waiting to see his punch line, since every article in this series has ended with a cliff-hanger. Here, he had closed with "Next week, we shall continue building our tests." I wonder if he be able to post the conclusion?

(Update of 2014-12-22)

Andrew Koenig's article series did conclude, after all, today. I'll comment on his concluded article series in a later blog post.

How I started reading DDJ

In 1992, I was unemployed, a physics grad school dropout, and needed a new career. I had studied some math and passed the first two actuarial exams but frankly, had no interest in doing math and insurance for a living. Friends told me computer programming was a good way to go, so although I had not written a single computer program since high school (where I wrote and ran only COBOL and Pascal programs), I decided to learn C and Unix and Lisp, because these were technologies my friends had learned in their first year in college.

Meanwhile, this was all before the Web, so the way to get any new and exciting information was from Usenet or from printed magazines. I got some recommendations to check out two magazines in particular: Dr. Dobb's Journal and the C Users Journal.

Yes, I did ask, "Who the heck is or was Dr. Dobb?!" It didn't matter. The magazine was great. It covered all kinds of topics, and had code listings you could type in or download (remember anonymous FTP as the primary way to download stuff?).

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Macintosh_classic.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Macintosh_classic.jpg">[image: Macintosh Classic]</span>

I got my first job as a software engineer in 1993, after much intense self-study, learning to programm in C on my younger sister's Macintosh Classic using THINK C. What can I say, DDJ was there for me as a useful resource.

Continuing to read DDJ; learning new languages

Today I was intrigued to read Bodil Stokke's tweet, "I read about both Haskell and Dylan in Dr Dobbs 1994-ish and was itching to learn both, but couldn't find Amiga impls for either."

I did learn both Haskell and Dylan in 1994, but don't remember whether it was because of mention in DDJ or because of other sources! I do remember that I downloaded quite a bit of "freeware" and "shareware" through FTP or bought through CD-ROMs in 1992-1994, before the birth of the World Wide Web, which I started using excitedly in 1995.

1994 was a particularly important year for me, because I discovered and experimented with writing and running programs in a huge variety of programming languages that year.

Haskell

The most important new language I learned in 1994 was Caml Light, which I came across and learned and used on my Mac SE/30 in 1994, at version 0.6. I still remember just finishing working through the tutorial when version 0.7 came out and a lot of stuff changed, annoying me. How Caml changed the course of my life is the subject of another article.

I also discovered Haskell in 1994. That took longer for me to get a feel for. It was the dialect Gofer that I first downloaded and copied to a floppy disk, in the form of <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/goferarc/macgofer/index.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/goferarc/macgofer/index.html">MacGofer</span>. Later, in 1996, I used GHC briefly for a small internal utility at work in 1996. I see that DDJ <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.drdobbs.com/programming-paradigms/184409831" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.drdobbs.com/programming-paradigms/184409831">mentioned Haskell in February 1996</span>, but given that I learned it earlier, I don't know if there was any earlier DDJ mention (not Web-searchable currently) that could have influenced me to try Gofer in the first place. (More on the history of my Haskell usage is the subject of another article; Haskell is the only programming language I am still using active twenty years after first learning it.)

Dylan

I see that there was a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/the-dylan-programming-language/184409404" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/the-dylan-programming-language/184409404">DDJ article on Dylan in January 1994</span>. "Dylan, an object-oriented dynamic language developed by Apple Computer, is designed to replace existing static languages for the development of large software systems, yet remains small and efficient enough for the next generation of portable computers. Dylan was developed from the language Scheme, augmented with the Common-Lisp Object System (CLOS)."

I was very excited about Dylan when I learned about it, because of its ambitions to simultaneously

have all the nice features of Scheme
remain dynamically typed, but offer optional typing as a standard part of the language
provide an object system with multimethods (in 1994, I felt that conventional single-receiver OO was a dead end in the history of programming languages, as evidenced by the horrible visitor pattern)

Up until I discovered Caml, my favorite language was Scheme, which I had learned in 1992 while working through (the first edition of) "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP), so I felt totally at home in Dylan. In fact, I remember this very article as convincing me to switch from Scheme to Dylan: <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/the-dylan-programming-language/184409404#0272_00e9" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/the-dylan-programming-language/184409404#0272_00e9">Example 5</span> in the article presented a code snippet from SICP translated into Dylan! Note that this was when Dylan was still using an S-expression syntax carried over from Scheme. Later, Dylan acquired an infix syntax, which I was a big fan of, actually, since I viscerally dislike the parentheses of Lisp languages. I played around with various implementations of Dylan before Apple's project was killed in 1995. That was a shocker. The news got to me late. I had acquired the Apple Dylan implementation and manual, and it was all for nothing. It was one of the greatest disappointments of my life (topic of another article).

Conclusion

I've appreciated Dr. Dobb's Journal for over two decades because of the timely information it has brought on all kinds of topics involving software development, from C and assembly code listings to surveys of new languages, libraries, algorithms, etc. It was particularly exciting rediscovering an important article on Dylan that exposed me to a sadly short-lived language, Dylan (although some are trying to revive it as <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://opendylan.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://opendylan.org/">Open Dylan</span>).

Some nostalgia and detective work have opened up memories and questions of "what could have been" that I'll explore in later articles.

What is your relationship to Dr. Dobb's Journal? Have you ever been a loyal reader of it? What did you get from it?

Thoughts on giving up an old project to make room for the new

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 20:10:34 GMT

Today I made a difficult decision to give up doing something that I have enjoyed for well over a year now: writing a weekly chess column at The Chess Improver.

Writing

It's been a major commitment coming up with something to write about every week for such a long time. There have been times when I was overflowing with ideas; there have been times when I struggled to come up with something to write about that I could stand behind. Sometimes I have published something I felt was particularly good; sometimes I felt uninspired; sometimes I just dashed something out of uneven quality. But through it all, I learned a lot from my attempt to convey something specific and concrete that I hoped readers would enjoy and ideally even use to their practical advantage in their own chess play. The best way to verify whether you actually understand something is to write about it! I definitely had to do homework in many cases in order to make sure I really understood what I was talking about, in order to be as accurate and correct as I could.

I even kept on writing about chess during very dry spells in my writing in general, when I wasn't writing anything for my other two blogs, this personal blog and my programming blog. I admit to being rather embarrassed that during these dry spells, I kept on posting links to my chess blog from this blog. I will never again waste readers' time by posting links from one blog to another except when relevant.

The law of conservation of time and energy

In our lives, we can't do it all. For 2015, recent circumstances have led me to commit to a bunch of personal projects that have nothing to do with chess, so I knew, as 2014 comes to a close, that I would have to give up something old in order to free up time and energy for the new. I'm going to writing up a retrospective on 2014 before 2015 comes, in order to plan out how to go about 2015.

It's not really giving up

I lied in my title. I'm not really "giving up" chess writing; I'm just putting it aside. If a time comes when I feel it is worthwhile to do it again, I may well return. However, for now, I'm shutting it down.

Conclusion

All things come to an end, or at least, an adjournment. I look forward to tackling new challenges as I free myself from the responsibility of writing a weekly chess column.

How do you rearrange your life when you decide to start new demanding projects? Do you try to squeeze them in and cut out "non-essentials" or optimize your efficiency? Or do you decide that you have to cut out significant old projects? Or do you feel that you are already stretched to the limit with essentials (such as young children) and cannot possibly take on anything new?

Thoughts on Cuba while watching Cuban musicians performing the 1947 bolero "La gloria eres tú"

Sat, 13 Dec 2014 21:01:47 GMT

I didn't expect to be thinking so much about Cuba today. It all started with a random musical itch I was scratching.

"La comparsa" and the wooden flute headjoint

Today I was in a Latin music mood as I was playing my flute at home, and started looking up flute versions of music on YouTube for fun and inspiration. One piece that came to mind was the famous "La comparsa", by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. Last year when Bebo Valdés died, I wrote about being moved by the reunion of Bebo with his son Chucho in a tearful duet performance of this piece on two pianos, and thinking about their separation as Bebo abandoned his family to flee Cuba for Sweden while his son stayed behind to become one of Cuba's great musicians.

I found a really quirky Latin jazz performance of "La comparsa" on YouTube by Cuban-American jazz flutist Bobby Ramirez and Puerto Rican Jose Negroni on keyboard:

Ramirez on flute was unfortunately out of tune with the keyboard, but what I noticed was his wooden headjoint. I've never seen the old traditional Cuban wooden <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.descarga.com/cgi-bin/db/archives/Article15" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.descarga.com/cgi-bin/db/archives/Article15">Charanga flute</span>, but do see flutists playing the modern Boehm flute with a wooden headjoint for a different sound. In fact, I love and prefer wooden flutes, but they are expensive and I own only one, a Casey Burns Irish flute. So just for the fun of it (I can't really justify the investment right now), I decided to search the Web for makers of wooden headjoints.

Juan Novo wooden flute headjoints

One of the top Web hits was Juan Novo. It had the benefit of having an embedded YouTube video with the caption "This musician appreciated Mr. Novo’s craftsmanship so much, that this song was dedicated to him." So I checked out the video. Indeed, the young woman playing the flute said, "Está para Juan Novo":

By the way, I noticed that Juan Novo's biography said he was sent from Cuba to the US all alone by his parents in 1962 to "escape the rampant communist indoctrination".

"La gloria eres tú"

I was captivated not so much by the flute playing, but by the beautiful singing, of the young woman in this video of the classic bolero "La gloria eres tú" written by Cuban composer <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.encaribe.org/es/article/jose-antonio-mendez-garcia/1296" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.encaribe.org/es/article/jose-antonio-mendez-garcia/1296">José Antonio Méndez</span> in 1947. I was really touched by her clear, unexaggerated but free expression and style, especially in light of much more famous performances of the song in my memory:

"La gloria eres tú" is one of my favorite boleros (my favorite being "Sabor a mî") of all time. For comparison:

Luis Miguel

My first exposure to "La gloria eres tú" was, like probably many others of my generation or younger worlwide, through the revival of the bolero by Mexican pop star Luis Miguel in the 1990s and onwards. I have all his bolero albums, a result of taking up Latin ballroom dancing in 2000 and hearing him singing in much of the music we practiced, performed, and competed to, including my first discovery of "Sabor a mî", which was also on the 1997 album "Romances". Luis Miguel is a great musician, I will continue to admit, but in time I drew away from his high-powered, slick performances.

Here he is live, from his 2000 DVD "Vivo", which was the last thing I bought by him before backing away from his work:

Olga Guillot

Of course, the gold standard for "La gloria eres tú" is the performance by Cuban Olga Guillot, the "queen of the bolero". (In 1961, she was yet another musician who fled Cuba.) I like how she alternates between different moods, starting out gently and almost like a prayer, but then gets more and more passionate. She very quickly changes the color of her voice and dynamics. For me it's still the greatest performance of this bolero:

Elena Burke

Another recording I have of the bolero is from an album by Cuban singer Elena Burke. She has her own style, with a low voice, and more staccato delivery:

Elena died in Havana in 2002. Her daughter Malena came to Miami in the US in 1995 with her family. Here is Malena Burke performing the bolero with Arturo Sandoval on piano:

Malena Burke's oldest daughter Lena is also a musician, a pianist and singer, and has worked with Gloria Estefan and others.

Here's Lena singing the famous 1929 bolero-son "Lágrimas negras" with Bebo Valdés and others. This is such a weird combo, with her being sixty years younger than Bebo and stylistically very "American pop":

Arturo Sandoval

Speaking of Arturo Sandoval, he defected from Cuba to the US in 2000. I discovered him initially when his biographical film "For Love or Country" about his life before defection came out, and I saw him perform in the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh in 2002.

Here's a Latin jazz version by Arturo Sandoval on flugelhorn, from his 1994 album "Tenderly":

Where is Blau Colonial Cayo Coco?

So there were many thoughts and questions already in my mind as a result of listening to this old Cuban bolero, as a result of my remembering past performances by musicians who had left Cuba. When I hear classic boleros, I think about old Cuba, the culture and society that produced this kind of music and musicians, the political upheaval, the consequences.

But back to that little band Nucay, captured presumably on a phone outside on a windy day by a random tourist who posted the video on YouTube in 2010. What has life been like for the members of Nucay, and for the charming young flutist/singer?

First, what and where is "Blau Colonial Cayo Coco"? Apparently it's a resort now named just Colonial Cayo Coco on the island of Cayo Coco that is part of Cuba. In particular, this place was designed to <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.cubahotelreservation.com/hotel.asp?hotel_code=sctblacolonial" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.cubahotelreservation.com/hotel.asp?hotel_code=sctblacolonial">look like a village</span>. This kind of thing makes me uncomfortable. I guess tourists fly in to pretend to have a nice "village" experience, while the hired musicians are probably paid to look and act the part.

Nucay

I looked up more performances on YouTube by this band Nucay.

"Oye como va", cha-cha

The caption for this video reads, "Ramon Almeida and daughter Arleytis [sic] lead this wonderful group of talented Cuban musicians." So now we have some names. I presume the leader with maracas is the father? (Later I determined his daughter's name is actually "Arletis": read on.)

This was a fine performance of the classic cha-cha "Oye coma va" written by Tito Puente in 1963. No, Puente was not Cuban; he was born in New York and was a big force in creating the mambo/salsa scene in the US in the 1950s. A great Latin jazz musician. I should have gone to see him perform live when he was in Pittsburgh in 2000 before he died. His music was great for listening to as well as dancing to; I still remember practicing my dancing to the first album of his I bought, "Mambo Birdland" (which has an "Oye como va" track).

And I'll confess that hearing performances of this work over a decade ago inspired me to think about taking up flute again.

Arletis did a fine job on flute here, jazzing things up:

"Ay Maria!", merengue

The musicians seem to be having fun; how could one not, given the catchy music and all of them singing? I really enjoyed flute action by Arletis in this upbeat classic.

Note that merengue is not Cuban, but comes from the Dominican Republic.

"Sabor a mî"

My favorite bolero, performed well. The caption reads "Cuban Music with the help of young percussionist from Quebec", but this is wrong: "Sabor a mî" was composed in 1959 by a Mexican composer, Álvaro Carrillo. These distinctions matter to me: "Latin" music is not all the same, any more than the people or the distinct cultures are.

Some salsa song

This is some salsa song; I'm afraid I cannot identify it offhand, the way I did the other songs. I'd have to try to transcribe the lyrics and hope that a Web search finds something, but have my doubts when it comes to salsa.

I loved the father-daughter musical interplay here, with Ramón singing and Arletis on flute.

Summary of Nucay

OK, so Nucay is a pretty good band and plays a lot of classics to please the tourists. What else?

Arletis Almeida, "Sentirse Asi"

It turns out that a search for more Nucay material on YouTube reveals the following slick, professionally produced video uploaded by someone in 2012, promoting Arletis Almeida as a singer, with the caption "Arletis Almeida, flutist of Grupo Nucay in Cayo Coco Cuba, with her original song Sentirse Asi written by her father and band member Ramon Almeida".

Here, she is almost unrecognizable to me, very much made up and glamorous and placed in an urban nightlife setting, with shots of handsome men, alcohol, cigarettes. The contrast between this angsty, sensualized persona and the cheerful flutist playing at Colonial Cayo Coco with her father was quite jarring to me.

The singing is beautiful, and the song actually breaks out into a standard bolero accompaniment. It's really something hearing bolero singing of this quality from a young person today. My overall feeling when hearing either this newly composed bolero or the classic music in the earlier videos is this: there's some kind of time bubble that can still happen in the world, for better or for worse (a subject bigger than this blog post), and Nucay and Arletis Almeida illustrate it. Here in the US, no young people sing in this way. The many influences from pop, hip hop, and much more result in much more "fusion". You saw that above in Lena Burke's singing.

Thoughts on Cuba

After watching this video, I wonder what has become of Arletis Almeida. Does she still play flute? Has she embarked on some kind of lounge career? Who knows? She's in Cuba. Cuba is a world away. It took tourists to make her name even register on the Web, through the links to the YouTube videos.

I've waited for decades for an end to the senseless embargo of Cuba. I've already run out of space here to even begin talking about the politics of the Cold War, about the human cost of isolating Cuba. Cuba, a place with a complicated history, but once an advanced nation by any standard, filled with culture, music classical and popular, home of world chess champion Capablanca.

"Con los años que me quedan" and nostalgia

For some reason, I was reminded of Gloria Estefan's music video of the bolero "Con los años que me quedan" from her nostalgic 1993 album "Mi Tierra". It's an odd kind of nostalgia, given that her parents fled Cuba when she was young. She made this album to embrace her Cuban heritage. But what world is portrayed here? Something like the world the tourists at Cayo Cayo hope to see? And what is Arletis trying to do as she sings boleros today?

Anyway, it's definitely a beautiful song, and Estefan sings it soulfully:

(Update of 2014-12-17)

Totally by coincidence, news has come of the apparent <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/world/americas/us-cuba-relations.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/world/americas/us-cuba-relations.html">plan by President Obama to normalize relations with Cuba</span> after half a century. I cannot process this news right now.

Life for Arletis and her father may well change one day in interesting ways.

A Reminder About The Strengths And Limitations Of Chess Engines

Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:00:45 GMT

This article was originally published on The Chess Improver, a chess instruction blog founded by GM Nigel Davies. The site is no longer active; this version is preserved from the Internet Archive.

Last week, I wrote an article about methodically building an endgame fortress, given a fascinating position that arose in a student's game. One thing I did not focus on in the discussion was the fact that he has inquired about confusing evaluations by chess engines during endgames. Often, in positions that we know a correct and foolproof drawing technique, a chess engine will show a large evaluation score incorrectly suggesting that the superior side has such an advantage that it should win. He knows about tablebases, which are exactly computed evaluations of simplified endgame positions in which exhaustive search has proved the result is a win or draw, along with the full variations leading to the end result. So he asked me why the computer can be unreliable.

The reason for this has been known for decades, but is worth periodically remembering given how this period of human history has shown a huge explosion in the successful use of computation to make progress in various domains, including chess, Web search, and shopping prediction. This success has led many to believe (either with excitement or worry) that computers are on the verge of becoming super-intelligent. I don't believe this is the case at all (but this general topic is outside the scope of this site).

Here I just want to point out something very concrete: that endgame fortresses are still difficult for computer engines to "understand". Coincidentally, GM Daniel Naroditsky recently wrote an article about <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.chess.com/article/view/breaking-fortresses" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.chess.com/article/view/breaking-fortresses">breaking fortresses</span>. I highly recommend studying it, and experimenting with "throwing an engine" at the positions he gives. You will get an idea of how a computer engine "thinks" as it tries to search forward for some kind of forcing variation.

The main difficulty for chess engines is that they are largely programmed to search forward, whereas we human beings in the domain of chess are able to use meta-reasoning rather than just huge, long chains of "if/then/else" in order to generate ideas, plans, and test them out by working backward (instead of forward). Breaking a fortress involves taking in the biggest possible picture of what is happening on the board, eliminating what must not possibly work (usually, this means shuffling pieces around is not enough), and trying to see if something might work (usually, this means some kind of temporary "weakening" through Pawn advances in order to eventually create a Pawn break). We humans can with care determine what the "critical" positions must look like, in which everything has to be accurate else counterplay is achieved, and then zoom in to see if we can create a forcing line (usually based on some kind of Zugzwang or switch of attention from one side of the board to the other) that is tactically justified.

Chess engines are tremendously useful for this kind of work, actually, despite what I've said: on their own they may not be able to crack fortresses, but they can supply the assistance to a human who is "directing" the problem solving on the meta level and assigning specific calculations and verifications to the chess engine. The usefulness of computers as assistants is very exciting and real, but should never be confused with claims that they will achieve autonomous "intelligence".

Why we decided to compile our own family cookbook

Sun, 07 Dec 2014 19:46:48 GMT

Cooking has been a significant part of my life since 1999 when, shortly before reaching age 30, my bachelor self decided to completely change his unhealthy diet and lifestyle, and that meant finally getting down and dirty with seriously cooking for myself.

After getting married to Abby ten years later, cooking responsibilities have rotated between us based on the situation; there have been long stretches of time during which I did all the cooking every day, and there have been long periods during which she did all the cooking. Currently, we roughly split the cooking between us.

Why compile our own cookbook?

I've occasionally posted on this blog a recipe and/or photos of some food I've cooked, but for the most part, cooking is just a mundane everyday activity that I don't keep track of, since the task of cooking is primarily utilitarian for us, not innovative or artistic. We simply need to eat every day, and prefer not to eat out often, for various reasons.

Recently I decided that we should start compiling our own family cookbook, noting details of what we prepare and how, in order to better replicate good results and improve on bad results, and make planning and impromptu cooking more efficient. Without our own cookbook, we have to rely on our faulty memories, and things sometimes don't come out right (especially where the oven is concerned).

Below is an example of the kind of cooking we do. This is not a cooking blog, so I don't expect to write much or often about our cooking, but I just felt like it tonight.

What I prepared tonight

Raw veggie sticks

We like to regularly cut up raw veggie sticks to eat as daytime snacks at work, or sometimes also as crunchy variety during regular meals as part of salads. I chopped up some carrots and celery for this purpose tonight. We often use other ingredients also, but tonight I just stuck to the basics. A list of some random options we've used (depending on season, availability in our Kretschmann Farm box subscription, and whim while out grocery shopping):

carrots
celery
cucumbers
peppers
radishes
parsnips
beets
turnips

The trick is simply to slice stuff lengthwise into reasonable widths, then chop them across to create reasonable lengths. No need to be exact. Also, we don't bother to peel carrots.

Kale, boiled

We like kale. There are actually many different varieties with different colors and textures. Here's some ordinary kale. I find it easiest to just boil it while preparing other foods. I test it periodically to make sure it is no longer tough to eat but still has some bite also and is not soggy. We boil the kale either in water or in our own homemade chicken broth that we make with the bones and other parts of whole chickens after eating the muscle meat.

Turnips, sauteed

OK, this is an example of something of an experiment that is going into the family cookbook.

We have cooked turnips in many ways (including, of course, as raw veggie sticks). Possibly the most common way we cook them is in the oven along with beets, potatoes, or the like, either as chunks or in "home fries" shapes. I've also prepared them as part of beef casserole dishes in the oven. Or as chicken stir fry with turnips. The possibilities are endless. You just have to be aware of how long they take to cook, and how thinly to slice for the purpose.

Tonight, I decided to slice the turnips very thin, for the purpose of creating a nice topping for the main dish.

extra virgin olive oil
turnips, sliced very thin
some onion bits
fresh rosemary
salt and pepper
garlic, generous amount

My habit these days when cooking in the skillet is to delay the introduction of the garlic, in order to give the result more kick.

Baked salmon

Finally, some fish (salmon). I have to confess that I'm not yet very happy about the results when I cook fish. Abby does a better job than me overall, so I usually let her cook fish. Still, both of us find it tricky to get fish just so: what's the perfect balance between undercooked and overcooked?

I slightly overcooked the salmon tonight, for a couple of reasons: I forgot to get it out of the fridge earlier in the day to warm it up more before preparation, and I baked a bit too long as an attempt to make up for that.

Using the oven is always tricky for me. Higher temperature means cooking faster, but also means drying things out. For this dish, I decided on a temperature of 400 F for 30 minutes. Next time, if I have the salmon fully defrosted, I believe 20 should do the trick.

extra virgin olive oil
lemon slices
salmon fillets, skin side down on top of the lemon slices
salt and pepper
fresh rosemary
garlic, generous amount
some onion bits

The result came out a bit dry, but other than that tasted great to me.

If you're wondering "why rosemary in particular", the answer is "our farm box from last week gave us a bunch and we need to use it".

Conclusion

Cooking is a necessity but can be a pleasure or a frustration as well. There are times when I feel "lazy" and don't want to cook and feel it's a chore, but there are times when I feel slightly creative or experimental and want to make something I will find enjoyable to eat (and hopefully Abby will find enjoyable to eat also). Hopefully collecting our efforts into a cookbook will make it easier to whip up more variety when we are feeling "lazy" and don't want to think too much.

Methodically Building An Endgame Fortress

Thu, 04 Dec 2014 05:00:41 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

This article was originally published on The Chess Improver, a chess instruction blog founded by GM Nigel Davies. The site is no longer active; this version is preserved from the Internet Archive.

A student showed me a fascinating game of his in which he was fighting for a draw as White, being an exchange down (Rook down for a Knight) for a Pawn. The position looked precarious, but the more I looked at it, the more it looked like he missed a fortress draw (he blundered quickly instead). Upon analysis, the fortress idea appears to work, but just barely. Below I explore the construction of the fortress and a subtlety that shows how a single inaccuracy could cause White a lot of trouble.

Features of the position

The starting position has unusual features that give White a fighting chance to draw at all:

White has a Queen side Pawn majority and a King side Pawn majority. This helps prevent Pawn breaks by Black, although Black may be able to try a minority attack on the King side. Black's b6 and e6 Pawns are extremely weak. If White could win one of them, that would ensure a lot of counterplay, probably good enough for a draw. White's Knight on d4 is a monster. Most critically, it prevents any Black King invasion via c6, b5, or f5, so Black can any possibility of winning only by using the Rooks and King side Pawns. There is only one open file for any of the Rooks, the a-file. If White takes it, White should probably be able to draw by perpetual check and/or winning the b6 or e6 Pawn (especially the e6 Pawn, in which case White would have a passed e-Pawn ready to march to e6 and e7). One of Black's Rooks happens to be very poorly placed. It will take time for this Rook to get to the a-file and join up with the other Rook to try to advantageously trade one Rook and then aim to knock off any weak White Pawns that cannot be protected by White's King or Knight.

Ideas of White's fortress

Making a list of the features of the positions gives many clues about how White could possibly draw this position, as well as how Black can try to win it. Of course, general considerations are not enough: very careful tactical calculation is required especially when White has the opportunity to go all out to abandon everything and try to get to Black's seventh rank with a Rook: if the attempt at a perpetual check (or other draw by repetition) and/or Queen promotion fails, White will obviously lose. In this article I don't focus on the variations in which Black allows such penetration, but on the fortress itself, under the assumption that Black does not allow the penetration.

The first thing to do is to imagine that Black does trade off White's remaining Rook. Black can always force a Rook trade if desired, so we have to at least be able to hold the draw if White's Rook can no longer defend the whole range of White's position, from Queen side to King side.

Black's King cannot make progress as long as White's Knight stays close to d4 and attacks the e6 Pawn. If Black sacrifices the Rook for White's Knight, that should not achieve anything because Black's King is not close enough to do anything useful in the King and Pawn ending. The c-Pawn must remain protected: this requires either the King on the b, c, or d files or the Knight on e2. The e-Pawn must remain protected: this requires either Ne2 blocking a Rook on e1, or f4 creating a Pawn chain. The f-Pawn must remain protected: if the g-Pawn has been forced to advance to g3, then f4 creates a Pawn chain; if the g-Pawn has been forced to advanced to g4, the f-Pawn is best protected at f3 by the Knight on d4. The g-Pawn must remain protected: it has to go to g3 or g4, because otherwise it is too far away from White's King and Knight, which ideally remain no further than the e-file, in order to guard against possible loss of the c-Pawn or possible invastion by Black's King. The h-Pawn must remain protected: at h3 it is in big trouble because we assume the g-Pawn has to be advanced; at h4 it might be OK, protected by a Pawn at g3; at h5 it might be OK, protected by a Pawn at g4.

How might Black breach the fortress?

The main thing to notice is that if Black can get a Pawn down to h3 safely, without trading any Rooks, White is surely lost, because Black can first tie up White's pieces on the Queen side, then trade a Rook just in time to get the other Rook attacking White's defenseless Pawn on h2. Therefore, Black has the plan of g5, h5, h4, h3.

Also, if Black can force a Pawn trade of the g-Pawn and open a file on the King side (say by White being able to play f4 only after Black has already played g5), White is surely lost, because of the power of a Rook crashing through White's position through that file and winning one or more remaining weak White King side Pawns with the help of the other Rook.

So the main variation below, which succeeds in setting up a defensive fortress, has White hurrying up to distract Black's Rook away from the King side to defend the a-file, then playing h4 to permanently prevent the h3 plan. Note that it involves saving time by not defending the attacked h2-Pawn at all.

An interesting side variation, which may lose, involves White playing g3 to protect the h2-Pawn currently under threat, but permanently weakening the h-Pawn. Black can try the g5, h5, h4, h3 plan. If White just waits passively, the game is lost. There is a fiendishly complicated variation in which White abandons the fortress idea and tries to get counterplay at the cost of sacrificing the f-Pawn after redeploying the Knight to d6. This is scary-looking and I don't actually know if White can draw with computer-perfect play, but it is White's best try after starting the mistaken g3 idea.

Annotated

<ChessGame pgn={`[FEN "8/4k1p1/1p2p2p/3pP3/1PrN4/2P1KP2/2R3PP/7r w - - 19 44"] [Setup "1"]

Kd3 $1 { Threatening Ra2.} ( 44. g3 $2 { Preparing to set up a fortress, but weakening the h3 square and giving Black chances.} 44... g5 45. Kd3 { Threatening Ra2.} 45... Ra1 { Stopping Ra2.} ( 45... Rd1+ $2 46. Rd2 Rxd2+ 47. Kxd2 h5 48. Kd3 Rc8 49. Kc2 Ra8 50. Kb2 { White's King prevents invasion by the Rook.} 50... h4 ( 50... g4 51. f4 h4 52. Kb1 hxg3 53. hxg3 Rh8 54. Kc2 Rh3 55. Ne2 Rh2 56. Kd3 ) 51. g4 ) 46. Nb3 ( 46. Rd2 { Waiting passively seems to lose.} 46... h5 { Planning h4 and h3.} 47. Rf2 { Still waiting.} ( 47. h3 Rc8 { Black should win, given White's very weak h3 Pawn.} ) 47... h4 $1 { With the unstoppable threat of h3.} 48. Rd2 { Just waiting.} ( 48. g4 $2 { Weakening.} 48... h3 $1 { Now Black will attempt to win the h2, c3, or f3 Pawn, and succeed.} 49. Rd2 Rc8 ) ( 48. gxh4 { This opens up White's King side.} 48... Rd1+ { Now it's time to force the Rook trade.} 49. Rd2 Rxd2+ 50. Kxd2 gxh4 51. Ne2 Rc8 { Black should be able to win by aiming at White's several weak Pawns (h2, f3, e5, c3).} ) 48... h3 $1 49. Re2 Rc8 50. Rd2 Rca8 { White is lost.} 51. f4 gxf4 52. gxf4 Rg8 ) 46... Ra3 47. Nd4 h5 48. Nb5 Ra1 49. Nd4 $2 { Just passively waiting.} ( 49. Nd6 $5 { A more active defense intending to deliberately open the f-file for the Rook to come down.} 49... Rc7 50. Rf2 Rd1+ 51. Rd2 Rf1 52. Ke2 Ra1 53. Kd3 Kd7 { Black still plans to get the Rook around if White just waits.} 54. f4 gxf4 55. Rf2 $1 { Deliberately sacrificing the f-Pawn in return for active counterplay. It looks very complicated, but I think White can draw.} ( 55. gxf4 $4 Rf1 { White will drop the f-Pawn and lose.} ) ) 49... Rc8 { Black has a simple plan of getting the Rook to a8 and a2 to attack White's h2 Pawn.} 50. f4 h4 $1 { Opening lines should win.} ) ( 44. h3 { Played in the game.} 44... Rg1 $2 ( 44... Ra1) 45. Kf2 Rd1 $4 46. Ne2 $4 ( 46. Ra2 $1 { Rook activity would have drawn.} 46... Rxc3 47. Ra7+ Ke8 48. Nxe6 { The combination of White's Rook, Knight, e-Pawn, and b-Pawn ensures a perpetual check one way or another.} ) 46... d4 { White resigned.} ) 44... Ra1 ( 44... Rd1+ $2 45. Rd2 Rxd2+ 46. Kxd2 { White has a fortress. Black cannot break through on the King side.} ) ( 44... Rxh2 $2 45. Ra2 { White has a draw because of the active Rook and Knight. Details for a later article.} ) 45. h4 $1 { Threatening h5 locking up the King side.} 45... g5 $2 ( 45... g6 46. g3 Rc8 47. f4 Rca8 48. Nf3 { White will always be able to protect the c3 and g3 Pawns with Nd4 and Ne2 if Black trades Rooks.} ) 46. hxg5 hxg5 47. g4 { Black is completely locked out.} *`} />

Report on my final day of Stoic Week 2014: the view from above

Sun, 30 Nov 2014 22:16:07 GMT

It's the seventh and final day of Stoic Week 2014! I am very glad I participated in the daily readings and reflections. I've made so many positive changes in my life already. Now it's time to stick to them.

Health

I've been spending all of the Thanksgiving long holiday weekend catching up on sleep. I have a meditation habit now and today it was warm out and I went for a run and ended up doing five miles in Frick Park. This is the longest distance I've run in months!

Nature, providence, the larger whole

It is fitting that today's theme is the Stoic view of humanity as being embedded in something bigger, call it "nature" or "providence". Part of why I enjoy running in the trails of Frick Park is that in its own small way, the experience puts me in touch directly with something bigger than us; I encounter dogs, chipmunks, trees, creeks, leaves, mud, and even deer (not today, but Abby and I saw one during our hike there yesterday).

I honestly feel more whole and alive when I see more of nature, and not in some self-conscious sentimental way. It's more subtle than that. And there's nothing sentimental about those steep hills that make me gasp for air when I climb them. But I sure appreciate the cleaner air in the park than on the main urban roads of Pittsburgh! And I remember where air comes from and how fragile its quality and composition is. The big picture matters.

Conclusion

I am grateful for the organizers of Stoic Week for putting it on again this year. Here is something I've decided to do, to keep its spirit alive indefinitely: I will continue to explore various interpretations of Stoicism (note that I don't feel compelled to buy into any particular school or even call myself a Stoic at all), as well as other philosophy (for example, the Zen I had begun looking into years ago) on a daily basis, to keep my mind always focused on applying principles of practical living.

Did you hear about Stoic Week this year? If you did, why did you choose to participate in it, or more interestingly, choose not to?

Report on my sixth day of Stoic Week 2014: preparing for adversity

Sat, 29 Nov 2014 18:37:25 GMT

I guess death is the ultimate adversity.

Whose death and how and what next?

I fear death. Not only for myself, but for Abby, for her parents, for my parents, for our friends. We knew older people who have died even this year.

Today's Stoic theme, "preparing for adversity", is particularly relevant to us because not only are our parents aging and already actively preparing for "what next" if they were to die or get sick and incapacitated, and trying to talk to us about such things, but also because being married, we need to have clear plans and instructions in case one of us suddenly goes. We are not invincible.

Decluttering

One thing that makes us anxious is that there's too much clutter in the house, and also clutter in the form of many random online accounts that we need to keep track of. We've seen how deaths in our families have caused a lot of trouble to survivors because of unfinished business, stuff left behind.

I feel that part of preparing mentally for adversity is preparing in reality for adversity. I would have much more peace of mind if I knew that everything would continue as smoothly as possible at home and at work if I suddenly died.

So today I continued on a long-interrupted project of decluttering at home. I dug up old college course notes, exercise log books from a decade ago, and other stuff I just don't need. Dozens of books I no longer read. I filled boxes of stuff to recycle or have Abby donate to the library. I am committed to leaving nothing accidental behind if I die, only what is purposeful.

Also, we don't have wills or the like yet. Time to get cracking on that.

Adversity, more generally

I feel that "negative thinking" is very useful and that I could do more of it. As a software developer, anticipating failure modes helps me write better and more confident code. Playing chess, I know firsthand that wishful thinking results in big crashes when things don't go your way. Teaching chess, I like to set up unpleasant situations and have the student struggle (in a safe, low stakes environment) to defend, as practice for real tournament chess when the strength to deal with the unexpected is a key to success in competition.

Daily habits

Yes, I did meditate and exercise (more dumbbell and body weight strength training) today. Recall that yesterday I had a setback. The advantage of having once had a successful exercise routine is that when I think clearly, I am prepared for adversity, having faced it before.

Conclusion

I appreciate the curious technique of envisioning and simulating future catastrophe in order to enable acting more calmly today. Figuring out death seems the ultimate challenge.

How do you feel about the technique of deliberately imagining bad things? Does this seem perverse to you? Or useful?

Report on my fifth day of Stoic Week 2014: action and the reserve clause

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 23:20:43 GMT

I had some setbacks today, the fifth day of Stoic Week, but dealt with them.

A coconut oil accident yesterday at Thanksgiving party

By the time we left yesterday's Thanksgiving party in the evening, I wasn't feeling so well. I had blamed eating that one cookie and also drinking a bit of spicy warm cider, but as unpleasant symptoms developed (you don't need to know the details), I immediately knew what must have happened.

A bit of history, years ago I experimented with using coconut oil but found that I could tolerate only a little bit, and in fact quickly decided to just not use it any more in cooking, after some incidents in which I experienced very unpleasant symptoms after a meal and found out that Abby had used a good amount of coconut oil in cooking. We had her limit the use of coconut oil in cooking anything I was to eat.

So it had been quite some time since I experienced those symptoms, but unfortunately, I suffered for over twelve hours with poor sleep overnight, and can only conclude that a large mount of coconut oil was used in Thanksgiving dinner!

My system temporarily wrecked, illustrating today's theme

So I not only woke up late in the morning today, but was also still suffering physically, was hungry nonetheless, and grouchy. Normally I try to start my day with meditation, but I just wanted to eat breakfast. Abby had gotten up hours before me and was annoyed I had gotten up late, and snapped at me while I was bleary-eyed and trying to start eating breakfast. I snapped back, and she got very upset and disappeared.

While eating, I recognized that I had gone totally non-Stoic, and so after I finished eating and reading today's theme on "action and the reserve clause", I immediately went to meditate for ten minutes before talking with her again, in a much calmer mood, explaining what had been happening.

I went back to napping, and then before lunch time, after my final visit to the toilet, I finally felt like my coconut oil disaster was truly over and I could start my day.

I felt I had "failed" in that, contrary to Stoic teaching, I had let my physical distress take over my mind and everything I was doing. I could have dealt better with my situation, acting the best I could despite my circumstance rather than giving into my foul mood.

The "reserve clause" in Stoicism refers to how we act even though we may not like what has happened or what might happen. I did not start the morning with this attitude.

Exercise

Abby and I eventually made up, but it really bothered me that I had started off the day so badly. I was also feeling like my muscles were trashed from yesterday's workout (and party play with the two sisters). Later in the afternoon, we went for a hike in Frick Park and both felt better. I considered that my "exercise" for the day, a lower-intensity day.

Conclusion

I had a setback in my practice of Stoicism but recovered, with even more appreciation for daily reading and study to get back on track.

How do you deal with setbacks? Do you have a system, a philosophical principle, to keep you on track?

Report on my fourth day of Stoic Week 2014: virtue and relationships with others

Thu, 27 Nov 2014 21:47:45 GMT

Today was Thanksgiving in the US, a surprisingly appropriate day to be in the middle of observing Stoic Week.

Thanksgiving dinner

I've reported on yesterday's theme of self-discipline and simplicity. At Thanksgiving dinner this year, I decided for the very first time to limit what I ate. I've always overeaten in the past, with poor results. It was just something I did.

This year, I did not eat any of the cake or pumpkin pie that was offered. For dessert (after the turkey etc.), I limited myself to one scoop of pistachio gelato and one cookie. Actually, I ended up regretting that cookie, because it was more substantial and sugary than I expected, so I've made a note to watch myself with the cookies. The gelato I may not have needed, but I enjoyed it all the more knowing it was the one main dessert I was allowing myself.

Fourth day of health habits

It's my fourth day now of daily meditation and exercise. Actually, I overdid it on the exercise today, but not intentionally.

I've been increasing the intensity of my short (seven-minute or so) daily workouts every day, lifting heavier weights and working more muscles. What I didn't expect was that at the Thanksgiving party, two young sisters (of ages around five and two) were bored and wanted to play, and I rather exerted myself. The older one was the ringleader. We played at scaring each other and I pretended to be sitting on the couch sleeping and suddenly spring up and boo or growl, and I accidentally pulled something in my right arm during one of these explosive, sudden movements. I also pulled my left shoulder when the two challenged me to lift them repeatedly, and the older one (tall for her age) was heavier than I expected and not so easy to repeatedly lift, given that I'd already had a workout in the morning at home. All in good fun, but left me a bit overextended.

On today's theme

I find sensible the Stoic teaching of developing our "natural affection", and expanding outward from ourselves. I feel I have been the beneficiary of much good from many people in my life and am grateful for this. The Thanksgiving dinner that Abby and I went to today is one we have attended for some years now. The hosts I met through Abby, who met them (and other dinner guests) through music and dance circles. I appreciate and deeply admire the generosity that they have shown us and to many others. I look up to them as role models for the kind of genuine affection that human beings can display and share, not only with immediate family or closest friends but outward to larger communities (such as local music communities) and beyond.

The tragic shooting and death that happened this year in Ferguson, Missouri has been in the news for some months now, and this week the grand jury decided not to indict. I haven't commented in public or in private on any of these events, or on any of the commentary about them, but I do not dismiss what has happened as irrelevant to my life. In fact, I feel that what has happened has been so important, in the biggest possible picture of what has been going on in American history for a long time, that I cannot afford to lightly spew sound bites about it. I do ask myself, how can I best talk about what I am feeling? How can I make a positive difference, in the Stoic "cosmopolitan" "love of all humanity"? I don't know the answer yet, but I know what is not the answer: fanning the flames of passion. But simply being silent is also not the answer.

(Update of 2015-01-19)

I wrote something in observation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Conclusion

I take seriously the Stoic call that we are ethically responsible for more than just ourselves, that we are to develop ourselves outward (not just on inner virtues) and work to honestly consider all human beings our brothers and sisters. I see how I have been treated in such a way by others through my life and aspire to expand beyond myself.

How do you feel about cosmopolitanism? Do you feel it is naive, that it is best to just look out after family and clan? If you have been following the Ferguson tragedy, do you easily choose a simple "side", an "us" versus "them"?

Report on my third day of Stoic Week 2014: self-discipline and Stoic simplicity

Thu, 27 Nov 2014 11:03:44 GMT

There is a reason I'm a little late in reporting on my third day of Stoic Week 2014: the theme, self-discipline and simplicity, had me cut short my intended plan of writing and publishing my thoughts at the end of each day.

Health and self-control

Today's reading for Stoic Week 2014 had us reflect on the importance of physical health and self-control in our daily routine.

For the third day in a row, I did a morning ten-minute sitting meditation, and noticed that my posture and breathing have improved. It took three days to notice this. It will take weeks to notice even more improvements; I know this because I'm a backslider, rather than one completely new to meditation. I imagine it must be much harder for a newcomer to adopt a practice like this where patience is required in order to experience the benefits.

I also kicked it up a notch with exercise. I mentioned in yesterday's report that I need to do more weight training. I'm on that now. I'm making exercise a priority for the next several months in my life, at least.

I've still been pretty good about refraining from unhealthy snacks. On day one, I noted that my work colleague brought back snacks from his first trip to Asia and I chose not to eat any of them. I opened up the bag of chips, but ate only a couple of them (in the past I have given into temptations, when confronted with a bag of chips, to eat the whole bag) and stashed the rest away. (By the way, the chips were unexceptional, tasting not much different than ordinary American potato chips, and the ingredients list was scary, with many weird chemicals included.)

Sleep

I haven't been good with my sleep habits. I tend to stay up too late on the computer, for example. Abby wants me to have a "computer off plan" for my daily routine, but I've found this difficult because I like to work on personal projects (such as writing) on the computer and I find the time in the evening. I know the benefits of the "natural" life, and I'm sure Stoics would promote being a morning person.

But the point of this report isn't to talk about becoming a morning person, or even so much about sleep. It's about self-control. The reality is, yesterday when I came home from work, I was very tired. "Sleep when sleepy" is so logical and natural, yet I find that American culture does not value sleep. It seems countercultural to sleep.

In any case, I decided to simplify the evening and choose to stay off the computer (hence not writing this article). Apart from Wednesday evening being designed "us night" for Abby and me anyway, I decided that before sleeping, I would read (physical books and paper printouts) instead of use the computer, until ready to sleep. I did end up sleeping earlier. I did miss having the use of the computer to look up stuff that would have been helpful in my reading, but for this evening, at least, it was a tradeoff in favor of simplicity rather than stimulation. I'll have to think about how to arrange my life differently if I want to continue to be more targeted in using the computer.

Conclusion

Self-discipline and simplicity are not popular in American culture, which prizes maximization and stimulation. I don't find it easy to maintain self-discipline, and am grateful to Stoic Week to remind me of its benefits.

Is your gut impression of Stoic teachings that they want to take the fun out of your life, or that they are a guide to the truly good life? What is the balance you purposefully adopt between self-indulgence and renunciation?

Blockading To Defend When Things Get Tough

Thu, 27 Nov 2014 05:00:03 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

This article was originally published on The Chess Improver, a chess instruction blog founded by GM Nigel Davies. The site is no longer active; this version is preserved from the Internet Archive.

In a recent tournament game that I painfully lost, I had a terrible losing position, but my opponent suddenly changed the nature of the game by allowing me to set up a blockade that should have enabled me to draw. I played carelessly and threw away the draw. I thought it would be instructive to show how powerful the concept of blockade is. In this game, the blockade was worth even more than the Pawn down and if I had been more careful, I could have maintained the blockade in the center and still had attacking chances of my own on the King side.

In the position below, my opponent had a winning advantage largely due to doubled Rooks on an open e-file, but then initiated a trade of Knights in which he blocked his own open file by recapturing with a Pawn to e4. Granted, this had its points: creation of a passed Pawn with Rooks behind it can be very powerful given the threat of advancing the Pawn further. But in this particular position, I had enough time to place my Bishop on e3 setting up a blockade, and if I had just made sure to leave it there, I could have continued a decent King side attack as compensation. Note in particular that Black's extra Pawn, the d-Pawn is backward on a half-open file, and therefore if it can be prevented from advancing, the extra Pawn should not suffice to win in a simplified ending given enough piece activity. Here, tactics based on my good piece activity were enough that I could even have tried for more, if I had maneuvered my other Rook to the King side more efficiently.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "18th Robert P Smith Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2014.11.18"] [Round "3"] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black "Melih Ozbek"] [Result "0-1"] [BlackElo "2054"] [ECO "A45"] [EventDate "2014.11.18"] [FEN "4r2k/pq2r1bp/1p1p2p1/2nP1pP1/P1p2P1P/2P2QR1/1P1B1N2/R4K2 w - - 3 37"] [Setup "1"] [TimeControl "G/120d5"] [WhiteElo "2165"]

h5 { Purely a bluff in a lost position.} 37... Ne4 $2 ( 37... Nb3 { A clean win would have been to gobble up White's Queen side, since there are not actually any real threats on the h-file.} 38. Rd1 Qa6 ) 38. Nxe4 fxe4 $2 { White should now blockade the position for a draw, by preventing the advance e3.} ( 38... Rxe4 { Keeps Black's Rooks dangerous on the e-file.} ) 39. Qh1 $5 { Stupidly deciding to try to win instead of defending the draw. The bad reason was that Black was down on time on the clock. Note to self: do not play the lock, but the board.} ( 39. Qe2 Qxd5 40. Be3 { The blockade should draw.} ) 39... gxh5 $2 ( 39... e3 $1 { Ignoring the King side "threat" was strongest.} 40. hxg6 Kg8 41. gxh7+ Kh8 42. Be1 Re4 { White is in bad shape.} ) 40. Qxh5 $2 ( 40. Be3 { The right move order was to blockade first.} ) 40... Qxd5 $2 { Returning the favor.} ( 40... e3) 41. Rh3 Qf5 42. Be3 { Blockade achieved. White even has some initiative on the King side despite being a Pawn down!} 42... Kg8 $201 43. Rd1 $6 ( 43. Kg2 { A stronger continuation, accelerating the Rook deployment to the h-file while getting the King out of danger.} 43... Bf8 44. Kg3 Rf7 45. Rah1 d5 46. g6 Qxh5 47. Rxh5 Rg7 48. Rxd5 Rxg6+ 49. Kf2 { White actually stands better despite being a Pawn down, because of active Rooks and Black's exposed King.} ) 43... Rd8 44. Rd2 d5 45. Rdh2 d4 46. cxd4 Bxd4 47. Qe2 $4 { Loses on the spot.} ( 47. Rd2 { The simple pin maintains the blockade to draw by perpetual check.} 47... Red7 48. Bxd4 Rxd4 49. Rxd4 Rxd4 50. Qe8+ Kg7 ( 50... Qf8 $2 51. Qe6+ Qf7 52. Qxf7+ Kxf7 53. Rxh7+ Kg6 54. Rh6+ Kf7 55. Ke2 { Black seems losing here, with White having connected passed Pawns on the King side.} ) 51. Qe7+ Kg8 52. Qe8+ ) 47... Bxe3 { The rest of the game is not worth noting, except that it continued because Black was down to 2 minutes.} 48. Qxc4+ Kh8 49. Qc3+ Bd4 50. Qg3 Kg8 51. g6 Qxg6 52. Qb3+ Kh8 53. Rh6 Qg1+ 54. Ke2 Qg4+ 55. Ke1 Qxf4 56. R6h3 Be5 57. Rc2 Rf7 58. Qc4 Qg4 59. Qxf7 Rd1+ 60. Kf2 Qg1+ { Black was down to something like 2 seconds before delivering checkmate.} 61. Ke2 Qe1# 0-1`} />

Report on my second day of Stoic Week 2014: mindfulness

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 23:50:38 GMT

Yesterday, I reported on my first day of Stoic Week 2014. Today, the second day's theme was "Stoic mindfulness". This is similar to the Buddhist teaching on mindfulness, and is basically a sound psychological observation that "You are just an impression and not at all the thing you claim to represent": our thoughts and feelings are one thing but what we do about them is another.

I found it particularly useful to remember this today, because Tuesdays present an interesting challenge for me.

Chess

On Tuesday nights, I have been playing in the latest 6-round current Tuesday night Pittsburgh Chess Club tournament, one round every Tuesday. Tonight was round 4. I had experienced an extremely painful loss last week in round 3 when I was not mindful and got carried away by emotions: I had an overwhelming advantage during an attack on my opponent's King, but I allowed my excitement to cloud my judgment, make poor moves, and then worse, after I managed to recover and had the opportunity to survive with a draw, and saw this, I passed it up out of wishful thinking that I could continue an attack, so I ended up losing. In chess, I face the stark reality that most losses at my level in local competition (where I am typically the top-rated player) are due to faulty psychology, rather than lack of sufficient understanding and skill. A loss of objectivity (which all athletes and other performers under high pressure) is the reason we fail. Mindfulness directly addresses this all-too-human flaw.

Continuing habits from yesterday

Yesterday, I noted that I began meditating and exercising again, because it was in my power to do so. I have continued. It's been tricky to get going again, because my body is out of whack, but I remember to do what I can, no more, with faith that incremental progress will pay off. Instead of running, I did a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/projects/workouts/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/projects/workouts/">7-minute workout</span>. I've lost a lot of strength over the years and plan to regain it. I have dumbbells lying around the house from when I was using them a decade ago; it's time to get back to them.

Tonight's chess game

I won a decent game tonight at the chess tournament. It was the third last to finish, taking almost four hours. I've played against my opponent many times before over the years, mostly winning, but the last time I played him, he held me to a draw, despite a 500-rating-point difference (which is huge). One thing that sometimes happens in tournament chess is overconfidence when facing someone who is on paper much weaker, or fear because of a past bad result. Mindfulness teaches us that although historical facts are facts, we should distance ourselves from distracting feelings about them.

As in many hard-fought chess games, I experienced a range of emotions during the game. First of all, in the opening, although I was doing OK, I was frustrated that I allowed a certain kind of position I ordinarily do not allow, because of an oversight. Instead of kicking myself, I focused to do what I could with what I had, assessing that even though I did not want that position, it was actually still OK for me. (Actually, computer analysis afterwards showed that I was more than OK, so I was still more pessimistic than warranted during the game.) In the middlegame, I emerged with an advantage, but then faced a curious choice. My opponent gave me an opportunity to win some material (a Rook for a Bishop and Pawn) at the expense of destroying my Pawn structure and therefore creating good chances for a draw. At the time, I saw no better winning try, so I went for it, deciding that, unlike last week, I was going to settle for a draw if my opponent could prove he could defend; I simply made sure to play soundly and not recklessly. It turned out that he cracked eventually and I won. I was pleased that I remained psychologically strong in the game and was rewarded accordingly. (For those of you interested in the technical details of the game, I will be annotating it in an upcoming article I will write for my weekly column in The Chess Improver.

Heavy traffic

Another thing: when driving home from work to eat dinner before the chess game, I noticed that the traffic was unusually bad. Mindfulness is always helpful when facing stressful situations like this. I was upset with myself for not anticipating apparent pre-Thanksgiving-holiday traffic and therefore being pressed for time to get home and eat dinner before playing chess. I decided to let go of my self-annoyance because it wasn't going to help me get home any sooner and would just sap my mental energy I needed for my game.

Conclusion

Mindfulness is something I've had prior experience in trying to adopt well before I even read about Stoicism. But having a daily theme and reading during Stoic Week has been surprisingly helpful in keeping me aware.

Are you familiar with the concept of mindfulness and the scientific underpinnings of it? If so, do you deliberately practice it? Do you have misgivings about it?

Report on my first day of Stoic Week 2014

Mon, 24 Nov 2014 22:30:51 GMT

Last year, I heard about the first Stoic Week, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/stoicismtoday/stoic-week-2013/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/stoicismtoday/stoic-week-2013/">Stoic Week 2013</span>, but did not participate because I was distracted at the time and did not feel like focusing. This week, I decided it was time to sign up for <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://modernstoicism.com/course/view.php?id=5" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://modernstoicism.com/course/view.php?id=5">Stoic Week 2014</span>, and I did.

Why my interest in Stoicism?

I've mentioned Stoicism only briefly in my blog: once in 2012 when thinking about Thanksgiving and once earlier this year after rewatching an old TV episode. As I mentioned, it was in 2011, upon reading a book on Stoicism, that I made some major changes in my life.

It turns out that a couple of weeks ago, I decided to make major changes in my life again, but not while thinking about Stoicism.

Over a year ago, my meditation practice fell apart, and I never really regained it. As a result, my thoughts and habits have become disordered, I have felt. For example, I stopped writing regularly for my blog. I spent too much time on Facebook and Twitter instead, being distracted, annoyed, and worse, behaving in ways that I later came to feel counterproductive. I did "quit" Facebook in July, and also "quit" Twitter some weeks ago (part of the big life changes I set in motion), but still, I have felt ungrounded. I decided Stoic Week 2014 would be a good opportunity for me to return to the contemplative life that Buddhism and Stoicism in their different ways aspire to and that I had forgotten.

What I did the first day of Stoic Week 2014

Today, as I started the first day of Stoic Week 2014, I began by meditating ten minutes, Zen style. This was my first meditation session in weeks.

Then I read the assigned text for today in the Stoic Week handbook, on "What is in our power?" A basic principle of Stoicism is that we should know what is under our control and what is not, and summarily refuse to dwell on or resent what is not under our control, and focus on making good decisions about what is under our control. A very simple but powerful concept, especially in a world in which it is easy to get annoyed or angry about many things we hear about in the news or encounter in our daily lives.

My exercise habit has been very spotty for months now. Well, today I reflected that, what the hell, it is completely under my control whether I choose to exercise or not, so why am I wasting this precious freedom? Some people don't have this freedom. Others, including prisoners in jail, have little freedom but make use of what they have, and they exercise! It happened to be warm outside today, so I really had no excuse. I went for a run in Frick Park. It was short, less than three miles long, but I went. This was my first run in weeks.

It was my turn to cook today at home, so I made a substantial beef casserole dish. Abby has (rightfully) complained in the past when I didn't completely clean up after cooking. Well, today I thought to myself that it is completely within my control whether I choose to attend to the details of cleanup as much as I attend to the details of using our skillets and baking pans. So I cleaned up as well as I could.

I have not been feeling very well physically for weeks now since an incident involving emergency dental work that somehow resulted in complications. I am still in recovery. OK, so it is not under my control that I am not in good health right now. But what is under my control? After lunch I took a nap, because I felt like I needed it. I have been skimping on naps, but this is stupid, because I know that sleep is the best restorative practice when ill. It is under my control whether I choose to set aside time to sleep as needed.

At work, a colleague just came back from his first trip in Asia. He gave me samples of some odd snacks: chips, cookies, and candy. In recent months, I would have opened them up and eaten them on the spot. Indeed, I have been having problems with eating too many snacks for no rational reason. Today, I decided that it is up to me whether I choose to give in to random cravings or temptations, and so I chose to put the snacks aside for later.

After work, I went to a Pittsburgh Code and Supply Build Night, where food was served. Apart from a Thanksgiving dinner (!), some kind of cake lurked around. I took one glance, and chose not to even look at it again until leaving (when it was already all eaten).

Leaving Build Night, I found myself annoyed that it was taking forever for the pedestrian light to change, but caught myself and observed that, first of all, the cycle is as it is, beyond my control; and second, I had mistakenly assumed that someone had pressed the button, so it was my fault I had to wait so long. I pressed the button and eventually got to cross. Next, while driving home, I made the mistake of driving behind a bus, which kept stopping. I got annoyed, not by the bus, but by myself, for mistakenly driving on the wrong street rather than the other one that does not have this problem; I got annoyed that I was too lazy to make a U-turn on the street I was parked on in order to get to that other street. But I stopped myself when I realized that what was done was done, and I simply had to endure the rest of the drive home behind the bus because it was not going to save any more time if I detoured around it late in the game: the best I can do is to be more careful in the future when making choices while driving.

Conclusion

I felt I improved my life today by keeping in mind the fundamental Stoic principle of observing what is not under my control and what is under my control. I look forward to continuing to adopt this outlook for the rest of the week, and beyond that.

An American English dialect quiz correctly guessed where I originally grew up in the US

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 23:32:10 GMT

Take this interesting American English dialect quiz yourself.

I took the quiz and wondered what it would analyze mine to be, given that I've lived in various places in the US in my life. I had a strong suspicion.

Where I have lived in the US

In particular, I spent my first years in the US in Johnson City, New York, while my father was a graduate student at SUNY Binghamton, and therefore my initial English vocabulary and accent derived from that region, but then lived in New York City during ages 5-7, then moved to Parsippany, New Jersey for 7-9.

Then, from age 9-27, I lived in Michigan (not including the time away in universities). I remember how traumatic this move was for me. It was not only because I missed my school friends, hills, the Atlantic Ocean, and eating Chinese food, but also because all my new schoolmates thought I talked funny and used entire sets of words that I did not use! The quiz reminded me of this big transition of mine from the East Coast to the Midwest.

Possibly, if we had moved when I was younger than 9, I would have chosen to adapt my speech to the new dialects around me. But I was stubborn. For the most part, I deliberately chose to continue pronouncing vowels the "New York" way (because that seemed more "logical"), and I chose to use certain words despite of course coming to understand the regional synonyms in Michigan. I'm not sure why I had to be so stubborn, but I did. Maybe I felt that my use of English was part of my identity somehow, or maybe it's more that I did not expect my parents to change, so it was easiest to continue communicating with them saying things like "soda" rather than "pop", for example.

And so it was not a big surprise to me that after I took the quiz (my results are here), the analysis was that my English is most similar to that in the regions of New York, Yonkers, and Newark/Paterson.

Note that since 27, I have lived in Pittsburgh for 17 years now. No, I still do not say "yinz", and again, although it was kind of a language shock for me moving from Michigan, I have adapted to understanding the local preferred pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of Pittsburghese, but I do not always use it myself. I have been known to sometimes slip and say "needs washed", but I think I'm mostly set in my ways in my use of the English language.

Your turn

If you haved lived in the US, what is your quiz result? Does it surprise you? If you have moved around, either as an immigrant or within the US, have you been jolted by dialect differences? Have you ever deliberately changed the way to speak and write English? Why or why not?

Check out the unsanitized first edition of the Grimms' fairy tales finally translated into English

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 23:11:02 GMT

What do you think of when you think of fairy tales? Cutesy kiddie stuff suitable for cartoons and school skits and costumes? Or murder, rape, cannibalism, cruelty, torture?

I've perversely loved fairy tales since coming across a huge collection of Grimms' and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales in a tattered album at a flea market when I was five and having my mother buy it for me. I spent four years reading this book (until all the pages fell out; the binding was horrible) as well as I could (since these were not actually children's editions but adult translations to English and my reading comprehension was limited), before deciding that I "outgrew" the genre and moving on. I spent many nights sleepless with terror, as well as many private moments crying with sadness while reading some of the stories: the one that affected me the most (since I have a younger sister) was "Brother and Sister" from the Grimms' collection.

I have always been so fascinated by fairy tales, mythology, Biblical and other ancient stories in general, that I even briefly considered a major in folklore and mythology in college (and took two literature courses in the subject). And it was early in college that a friend of mine alerted me to the fact that the brothers Grimm repeatedly sanitized the stories that they had originally collected in the field: Maria Tatar had just published (this was 1987) her book <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://scholar.harvard.edu/tatar/publications/hard-facts-grimms-fairy-tales" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://scholar.harvard.edu/tatar/publications/hard-facts-grimms-fairy-tales">"The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales"</span>, and I was excited to buy a copy (which I still have today). (A second edition came out in 2003, but I have not looked at it.)

A couple of years ago, after accidentally discovering Maria Tatar's 2002 <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://scholar.harvard.edu/tatar/publications/annotated-classic-fairy-tales" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://scholar.harvard.edu/tatar/publications/annotated-classic-fairy-tales">"The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales"</span> while browsing a library "new book" shelf, I also learned that she was blogging, so I started following her blog, "Breezes from Wonderland". It was from this blog that I just learned now that Jack Zipes has finally translated the first edition of the Grimms' fairy tales into English.

I look forward to checking out Zipes' new translation. It's been a decade since I last revisited the Grimms' fairy tales, and I still perversely love a dark story.

What are your memories of fairy tales as a child? Have you ever read (or read about) the original unsanitized versions of well-known fairy tales? If you are a parent, do you tell your children fairy tales, thinking of them as harmless imaginative entertainment? Would you tell them unsanitized versions of the tales, as people used to do before modern Western sentimentalized views of what is appropriate for children? Or do you think it was wrong how parents used to terrify their children?

(Update of 2014-12-23)

A beautiful essay on the importance of fairy tales, by Rowan Williams.

The Danger Of A King Out Of Play In The Endgame

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 05:00:31 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

This article was originally published on The Chess Improver, a chess instruction blog founded by GM Nigel Davies. The site is no longer active; this version is preserved from the Internet Archive.

In a hard-fought game my student played that ended in a draw, when we were looking at it, I observed that his opponent missed a win at one single critical moment. This was a result of an accumulation of positionally questionable decisions that, although in themselves still led to defensible positions, led to a single blunder that could have been punished.

Three mistakes

Allowing an outside passed Pawn

The first unnecessary concession was made in the late middlegame when Black captured a piece on a5 allowing a recapture with a Pawn bxa5 resulting in White getting an outside passed Pawn. Granted, this being a Rook Pawn made it not as useful, but still created unnecessary danger.

King out of play

The second unnecessary concession was moving the King from g8 to h7, out of the main action. It was best to moving the King toward the center and toward the Queenside, with the goals of safeguarding the Pawn chain from c6 as well as, more critically, aiming toward White's a-Pawn, either to capture it or at least prevent it from Queening. Granted, Black had a plan to get the King to f4, but it is slow. In fact, it ended up working in the game, but only because White did not act more quickly and decisively to try to Queen the a-Pawn.

Creating another outside Pawn for the opponent

The final concession, which in this case was a big blunder, was to accept White's sneaky offer of a Queen trade, resulting in transforming White's c-Pawn into an "outside" b-Pawn that could have been used as a Pawn break to lead the way for White's King to invade the Queen side and successfully Queen the a-Pawn. A calculation shows that Black's attempt to also Queen a passed Pawn is too late, because White's active King can get to Black's King side Pawns in time to ensure that after White gives up the Rook in turn, the resulting King and Pawn ending is an easy win because Black's King ends up out of play and White can just push a passed Pawn to victory.

Lessons

The main lessons to learn are that even in a drawable position, it is wise to keep the draw simple by not giving a passed Pawn to the opponent, not giving a Pawn break to the opponent, and keeping one's King ready to prevent Queening of a passed Pawn if it does exist.

<ChessGame pgn={`[FEN "r7/P4ppk/1qp4p/3p4/3Pp3/Q1P4P/5PP1/R3K3 w - - 10 38"] [Setup "1"]

Qb4 $201 Qxb4 $4 ( 38... Qc7 { Should be a straightforward draw, as Black's Queen will go to h2 with counterplay.} ) 39. cxb4 Kg6 { The King is too far away!} 40. b5 cxb5 41. Kd2 { Aiming to pick off Black's b-Pawn and march to b7 and Queen the a-Pawn.} ( 41. Ra6+ $4 { Actually played in the game, led to a draw.} 41... Kf5 ( 41... Kg5 { An easier draw, creating a passed e-Pawn with f5, f4, e3.} ) 42. Kd2 Kf4 43. Kc3 e3 { Good active counterplay by Black.} 44. fxe3+ Kxe3 { Now White cannot make progress.} ) 41... Kf5 42. Kc3 e3 43. fxe3 Ke4 44. Kb4 Kxe3 45. Kxb5 Kxd4 46. Kc6 { In the race, White's King is too far ahead and will win Black's Rook, then be positioned to win Black's King side Pawns just in time.} 46... Ke4 47. Kb7 Rd8 48. a8=Q Rxa8 49. Rxa8 d4 50. Kc6 Ke3 51. Kd6 d3 52. Ke7 d2 53. Rd8 { Stopping the Queening.} 53... f5 { Desperation.} ( 53... Ke2 54. Kxf7 d1=Q 55. Rxd1 Kxd1 56. Kxg7 Ke2 57. Kxh6 { White will Queen the g-Pawn effortlessly.} ) 54. Kf7 g5 55. Kg6 g4 56. hxg4 fxg4 57. Kxh6 Ke2 58. Kg5 g3 59. Kf4 { And White is back in time to win the g-Pawn if Black Queens.} 1-0`} />

World Toilet Day is not just another crappy holiday

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 23:41:34 GMT

From an excellent blog I follow, Timothy Taylor's Conversable Economist, I read his article about <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://worldtoilet.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://worldtoilet.org/">World Toilet Day</span>.

Yes, every day is some kind of observed day somewhere in the world promoted by someone, but World Toilet Day is not just another crappy commercial holiday. It's about a serious problem, which is that 15 percent of the world population still lives without proper sanitation. Open sanitation, especially in densely populated areas, is a cause of much serious illness (especially to children, who are especially vulnerable). So I'm happy about the invention of World Toilet Day in 2001 by the World Toilet Organization global non-profit. It's curious that I hadn't heard about it for thirteen years, but I'm grateful Timothy Taylor pointed it out in his blog. Because this is a serious issue.

I, for one, am grateful to live in the industrialized US where toilets abound everywhere, and even in parks such as my local Frick Park in Pittsburgh, there are port-a-potties in various locations within the park. I used to make fun of my immigrant parents for being strangely fixated on and happy about functioning and clean toilets, but the reality is that their generation and their parents' generation in rural Taiwan did not necessarily have this luxury. In fact, even today, apparently, the sewage system is not great in Taiwan.

On re-experiencing VHS tapes again

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 21:27:49 GMT

I stopped serious study of ballroom dance sometime around 2003, over ten years ago, because I was discouraged by not finding a maximally compatible dance partner. I ended up closing the chapter of my life that started in 2000 when ballroom dance consumed almost all of my time.

Recently I brought up several boxes of ballroom dance instruction videos from those days, with the idea that even though I'm not longer doing ballroom dancing with anyone any more (Abby is not very interested in ballroom dance), I might find it enjoyable to continue developing my dance skills and use the videos as part of exercise also. Almost all of these videos are VHS tapes. I have almost no dance videos on DVD, as I was very late in acquiring a DVD player: actually, one day, my mother bought me a DVD player because she was tired of visiting me and having no way to watching any DVDs she brought!

I had mixed emotions and memories as I started going through these videos again.

Why was I late to CDs and DVDs?

Earlier in life, I was very late in getting a CD player also; I bought only cassette tapes and LPs until late in college, around 1990, when I finally buckled to pressure and bought a CD player. I am generally not an early adopter of technology. I bought my first smartphone in 2012.

Why the resistance to technology? Partly it's just a matter of cost. But more fundamentally, I worried about the long-term durability of digital media. It turns out that I shouldn't have worried quite so much, because backing up has turned out to be quite feasible and inexpensive. But in the early days of CDs and DVDs, I was not going to be ripping them and storing them on super-expensive hard drives, so my worry was about the physical media of CDs and DVDs.

Was I was right about the disadvantages of digital media?

It turns out that I was partially right. Some of my old CDs and DVDs did become unplayable after a decade or two, but very few.

The bigger problem is that Abby and I sometimes check out DVDs from the public library and find that they have enough scratches that when watching a film we often miss entire minutes and scenes because of damaged playback! This has happened so many times that I question the value of ever checking out a DVD from the library again that looks even a little scratched. What a waste!

The advantage of analog media such as LPs and cassette tapes and VHS tapes is that in some ways they are more fault tolerant. I remember the old days of splicing tape, for example.

But actually, analog media get corrupted easily enough by magnetism, mold, etc. I do have tapes that are unplayable.

The killer feature of digital media was always indexing and random access. It's a real hassle not being able to skip from one dance lesson to the next, or get a table of contents, in these dance videos.

Conclusion

It's far less efficient using VHS videos for instruction than indexed digital media. That said, I see why people stream video these days rather than buy or borrow DVDs; physical digital media are fragile. But what would libraries do if they stopped acquiring and serving CDs and DVDs?

Ransoms, hypocrisy, and bourgeois virtues

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 22:18:36 GMT

I saw a provocative article, "The Case for Paying Ransoms", that argued that noted that European hostages of terrorist groups, unlike American and British hostages, tend to be returned alive, thanks to European governments paying ransoms. The US and UK governments, however, have a public policy of not negotiating with terrorists.

It appears that "governments like the Spanish, the French, and the Italian, have simply found other, more clandestine and covert ways of making such payments, through sudden increases in aid budgets and the like. The next move these governments make is simply to deny that such payments have been made."

So this brings up a dilemma (which of course comes up in action films all the time):

<blockquote> Is it better to (a) remain morally consistent, refuse negotiation and ransom payment to an allegedly evil organization, but watch your citizens get beheaded? Or (b) sign up to a principled agreement not to negotiate with "terrorists," but then negotiate nonetheless, pay a large amount of money to release the citizens of your country, and simply deny the fact publicly? </blockquote>

In praise of hypocrisy?

The article argued for the second choice, which is to be hypocritical and deny negotiation while actually engaging it: "The effectiveness of the strategy depends on the fact that it is not openly acknowledged, and indeed that it is repeatedly repudiated in official statements and in international agreements by the governments in question."

When reading this, I was not particularly shocked, because hypocrisy is everywhere and is quite official. In fact, almost all American news and political discourse revolves around hypocrisy. This is apparent when it comes to sex scandals, corporate payola, NSA domestic surveillance, complaints about government spending, railing against privatization of education while sending one's own children to private schools, and so on. I get the impression that Americans give much more priority to the appearance of "moral outrage" than other people in the world. Nobody wants to be pointed out as a hypocrite, it seems.

The trouble is that hypocrisy is arguably the single most important bourgeois "virtue", the collective decision to look the other way when confronted with something disturbing, to make a euphemism of it if it is seen at all. The "liberal", tolerant society depends to a great deal on hypocrisy. This is how "tolerance" works: claiming to believe one thing while not acting entirely consistently with that claim. For example, religious tolerance was hard won: remember when Catholicism were considered anti-American by many? Was the solution really that Protestants decided Catholicism was OK after all? In part, perhaps, but also in part a result of hypocrisy. Remember when <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.today.com/id/4224452/ns/today-entertainment/t/mel-gibson-says-his-wife-could-be-going-hell/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.today.com/id/4224452/ns/today-entertainment/t/mel-gibson-says-his-wife-could-be-going-hell/">Mel Gibson said his (then) wife was doomed to go to hell</span>?

A certain level of hypocrisy seems necessary for a liberal society. Many people who claim to believe abortion is baby murder tend to still be OK eating at a restaurant owned by someone who believes otherwise. Many "progressive" programmers seem to have no problem with buying Apple products despite suspect sweatshop labor practices at Foxconn. And so forth: in fact, capitalism itself is reliant on hypocrisy to stay alive. If people bought and sold mostly with their supposed moral conscience rather than with their wallets, markets would fall apart. Overall, nobody cares whether the gas station owner is doing drugs, beating his wife, or hates their ethnicity.

Is there an alternative to hypocrisy that doesn't just lead back to all-out wars among every possible faction believing in their principles so strongly that they are willing to die and kill for them? I don't know. I just know that on some uncomfortable level, complaining about hypocrisy is the essence of hypocrisy itself. This may just be how human beings have to operate. But we're not supposed to openly admit that, are we? It would be like going to your dear friend's parents' home for dinner and then screaming at them for being animal killers for serving meat if you're an ethical vegetarian. That would be such bad manners.

How do you feel about hypocrisy? Do you acknowledge its social value? Do you admit to it yourself? Do you call out those you consider hypocrites?

(Update of 2014-11-19)

Here is a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/nov/19/ransoms-real-cost/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/nov/19/ransoms-real-cost/">critique</span> of the original article.

(Update of 2014-12-05)

On a related topic, here is an interesting <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-sp-case-against-human-rights" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-sp-case-against-human-rights">critique of "human rights" by Eric Posner</span>.

Anticipating The Endgame As Part Of Understanding The Opening

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:00:37 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

This article was originally published on The Chess Improver, a chess instruction blog founded by GM Nigel Davies. The site is no longer active; this version is preserved from the Internet Archive.

The 2014 World Chess Championship rematch between Carlsen and Anand kicked off with Carlsen playing the Grünfeld as Black, an interesting choice since he does not usually play this opening, and in fact Anand is the one who prepared the Grünfeld as Black in 2013. The game proceeded along a path in which Anand as White lost an opening initiative and got into some trouble but held an unpleasant endgame.

Since detailed commentary from many strong players is already available and will continue to be provided as the match progresses, so why should I write out it here at The Chess Improver? My goal here is to describe the big picture that players of many levels can relate to and hopefully apply to their own play.

The goal of the Grünfeld Defense opening

Black's goal in playing the Grünfeld Defense is to try to destroy White's center, by targeting White's Pawn on d4. The asymmetrical Pawn structure that arises when White's c-Pawn is exchanged with Black's d-Pawn gives Black possible chances to contain White's d-Pawn and counterattack with a Queen side Pawn majority.

White has a choice of goals in return, and has to make a decision. (Take note if you are following the match, because we may see the Grünfeld pop up again with players making different decisions.) The three basic choices are to:

Grab the big center with e4, advance with d5 eventually, possibly make a passed d-Pawn for the endgame. Forget the endgame, go all out with an attack on Black's King based on h4, h5, etc. Forget the big center, protect the d4 Pawn with e3, block in Black's Bishop on g7, and try to make headway on the Queenside.

What happened in this game

What actually happened was Anand played as though aiming for one of the first two, but was inconsistent in followup. He got the center and then played as though to attack Black's King: Qd2, allowing his Knight on f3 to be captured by Black's Bishop permanently messing up White's Pawn structure (doubled f-Pawns, isolated h-Pawn), castling Queen side. But he never did attack Black's King after all, and the Pawn on d5 didn't get any further.

So Black's defense, based on destroying White's Pawn structure and surviving any attack, with the aim of reaching a superior endgame, worked out. Anand had to be careful to hold the draw in face of his isolated and weak f and h Pawns.

The main thing I want to point out is that it was not automatically bad for White to allow the weakened Pawn structure. Before the endgame, there is the middlegame. It is a valid, aggressive idea for White to decide not to try to win the endgame, but instead the middlegame. It just didn't work out in this particular game.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "WCh 2014"] [Site "Sochi RUS"] [Date "2014.11.08"] [Round "1"] [White "Anand, V."] [Black "Carlsen, M."] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [Annotator "Ramirez Alvarez,Alejandro"] [BlackElo "2863"] [ECO "D85"] [EventDate "2014.11.08"] [PlyCount "95"] [WhiteElo "2792"]

d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5 4. cxd5 Nxd5 5. Bd2 Bg7 6. e4 Nxc3 7. Bxc3 O-O 8. Qd2 Nc6 9. Nf3 Bg4 10. d5 Bxf3 11. Bxg7 Kxg7 12. gxf3 Ne5 13. O-O-O c6 14. Qc3 f6 15. Bh3 cxd5 16. exd5 Nf7 17. f4 Qd6 18. Qd4 Rad8 19. Be6 Qb6 20. Qd2 Rd6 21. Rhe1 Nd8 22. f5 Nxe6 23. Rxe6 Qc7+ 24. Kb1 Rc8 25. Rde1 Rxe6 26. Rxe6 Rd8 27. Qe3 Rd7 28. d6 exd6 29. Qd4 Rf7 30. fxg6 hxg6 31. Rxd6 a6 32. a3 Qa5 33. f4 Qh5 34. Qd2 Qc5 35. Rd5 Qc4 36. Rd7 Qc6 37. Rd6 Qe4+ 38. Ka2 Re7 39. Qc1 a5 40. Qf1 a4 41. Rd1 Qc2 42. Rd4 Re2 43. Rb4 b5 44. Qh1 Re7 45. Qd5 Re1 46. Qd7+ Kh6 47. Qh3+ Kg7 48. Qd7+ 1/2-1/2`} />

My predictions after Carlsen and Anand are tied after round 4 of the World Chess Championship

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 23:01:25 GMT

Last week I made some predictions about the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.sochi2014.fide.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.sochi2014.fide.com/">2014 Carlsen-Anand World Chess Championship</span> match before it began. Now, four rounds later, there have been two draws and a win for each player. What next? Since I correctly predicted some things already, I thought I'd speculate about the next couple of rounds.

Anand

As White

As I expected, Anand opened with d4 with a view to aggressive, sharp lines based on home preparation. In round 1, he lost his nerve and lost his initiative, but in round 3, he won convincingly, first inviting a Queen's Indian (as I expected he would) but then defeating the Queen's Gambit Declined. I do not see why he would vary from d4 as White in the future unless he ends up ahead in the match and has psychological reasons to mix things up.

As Black

So far, Anand has only faced 1 e4 as Black. In round 2, Anand made what seems like a stupid decision to try to go into the Berlin Defense, and got punished by a loss. I see no reason for him to play the Berlin Defense again; playing 1...e5 just seems to be playing into Carlsen's strengths. In round 4, Anand went for the Sicilian, as I expected; he used an ...e6 move order to avoid the Moscow and Rossolimo, causing Carlsen to vary with a g3 anti-Sicilian, resulting in a draw. My suspicion is still that Anand might be aiming for a ...Nc6 Sicilian through transposition, perhaps a Taimanov. I expect him to try this again.

I'm most curious about how Anand would face the English. I think it would depend on his situation. 1...e5 would be an ambitious, unbalancing choice, while transposition to a Slav structure is also possible.

Carlsen

As White

I made no specific prediction about how Carlsen would open as White. He has played 1 e4 twice, once with success but once leading to a draw. Psychologically, his inability or unwillingness to engage Anand in an Open Sicilian does not make continuing with 1 e4 right now seem plausible. I expect him to vary, possibly using the English. I certainly hope he doesn't try the Reti again as he did last year, even though it worked then; he is facing a different Anand this year.

As Black

The Grünfeld in round 1 was a surprise, but exactly true to my expectation that "he will do whatever might confuse Anand". That he varied in round 3 with the Queen's Gambit Declined suggests that the Grünfeld may not appear again soon, but he lost with the Queen's Gambit Declined, so will he play it again? It is possible. Another possibility is to resort to the Queen's Indian, making sure to avoid sacrificial lines (which means possibly playing a traditional ...Bb7 instead of ...Ba6). Or he could play a Ragozin.

Conclusion

Right now I think Anand is actually in good shape in the match, having a certain momentum. It appears Carlsen is mainly winging it, in the last two rounds. I expect him to change things up.

SorryWatch: good and bad apologies

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 22:27:53 GMT

I try to avoid reading news, but now and then I see an article about someone or other "apologizing" for something, and most of the time, the apology is pretty bad. Personally, I admire more someone who defiantly refuses to apologize. The stupidest, most transparent copout, of course, is "I apologize if (something bad resulted from what I said or did)", rather than the real apology "I apologize that ..."

My own preferences when it comes to apologies:

Always apologize for something if you do believe you did wrong.
Never "apologize" for something if you don't believe you did wrong.

I don't need to feel comforted and coddled by bullshit fake apologies: but I do want to know the truth of where you stand and I'll respect that even if where you stand might be something like "Yeah, I'm a racist and proud of it!" I want you to look me in the eye and spit at me and say that, and I will at least respect you for being honest.

By coincidence, I recently found a Web site devoted to analyzing different kinds of apologies, good or bad or bizarre. Have fun: <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.sorrywatch.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.sorrywatch.com/">SorryWatch</span>.

Happy 10th birthday Firefox! Thoughts on using Firefox, abandoning it, and returning to it again

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:09:02 GMT

Today Mozilla launched a 10th birthday celebration for its Firefox Web browser. Mozilla just released both a developer version of Firefox as well as a new feature in regular Firefox to help users control their privacy

Check out their video "Firefox: Choose independent":

My use

I use Firefox daily on all my work and personal machines (including my Android phone), have it installed on Abby's, and on the computers of my parents as well as my parents-in-law! I love Firefox for its independence, adherence to open standards, high performance and reliability, syncing of my preferences and other data across multiple devices, and fantastic ecosystem of extensions.

History

I have used Firefox since before it was called Firefox. I used it when it was Phoenix. I used it when it was Firebird. (For a long time, the user profile information was still stored in a directory named "phoenix"!)

Before Firefox, I started using the Web twenty years ago through Netscape Navigator, the ancestor of Firefox. It was so exciting using the Web in 1994 when the Web was brand new; I would dial up through my modem hooked up to my Macintosh SE/30 and patiently wait for pages to load.

I continued to use Netscape in the late 1990s (when I switched to Linux for my personal and work machines) until it started stagnating, and I switched to Galeon around 2000. I switched to Phoenix in 2003 because Galeon was just too buggy, then lived through its short rename as Firebird before it became Firefox.

Confession about a brief abandonment

At some point in 2012, Firefox entered an unstable phase in which it was slow and buggy and became unusable to me. I was very sad. In fact, for the first time in my life then, I tried out Google Chrome. It worked great, and I ditched Firefox. I was very sad about my decision, because I want Firefox to succeed, it being a truly independent browser, not owned by any for-profit corporation. Microsoft used Internet Explorer to damage the open Web, and I do not want a repeat of the same story. But the reality was, Firefox had become unusable to me, so I had to switch!

Luckily, several months later, when I tried out Firefox again, it was usable again, and also kept improving as well, being no longer just adequate but very reliable for me, and I switched back happily.

I am grateful that Firefox exists and continues to thrive. Thank you, Mozilla!

Which is your preferred Web browser? Why? Do you care about the implications of independence, or do you only care about the technical and user-end aspects of Web browser choice?

Understand and use motivation contagion: everyone matters

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 20:35:39 GMT

When I was a child, my parents always concerned themselves with whether I was hanging out with the "right" schoolmates. I never agreed with their definition of "right", but they were onto something. I only accepted this truth when I was already in my thirties and reflected on choices I made in my life and why, and was surprised by correlations between what I did and who I happened to be around at the time.

An excellent article by running trainer and coach Steve Magness reminded me how important motivation contagion is in our lives, whether we recognize this consciously or not.

Exercise habits and performance

The study he references tried to determine whether exercise habits or performance are contagious. It turned out that your least fit friends most influence your own fitness.

Interpretation

OK, supposing you accept this, what is your reaction?

Some people might think "Oh, I should ditch my unfit friends". This is a somewhat cynical and heartless reaction, of course, and narrow as a criterion of who deserves friendship, and perhaps shortsighted in a similar way as explained in "Don't surround yourself with smarter people". Physical fitness is not the only measure of the worth of a human being!

Still, the reality seems that if you unapologetically value your own fitness, you might do best to be careful about your associations with the least fit. I'm going to be honest here: in the past several years, as my social circles have changed from being dominated by fitness freaks (dancers and runners) to more "regular" people, my own fitness has plummeted considerably. I chalk it up to having far less motivation to exercise the way I used to, not being involved in constant shared activities such as races and just working out together. I'm determined to get back in shape, but it will be much harder than when I was actually one of the least fit of everyone around me.

A more positive interpretation, by Magness, in the context of teams, is that everyone matters. If you are less fit, then if you care about the group, what you do to improve yourself, personally, actually benefits a lot more people than you. So understanding motivation contagion can give you motivation to not only help yourself but those you love.

Other applications

Of course, this applies not only to fitness and sports, but to academics, work, and any other habits or activities.

A closing note

I was horribly unfit as a child. I only hung out with others who were very unfit, unfortunately, so that did not help motivate me. On the other hand, my parents made sure to always try to exclude "bad students" from my life, in order to boost my grades. It kind of worked. Unfortunately, I have to disagree with their narrow, lopsided priorities: I wish I had hung out with more athletes as a child and had much better health as a result. I didn't start running until age 29.

When you think about it, how does motivation contagion currently work for or against you in your life? What are the good influences that you absorb, and the bad influences? Do you actively try to change your environment in order to help yourself behave in a different way? What challenges do you face?

Smart versus unpredictable people: whom do you prefer?

Sat, 08 Nov 2014 11:10:13 GMT

I saw an excellent Ribbonfarm blog post, "Don't surround yourself with smarter people".

You should read this post; in fact, you should follow the blog in general, as it is one of the deepest-thinking blogs out there. Furthermore, it is an unpredictable blog. I never know what will be discussed there, but whatever it is, I always find that it is new to me, not something following a standard school of thought or template.

In other words, I follow this blog precisely for the reasons the post advocates learning not only from "smart" people but specifically from unpredictable people:

<blockquote> I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. </blockquote>

My experience

This is how I feel about whom I follow online through blogs (RSS) or through Twitter. I'm always looking for something different. People have different reasons for reading what they read, or following whom they follow. Personally, my goal is to better understand the world. Sometimes, this comes from following people who offer useful news and information that I wouldn't otherwise know. Other times, I learn from being offered a perspective that is completely contrary to or foreign to mine; in fact, I have changed my mind about a lot of things through deliberately following people who make me uncomfortable.

If I can predict everything you might say, or you can predict everything I might say, then there seems not much point in communicating; we might as well just fire up computer programs to spit out "virtual" conversations that add no new information. So I like to hear about your weird ideas, or stuff that goes against the dominant scripts of your tribe.

Do you value independence of mind or do you think it is overrated? Why? What sort of balance do you try to achieve?

When a computer algebra program gives wrong answers

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:20:32 GMT

I read an interesting and disturbing report, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf">"The Misfortunes of a Trio of Mathematicians Using Computer Algebra Systems. Can We Trust in Them?"</span> published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. I feel that all software developers should read this and reflect on the nature of our work, when people who are not programmers depend on it.

This report was about mathematicians accidentally discovering a bug in a major computer algebra system, Mathematica.

A note about scientists and mathematicians

Scientists and mathematicians increasingly depend on computer software for their work, to explore data, analyze it, verify hypotheses, etc. It's gotten to the point where we can no longer pretend, for example, that scientists are not writing substantial computer programs, whether or not they are trained programmers (in fact, Software Carpentry was created by a physicist to fulfill the need of training scientists in programming).

The discovery of the bug

A bunch of mathematicians used Mathematica to generate and test ideas they had about a mathematical hypothesis. They wanted to find counterexamples to their conjectures and found some with integer arithmetic calculations using Mathematica.

One of them happened to also be using Maple, and the results differed, so Mathematica or Maple had to be wrong. They isolated the error by generating random test cases and finding that Mathematica was in error.

In fact, given the same matrix and calling Mathematica's matrix determinant function, Mathematica would return different results!! This was a rather serious bug indeed. They found that Mathematica 7 did not have this bug, but 9 and 10 did.

Wolfram Research's lack of responsiveness to the problem

They reported the Mathematica bug to Wolfram Research but got no useful reply, and at the next release of Mathematica, the bug was still not fixed.

There were other bugs they found as well.

Wolfram Research never gave any feedback, and does not publish a list of known bugs.

Lessons to learn

When there is a bug in proprietary, closed-source software, you are completely helpless. The bug may not even be acknowledged, much less fixed, and you could not fix it yourself even if you wanted to.
There is value in having an alternative tool: without independent work using Maple, the bugs in Mathematica may never have been discovered. Diversity is good.
All scientists should be aware that the tools they use can be buggy, and therefore computational results can only be trusted as much as the specific versions of software they use can be trusted.

Does any of this surprise you? For what you rely on, how do you work around the inevitable fact that software has bugs?

My predictions and hopes for the 2014 Carlsen-Anand world chess championship rematch

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 21:09:54 GMT

The <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.sochi2014.fide.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.sochi2014.fide.com/">2014 World Chess Championship</span> is about to begin, featuring Anand and Carlsen again, this time with Anand as challenger and Carlsen as defending champion.

Last year when I followed the World Chess Championship match, I wrote several blog posts looking at each game that was played. This year I'm not planning to do the same, but instead, I would like to offer some predictions and hopes for the rematch.

Recall that I made one prediction that was eerily correct last year:

My correct prediction last year

Before round 9 began, I predicted correctly:

<blockquote> It came to me in a dream: Anand playing d4 in the next round, then going for an f3, e4 Pawn storm against Carlsen #FWCM2013 </blockquote>

This was a critical game in the match, in which Anand blundered horribly to lose a game that he had very good chances of winning.

For this year

Anand

Anand's play last year was very disappointing: he did not win a single game in the match, as he was psychologically unprepared to play aggressively enough when he had good positions against Carlsen.

I expect that this year, being the challenger instead of the defending champion, he will play in a more forceful way, because he has no choice and nothing to lose. What does this mean?

Last year I was surprised Anand played e4 as White inviting the Berlin Defense. This was a big mistake. I cannot imagine why he would play e4 again. He surely must play d4, or at least the English Opening with c4. What could he possibly have against the Nimzo-Indian, however, now that the f3 weapon is well-known? There's always the Rubinstein e3 variation but Carlsen, like Karpov of old, should be happy with Black there. The other option is to avoid the Nimzo-Indian and use one of the Pawn sacrifice lines in the Queen's Indian or Catalan. But Carlsen must be prepared against such. So there remains the option of trying for a tiny first-move advantage using the English. I guess we'll see.

As Black, Anand could stick with the Grunfeld setup from last year, or return to a Slav setup. But what about against e4? There's always the Najdorf, but that allowed the Moscow last year, so maybe a Nc6 Sicilian? In any case, I hope we see fewer Berlin Defense games this year.

Carlsen

Carlsen is still the favorite to win this year, but is not invincible. He can either play like he did last year, or play differently. Because he is versatile, he can change his plans depending on what happens. I suspect that because he is champion now, he may want to prove his dominance, and play more sharply than last year, but he can always fall back on his wait-for-opponent-to-self-destruct style. Since Anand is simply not going to last forever, Carlsen needs to already start preparing to play against his younger rivals such as Caruana and might want to send a message to them in this match.

I expect that his aim will be to psychologically destroy Anand one way or another, so he will do whatever might confuse Anand. I cannot really predict how he will play. I suspect his use of the Reti as White is over, however; there are plenty of ways to still control the situation as White while playing d4 or c4. Playing the English might be smart, actually, especially if Anand is also thinking of playing it. We could see one of those matches where both players decide to enter openings as both colors.

Conclusion

I have no idea if any of my "predictions" will actually come true, but thought it would be fun to get them on record in case they do.

Are you going to follow this year's World Chess Championship? What do you expect to see in the 2014 match in Sochi?

The Art Of Attacking A Slightly Weakened King Side

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 05:00:43 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

This article was originally published on The Chess Improver, a chess instruction blog founded by GM Nigel Davies. The site is no longer active; this version is preserved from the Internet Archive.

In a recent tournament game, as White I ended up misplaying a Semi-Tarrasch type of early middlegame, allowing Black easy equality after committing to the e5 advance (giving up control of the d5 square) and not taking advantage of Black's lag in development. However, I managed to win by stubbornly trying to attack a slightly weakened King side, resulting from my forcing g6 to avoid mate on h7. Even after g6, however, Black's position was fine. But at least I had something to work with. This game is instructive because it shows how to try to make progress based on just a single possible weakness in the opponent's position.

The story

Black made the error of trading off the dark-squared Bishops, permanently weakening f6 and h6 and d6. Again, objectively Black's position was still solid and fine, because of his very strong Knight on d5 that guarded the f6 square anyway.

But I did some maneuvering and waiting to allow my opponent to make one inaccuracy after another, resulting in Black voluntarily moving the Knight away from d5 to b6 and my own Knight getting to a d6 outpost, thanks to Black's missing dark Bishop.

Finally, Black made a tactical inaccuracy that allowed me to win the a7 Pawn. Even after this, objectively the position should have been an easy draw, thanks to simplification and Black's total control over the d5 square. But Black gave up the light-squared Bishop for mine, resulting in a position in which I had still had a bind and remote chances to try for a King side attack.

It turned out that Black maneuvered poorly, making his own Rooks passive and away from his King, and finally erring with moving his Queen also away from his King, to the Queen side. This allowed me to land my Knight on f6 just in time as the King side was undefended, and through some tactics win the f7 Pawn and the game.

A long grind of a game, but I was happy that my patience was rewarded.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "18th Robert P Smith Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2014.11.04"] [Round "1"] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black "Vassil Prokhov"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "1801"] [ECO "D38"] [EventDate "2014.11.04"] [TimeControl "G/120d5"] [WhiteElo "2165"]

Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 d5 4. d4 Bb4 5. cxd5 Nxd5 $6 { This gives up the center, transposing into a Semi-Tarrasch type of Pawn structure.} 6. Bd2 ( 6. Qc2 { Arguably stronger because the Bishop ended up poorly placed at d2.} ) 6... O-O 7. e4 Nxc3 8. bxc3 Be7 9. Bc4 c5 10. O-O cxd4 11. cxd4 Bf6 $6 { Provocative waste of time, but it achieved its objective of encouraging White to play e5.} 12. e5 { OK but very committal. The d5 square can easily fall to Black.} 12... Be7 13. Qe2 $6 { Much too slow. White's pieces are not so well placed.} 13... Bd7 { Of course Black wants to get to d5.} 14. Rfd1 $6 Ba4 15. Re1 $6 { The Rook is doing nothing here.} 15... Bc6 { And Black has fully equalized.} 16. Be3 Nd7 17. Bd3 Rc8 $6 { Pointlessly slow, allowing White to make a bit of progress.} 18. Nd2 Nb6 19. Qh5 g6 ( 19... h6 $4 { Loses to a thematic Bishop sacrifice.} 20. Bxh6 $1 gxh6 ( 20... Qxd4 21. Bxg7 $1 ) 21. Qxh6 f5 22. exf6 Rf7 23. Qg6+ Kf8 24. fxe7+ ) 20. Qg4 { The position is still dead equal but White has created a possible weakness, at least.} 20... Nd5 21. Bh6 Re8 22. a3 { Stopping ...Nb4.} 22... Bf8 $6 { A needless positional concession that gives White some chances. White wants the dark squares off, to weaken Black's f6 square and King side in general!} 23. Bxf8 Rxf8 24. Ne4 Bd7 $2 { An undeveloping move.} 25. Nd6 { White now has a well-placed Knight.} 25... Rc7 26. Bc4 Qe7 27. Qf3 $5 { Waiting for Black to start making errors.} ( 27. Bxd5 { Trading guaranteed some advantage but I didn't want to simplify.} 27... exd5 28. Qg3 ) 27... Nb6 28. Bb3 Bc6 29. Qg3 Bd5 $6 { Hangs a Pawn.} 30. Nb5 Rd7 31. Nxa7 { It should be very difficult for White to win, despite a Pawn up, but Black continues to go astray after losing a Pawn.} 31... Bxb3 $2 { Giving up the beautifully centralized Bishop.} 32. Qxb3 Nd5 33. Nb5 Rfd8 34. Qg3 $5 { Again, just waiting for Black to make an error.} 34... Rc8 $2 35. Rac1 { Black is not going to control the c-file.} 35... Rdd8 $2 36. Nd6 Ra8 $2 { Black's Rooks are getting more and more passive.} 37. Qb3 b6 38. a4 Qa7 $2 { Black is mistakenly abandoning the King side in hope of counterplay on the Queen side.} 39. Rc4 Qa5 40. Rec1 Rdb8 $2 { A passive square for the Rook.} 41. g3 { Taking away the f4 square from Black's Knight and preparing to keep the King safe while waiting for move developments.} 41... Kg7 $2 { Walking into possible tactics with check on f7.} 42. Kg2 Qd2 $4 { Now the Queen is too far away from protecting the King.} 43. Qf3 Ra7 44. Ne4 ( 44. h4 { Even stronger.} ) 44... Qb2 $4 45. Nf6 { It's game over for Black, because White will invade on the 7th rank.} 45... Rxa4 { Random try to mix things up.} ( 45... Nxf6 46. Qxf6+ Kh6 47. d5 $1 ) 46. Rxa4 { Good enough to win.} ( 46. Nxd5 { Was even stronger.} ) 46... Qxc1 47. Nxd5 exd5 ( 47... Qc6 48. Nc3 { White stays a Knight up.} ) 48. Ra7 Rf8 49. e6 { Black's f7 Pawn is falling.} 49... Qg5 ( 49... Kh6 50. Rxf7 { And mate in 8.} 50... Re8 51. Qf6 Qg5 52. Qg7+ Kh5 53. Qxh7+ Qh6 54. g4+ Kg5 55. f4+ Kxg4 56. Qxh6 ) 50. Rxf7+ Rxf7 51. Qxf7+ Kh6 52. e7 { A second Queen is coming, with mate in 5 coming.} 1-0`} />

The single greatest performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations: Pierre Hantaï with rhythmic drive and life

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 22:32:07 GMT

I've been listening to JS Bach's Goldberg Variations for a quarter of a century now. I haven't actually said much about this piece on this blog, although I did mention attending a concert featuring a string trio arrangement of it a year ago.

I have a favorite recording, out of probably a dozen recordings I have heard since a college friend introduced me to the piece performed by Glenn Gould on piano . Several years ago I discovered my true favorite, upon encountering Pierre Hantaï on harpsichord in a CD recording.

Why Hantaï stands out for me

Given that there are plenty of other performances that I consider worthy, why is Hantaï's by far my favorite?

sustained intensity (many performances have me getting bored and sleepy)
rhythmic drive is always there; the music never droops
subtlety and shape to all phrasing and contrast
no distractions of self-absorption (many performances have certain kinds of oddities that are magnified when spread out over an hour or more)
nice harpsichord sound

Note: I once didn't like harpsichord, and always preferred a piano when possible, but now I actually prefer Bach's music on harpsichord, because of the nature of articulation and decay and how dissonances are more delicious on this instrument.

Here's a treat I just found by accident: a video of Hantaï performing the Goldberg Variations. Watch it if you care about the Goldberg Variations at all!

Conclusion

If you are already a fan of the Goldberg Variations, what is your favorite performance, and why? Also, does it matter to you whether piano or harpsichord is used?

Things look different from the perspective of the professional and the spectator

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 22:10:35 GMT

I saw an interesting article by young American chess Grandmaster Sam Shankland on his recent successful tournament in Brazil.

His goal was to qualify for the Chess World Cup, the tournament that feeds into the final candidates for the World Championship match.

"I knew before going that I’d be unlikely to face any of the top seeds until the end of the tournament, and that it would largely be about taking care of business against guys 100-200 points lower than me. While normally I would avoid such a tournament, it all goes back to that one goal: the World Cup. I did not care about playing good chess, challenging myself, raising my rating, playing with strong players -- all things I normally prioritize -- all I wanted was one of the four coveted spots. As such, I played very differently than normal."

Short draws

One thing about high level chess that often seems to confuse and frustrate spectators is the high percentage of short draws. Spectators find it easy to make fun of the elite competitors for being cowards or the like, not trying harder to win when it seems possible to do so in chess positions that are not yet dead.

But if you put yourself in the professional's shoes, you should be able to understand the strategic decision-making that happens on the board and off the board. I'm happy that players such as GM Sam Shankland are writing in a personal way about their choices.

"I made more short draws in this event than I have in all my other tournaments combined in the past year and a half. I love chess and I have a well deserved reputation for being a fighting player, which is largely due to my priorities."

Conclusion

GM Sam Shankland is a fine American chess player and writer. I appreciate his candor in explaining not only his chess moves but also his approach to his games and tournaments.

How do you perceive and judge professional behavior in the world that often seems at odds with the interests of other people than themselves: by chess players, teachers, politicians, physicians, musicians, writers, athletes, etc?

Some good science-based reading for Election Day, whether or not you voted

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 15:41:25 GMT

I voted today, on Election Day in the US.

That said, now is as good a time as any for some interesting articles about politics and voting. Here are some that came my way:

Motive attribution asymmetry

Oliver Burkeman discusses a study that shows that you argue that your side is motivated by love, while the other side is motivated by hate. But since the other side thinks the same, what is the "truth"?

"One of the reasons it’s so hard to accept the notion that our enemies might be motivated by love, I suspect, is because that conclusion seems to suggest that our enemies’ cause must therefore have merit."

"Actually, those two issues are completely unrelated."

I agree with this: it is quite possible (I'm not saying it's always the case) for someone you disagree with to have the most loving intentions, but simply be mistaken rather than evil.

Dangers of accurate statistical prediction by data journalism

A good article in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology about Nate Silver's statistical journalism argues that data journalism should focus on understanding rather than prediction.

"This extensive use of Big Data for election forecasting passively promotes our current sense of political fatalism."

"If our politicians can’t risk making public appearances or trying to appear human without navigating at least three levels of performative irony, then our political culture has entered a state of structural crisis."

Emotions of Election Day: asymmetric hedonic response

Harvard Kennedy School research result on asymmetric hedonic response: after an election, losing makes you far sadder than winning makes you happy.

I confess to having been really bummed out fairly often in the past two decades of voting. I've been trying to be more detached.

In praise of the occasional voter

Sometimes, some people make fun of people who do not vote (I never do this; there are often quite rational reasons to avoid voting). Here's an interesting article arguing that the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/upshot/the-vital-role-of-the-occasional-voter.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/upshot/the-vital-role-of-the-occasional-voter.html">"occasional voter" is actually quite valuable</span>.

From an economics point of view, "voting is a classic example of a free-rider problem" because the possible gain for each individual is so tiny, statistically, that it may not make sense to go out of one's way to vote.

On the other hand, voting has an interesting cost to the voter: "The very act of voting for a given candidate or party ties us mentally to that candidate and inadvertently costs us some measure of our neutrality." This is because we rationalize what we do in order to resolve our cognitive dissonance about the apparent pointlessness of voting. We try to fool ourselves into thinking we did something really important. "We don’t just choose what we like; we like more and more what we choose."

So the "occasional voter" can be an outsider not subject to cognitive dissonance as much as the regular and party-registered voter, countering partisanship.

Of course, it could be argued that partisanship, and the resulting gridlock, is good. But is it? That's another topic entirely.

The strange sameness of political candidates in the face of competition

The Conversable Economist, Timothy Taylor, offered an explanation for why politicians end up in the same squishy middle, based on Hotelling's famous 1929 mathematical model.

"Mainstream politicians thus face a continual dynamic where they seek to reassure their more ardent partisans that they are on their side, while shading and tacking as needed to pick up voters in the middle."

By the way, if you are interested in more mathematical modeling, check out Scott Page's free MOOC on "model thinking", which I reviewed here.

Bloggers' reactions to Election Day

Here's a blogger I follow, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/101755797073/and-one-more-note-on-politics" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/101755797073/and-one-more-note-on-politics">Alan Jacobs, on his options</span>.

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/05/09/people-hate-congress-but-most-incumbents-get-re-elected-what-gives/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/05/09/people-hate-congress-but-most-incumbents-get-re-elected-what-gives/">People hate Congress, but 90% of incumbents get re-elected</span>. "The message from voters to Congress? Throw the bums out. But not my bum."

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this taste of research results concerning psychology, sociology, and economics.

I'm not staying up to watch the returns from today's election. I did what I did, and it's over for me until next May.

Did you learn anything surprising in the links I shared here? Is there anything that will change how you think or behave when it comes to politics?

Lessons to learn from pianist Dejan Lazić's attempt to remove a critic's bad review

Sun, 02 Nov 2014 17:25:32 GMT

I never heard of the pianist Dejan Lazić until a news article about him started circulating: he was upset about a 2010 review of a concert of his, written by a Washington Post critic. Because a link to this review appeared high in Web searches of his name, he asked the Washington Post to remove the review under the EU's "right to be forgotten" law. The result: <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/31/pianist-asks-the-washington-post-to-remove-a-concert-review-under-the-e-u-s-right-to-be-forgotten-ruling/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/31/pianist-asks-the-washington-post-to-remove-a-concert-review-under-the-e-u-s-right-to-be-forgotten-ruling/">this article in the Washington Post about the situation</span> that came to my attention from music blogs I follow.

I don't have much to add to the commentary about the important questions about politics or philosophy regarding the "right to be forgotten"; there are very complex questions there.

In any case, Lazić claimed he has a right to control his public image, to make the Web reflect the "truth" about his concert performance.

But what about unintended consequences?

Unintended consequences

Obviously, one could argue that the law has resulted in unintended consequences in people trying to use the law for more than what it was in spirit aimed to do, which was to protect people from defamation or a past that no longer reflects who they are.

The main unintended consequence, however, as far as I'm concerned, is what Alex Ross said without words, in his <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.therestisnoise.com/2014/11/the-unfortunate-mr-lazi%C4%87.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.therestisnoise.com/2014/11/the-unfortunate-mr-lazi%C4%87.html">blog post here with a screen shot</span>.

Basically, what Lazić did is to make himself a household name, with one of the top Web search hits now being exactly the article about him trying to remove an article. Talk about going meta! He has pretty much guaranteed that he will be known for possibly the rest of his career as "the guy who was upset by a negative review and tried to have it taken down". I don't think he intended for that to happen. This article about his trying to remove a bad review is surely going to be the top hit for his name now!

Many actions have unintended consequences, if you didn't think far enough ahead or have contingency plans. And even if you are powerful enough and arrogant enough to think you have everything figured out, and don't consider what reaction you might get from your action, and entire chains of actions and reactions, then something further down the road can still wreck everything you tried to start; for example, the Iraq War and the entire "War on Terror" has destabilized Iraq and the entire Middle East, and has created more terrorists than existed before it.

I don't think there was any realistic scenario under which a lone pianist looking for fame could have killed that bad review in a major newspaper. An obscure pianist could kill a bad review in an obscure blog, probably. But once you are big enough, anything you do is news in itself.

Ignore negative reviews

I would advise Dejan Lazić to focus on making good music, getting more positive reviews from many sources. It is definitely possible that critics can kill a career, and certainly in the past, vicious powerful critics have silenced musicians, but in today's world, people do know to look at more than one source of trusted information. I for one would not rely solely on one random Washington Post music critic's review of a musician to determine whether to give that musician's work a listen: actually, I would just go look for audio or video samples to hear for myself. The world is different now than when the critics really did have more power than they have now.

If you are a musician, do you agree with what Lazić tried to do? If so, why?

If you are a music fan, how seriously do you take the top negative hits when you search for an unfamiliar musician?

How I avoid demotivating myself away from voting

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 22:11:10 GMT

It's that time of year again: three days from today is Election Day. I've written a few posts about voting over the past couple of years here already, and I've clearly changed my attitude about it over time:

November 2011
April 2012: I was too apathetic to vote.
November 2012
May 2013
November 2013: I voted but wrote nothing about it.
May 2014

This is my first post before an Election Day rather than after having voted. Why the change this time?

Reflections on my past behavior and attitudes

I have always been frustrated by politics and voting. That showed in my posts in the last three years. I always got very emotional and torn about the whole process. I finally settled on a habit of trying to minimize my involvement, not paying attention to any races or "debates" or any political coverage in the news until the night before Election Day, but I was still unhappy.

The situation now

Today, it is still the case that I have not looked at any political coverage for Tuesday. In fact, I have no idea who's running for what, with one major exception: Governor of Pennsylvania. That's been in the news for a year now, and totally unavoidable if you live in PA at all, and especially if you bothered to vote in the primary in May, which I did.

It turns out that I am accidentally less angry now than I used to be, because unknown to me, Abby has intercepted all political flyers arriving in our mailbox or on our doorknob (how dare they!) and recycled them, with one exception.

Negative emotions came back

Today I saw a flyer in a pile of mail. I tried not to see anything as I picked it up and recycled it, but it was impossible to see something. I have to hand it to the designer: the name of the politician reached my eye somehow, even though I prided myself on not seeing a single word (at least consciously) of anything else on the flyer.

A rush of disgust and anger came my way, as I reflected that actually, this is someone I already decided last May in the primary to vote for in the general election. As I've mentioned in previous posts, flyers that are shouting, negative, fear-mongering, and deceptive piss me off and make me want to puke down the throats of these politicians, especially those I expect to vote for.

(Note that in order to minimize bias, I have never heard this guy talk, and barely recall what he looks like, although I think I saw some head shot back in May. Also, I have no idea what he's been doing or saying since May, or whether any truly major scandal has broken out, although I assume I would have heard by now if so. I will learn what I need to know on Monday night.)

Taking more control

But now, after having read that fascinating article yesterday about emotional manipulation, I have decided that these politicians are only doing the rational thing in their game, nothing personal. You might want to argue that this is a flaw in democracy, as many ancient and modern philosophers have, of course, but that would be another topic of discussion entirely.

I was also annoyed by the robocall on the answering machine at home today, from the same guy.

Action to further minimize annoyance

We shut off the answering machine for our land line. We will not be answering any phone calls until after Election Day. Actually, we are not sure why we need any phones connected to our land line anyway, because in principle we could make sure all relevant accounts list our cell phones as our primary phone numbers (most already do but some old ones don't yet). We only need the land line for DSL purposes. The land line has been mostly nothing but trouble, a target for robocalls of all kinds.

Also, I wish there were a way to stop getting junk mail in general. Not just the election season junk mail, but all junk mail.

Conclusion

There will be no Election Day blog post on Tuesday. I've said all I need to say for this Election Day.

Win ugly or lose pretty: do you agree?

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 22:53:18 GMT

I read a juicy article <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/us/politics/pr-executives-western-energy-alliance-speech-taped.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/us/politics/pr-executives-western-energy-alliance-speech-taped.html">Hard-Nosed Advice From Veteran Lobbyist: "Win Ugly or Lose Pretty"</span> that exposed a speech by a political consultant, Rick Berman, that remarkably, offended one of the participants enough to cause a leak to the public.

The full transcript is here

If you love preserving your independence of mind, get angry when secretly manipulated, and want to learn a bunch of tricks of the trade, you'll want to read the whole thing!

Here are some highlights I found worth making note of.

Public opinion versus public judgment

Berman makes a point of distinguishing between public opinion and public judgment. He focuses on how to influence public judgment when the war cannot be won on opinion. Opinion is good to influence when possible, of course, but judgment is what actually matters, because it is the act of deciding to vote for some policy because of some facts.

Offense versus defense

Berman advocates always being on the offense, not defense. Being on defense is reacting to someone else. All students of psychology know that reacting is very poor tactics, because it leaves the framing of a situation up to the opponent, and therefore gives the opponent the advantage as far as natural human cognitive bias.

For example: in order to prevent change, throw around a lot of information and hypotheticals about what could happen upon change, in such a way as to confuse people and get them into a state of "I don't know who to believe". You want to make it sound like a possible tie to be broken. Because then by default, the psychological tendency is to give up and not decide, because "People are not prepared to get aggressive and in moving one way or another". Therefore, the status quo remains, and the status quo is a win for the side that wants to prevent change.

Also, apparently it's good to toss in children and animals to make one's opponents seem cartoonish and not to be taken seriously. Also, these kinds of images or videos are popular, helping the spread of such material.

And "I like to use humor to minimize or marginalize the people on the other side."

Common knowledge

Berman says that the goal is not to just send a message out there but to make it "common knowledge", something that people just assume because they heard it somewhere enough (completely independently of its truth, of course). And not just somewhere, but "enough times from enough different places". It's important to make it look like the message came from different sources, hence the "different places". (Nobody will be fooled if they know exactly where the message came from and that it came from one mastermind.)

Jack Hubbard on diminishing moral authority

Diminishing moral authority of the opposition means winning through making the other side lose. (Jack Hubbard took over from Rick Berman to speak at this point.)

One obvious way is to go personal. Rip apart the personal lives of people on the opposition. For example, the left-wing Congressman who is discovered to have a large investment in the energy industry: the public enjoys exposing hypocrisy.

"We have a section on every single activist. Their rap sheets, their criminal records that they have. We're really making this personal."

And "engaging unique or third party messengers to get involved on this stuff."

"The public really does have a celebrity worship culture. But...there is nothing the public likes more than tearing down celebrities and playing up the hypocrisy angle."

Rick Berman on emotions and FLAGS

Berman reminded the audience that some did not want to go offensive in that nasty way, but you have to "win ugly or lose pretty". "I was convinced you could not get into people's heads and convince them to do something as easily as you could get into their hearts or into their gut to convince them to do something." It's all about emotions. His acronym FLAGS:

Fear
Love
Anger
Greed
Sympathy

In the particular campaign he was describing, he deliberately wanted to tap fear and anger. Because "we're not going to get people to like the oil and gas industry over the next few months".

Endless war

Berman reminded his audience that "this is an endless war". Winning one battle is not enough because the opposition will keep trying win; it does not think of any single loss as a loss for the cause, but just "haven't won yet".

Berman used the metaphor "natural enemy": the Sierra Club has no "natural enemy". It is hard to fight against something that does not have a natural enemy.

How not to be found out

"We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors... we've been doing this for 20 something years".

Study the other side

Good quote from Berman: "I studied what the other side did to be successful and then translated it into how businesses can use those tactics".

Always aim for the middle

"We're always aiming with our messages for the people in the middle. I don't try to appeal to the people who already believe in us. And I don't try to convince people who are never going to agree with me, so I'm always playing the middle."

Conclusion

People like Rick Berman are master psychologists. Whether you agree with his tactics or not, know them and know that they are effective. Now it's your turn:

Do you or would you use these tactics yourself, for some cause that you deeply believe in? Why or why not?"
Was there something you learned that surprised you?
Is there some decision you made in the past that you now consider as having been triggered by a FLAGS emotional manipulation?

Disclaimer: Berman's messages have no effect on me; I am not his intended "middle" audience.

The Chess Improver: The common problem of following a pattern without understanding it

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 20:14:40 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""The common problem of following a pattern without understanding it"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Last week, I wrote about the importance of learning and teaching through comparing similar but different situations. Again and again this theme pops up, and is easy to miss if one is not careful. It is easy to memorize a pattern without understanding its context and purpose, or more charitably, to have understood it once but getting it mixed up with another pattern during the heat of battle. What is the solution? Sometimes the solution is just to review concrete details. Sometimes the solution is to remember a higher-priority pattern that gives real force and justification to the pattern at hand.

Here's an example I recently saw, involving the elementary Lucena position which is a win for the side with the Rook and Pawn versus Rook, if one understands the fundamental concept, which is "building a bridge" in order to block the opposing Rook's checks and therefore ensure Pawn promotion.

Lucena position

The standard easy win for White is to

Chase Black's King further away from the Queening square by checking. Lift the Rook to the 4th rank in preparation to "build a bridge".

However, White in eagerness to "remember" the key pattern, that of the Rook lift, failed to perform the first critical step, and the result was a draw by mistake! Building the bridge is pointless if it only results in Black's King reaching the advanced Pawn and gobbling it up.

The solution to this mistake is to remember that the primary goal in this position is not to build the bridge. The real goal is to successfully Queen the Pawn, and getting Black's King far away is the most important part of that, not the bridge building. The bridge building is not the goal, but the means to the larger goal. Without remember this, it is too easy to just vaguely remember one aspect of what the winning technique is, and use it outside of the larger context.

<ChessGame pgn={`[FEN "3K4/3P1k2/8/8/8/8/2r5/4R3 w - - 0 1"] [Setup "1"]

Re4 $6 ( 1. Rf1+ { Standard easy win.} 1... Kg7 ( 1... Ke6 2. Ke8 ) 2. Rf4 Kg6 3. Ke7 Re2+ 4. Kd6 Rd2+ 5. Ke6 Re2+ 6. Kd5 Rd2+ 7. Rd4 { Bridge built!} ) 1... Rd2 2. Kc7 Rc2+ 3. Kd6 Rd2+ 4. Kc6 Rc2+ 5. Kd5 Rd2+ 6. Rd4 $4 ( 6. Kc6 { Ironically, White's best is to get back to the Lucena position and try again!} 6... Rc2+ 7. Kb6 Rb2+ 8. Kc7 Rc2+ 9. Kd8 ) 6... Rxd4+ 7. Kxd4 Ke7 { Oops, draw!!} *`} />

The Chess Improver: Learning through comparing similar but different situations

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 07:13:51 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Learning through comparing similar but different situations"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

The temptation is very great, for both a learner and a teacher, to try to go fast through a lot of material, when learning a subject such as chess, because there is so much that is known. This is not a problem specific to chess: in fact, it is a problem for students of cooking, running, law, computer science, medicine, you name it. We all feel the burden of the accumulated knowledge of all of human history. Educators everywhere face the challenge of somehow distilling more and more knowledge, wisdom, and practical technique into less and less time. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut for deep learning. Just flipping through a chess book or even working through a set of exercises is no guarantee that when you sit down across the chess board, you will remember or know how to apply what you learned.

In my attempts to improve my own lifelong learning as well as my teaching, I have found that comparing similar but different situations is a technique that can be very useful in making learning more efficient, and even more interesting. Instead of trying to focus too much on "this is how to do things", it is better to have worked through several similar ideas that do or don't work, and know why. It is like in martial arts where you must learn how to fall, in addition to how to strike.

Fundamental endgames are a great place to notice both patterns and differences between them. Little things can make a big difference in endgames. It is a great mental exercise to understand fundamental endgames and learn to appreciate the importance of detail, and the unexpected beauty of peculiar features of chess positions. For example, consider the following Rook and Pawn endgame position, White to move. Can White win or is it a draw?

<ChessGame pgn={`[FEN "R7/P7/8/8/8/6K1/8/r5k1 w - - 0 1"] [Setup "1"]

Kf3 Kf1 2. Ke3 Ke1 3. Kd3 ( 3. Kd4 { Also wins, in a completely different way.} ) 3... Kd1 4. Kc3 Kc1 5. Kb3 Kb1 6. Re8 { Threatening a back rank mate.} *`} />

One way to win

The answer is that it is a win for White. The key insight is that in order to Queen the a7-Pawn, White must reach a position in which

Black cannot check White's King forever. White has time to move the Rook with check in order to free up the a8 square for Queening without losing the a7-Pawn (if Black's Rook is on the a-file always threatening to take it).

The tricky part of winning is finding out how to deal with all possibilities and obstacles while keeping in mind the key insight.

One way to win is to move the King all the way to the left, perpetually uncovering Black's King and therefore threatening to check it. This forces Black's King to move in the "shadow" of White's King; if the King does not move but the Rook checks instead, then White can simply bring the King near the Rook eventually and stop all checks and then be in position to check Black's King and Queen the a7-Pawn.

Once Black's King is pushed all the way to b1, and White's King at b3 prevents a Black Rook check, White has the tactical trick of moving the Rook to the right and simultaneously threatening Queening and checkmate on the first rank!

Changing the problem

Unfortunately, teaching this way to win, although instructive in its own right, can cause a failure to generalize. This is a special case kind of winning plan. To prove this, move the pair of Kings up one rank:

<ChessGame pgn={`[FEN "R7/P7/8/8/6K1/8/6k1/r7 w - - 8 1"] [Setup "1"]

Kf4 Kf2 2. Ke4 Ke2 3. Kd4 Kd2 4. Kc5 $1 { Racing toward the a-Pawn by running the King on the diagonal.} ( 4. Kc4 Kc2 5. Kb4 Kb2 { A student might be confused here how to proceed.} ) 4... Kc3 ( 4... Rc1+ 5. Kb4 { Heading toward Black's Rook.} 5... Rb1+ 6. Kc4 Rc1+ 7. Kb3 Rb1+ 8. Ka2 { Black has no more checks.} ) 5. Rc8 $1 Rxa7 6. Kb6+ { Discovered check wins the Rook.} *`} />

Here, if White blindly follows the plan of trying to box Black's King down, then it becomes clear at the end of the King march that the original tactical idea no longer works: there is no back rank mate.

I believe that it is extremely instructive to allow the student to try a generalization that fails, to solidify the understanding of what is going on, rather than treat endgame knowledge as a mechanical memorization of particular move sequences. Then after trying out some possibilities, we can finally reveal a key idea: White has another tactical trick, based on reaching a position in which White can still move the Rook away and allow Black to capture the a7-Pawn, but in return, White can perform a discovered check that wins the Rook. So White's King should, at the first opportunity, start a diagonal march straight to the a7-Pawn.

By presenting first the back rank trick, and then the discovered check trick, we allow the student the opportunity to learn a more general lesson than if the back rank trick had not been mastered first: that the goal is to be able to move the Rook with an appropriate tactic in mind, not just checkmate or a discovered check.

A variation that still obeys the pattern

It's always useful to show how a pattern can in fact be applied to a slightly different position, without substantial change. Move the Kings up more: the discovered check still works.

<ChessGame pgn={`[FEN "R7/P7/6K1/8/6k1/8/8/r7 w - - 0 1"] [Setup "1"]

Kf6 Kf4 2. Ke6 Ke4 3. Kd6 Kd4 4. Kc6 Kc4 5. Rc8 $1 Rxa7 6. Kb6+ { White wins Black's Rook.} *`} />

A variation that does not work

And, of course, it is necessary to show a variation of the initial position in which White cannot win, otherwise the student might get the wrong idea and again fall into mechanical memorization habits.

<ChessGame pgn={`[FEN "R7/P5K1/8/6k1/8/8/8/r7 w - - 0 1"] [Setup "1"]

Kf7 Kf5 2. Ke7 Ke5 3. Kd7 Kd5 4. Kc7 Kc5 5. Kb7 ( 5. Rc8 { This "trick" does not work here.} 5... Rxa7+ 6. Kb8+ Kb6 { Black gets out of check and protects the Rook just in time.} ) 5... Rb1+ { And White's King has no shelter.} *`} />

Here, the Kings are so far forward that Black has boxed in White's King so that it has no shelter and is far away from Black's Rook, so Black can keep on checking White for a draw. Note that a careless student might try to mechanically apply the discovered check tactic with Rc8 only to find that after losing the Pawn on a7, there is no win of the Rook, because Black's King is close enough to protect it! Again, allowing the student to fall into this trap is important, to prevent complacency and really nail down the nature of the discovered check tactic, which requires a nice combination of

White's King being close enough to the a7-Pawn to get there in two moves, including one "free" discovered check move if necessary. Black's King being far enough away from the a7-Pawn not to be able to cover the a7 square in one move.

Conclusion

Even elementary endgames provide quite a rich amount of material for setting up ways for a student to discover the reasons for what works and what doesn't work in a line of reasoning and a general plan.

Climbing the Cathedral of Learning to get to the Harvard Classics

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 23:12:24 GMT

I recently learned that the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume set of classic writings first published in 1909, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.openculture.com/2014/03/the-harvard-classics-download-all-51-volumes-as-free-ebooks.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.openculture.com/2014/03/the-harvard-classics-download-all-51-volumes-as-free-ebooks.html">are now available for free download as ebooks</span>. This isn't really news, but was just something that appeared on my radar.

What relevance such an ancient collection has today is an interesting question, especially in light of the fact that a century ago the concept of what was of interest in the history of the "world" was fairly narrow, but not something I'm discussing right now.

I had a hunch where I could find a physical copy of the Harvard Classics. I tested my hunch:

Sightings

I have seen this type of material (including, of course sets of encyclopedias) in many places, including personal homes: dusty, hardly opened volumes handed down generation after generation, perhaps, or acquired at bargain prices from library or garage sales.

But most interesting to me is seeing it in public places. In particularly, I suddenly had the suspicion (or unconscious memory) that the 36th floor of the Cathedral of Learning at Pitt, which has book shelves of many old books, might have the Harvard Classics.

Climbing the Cathedral

So I used my curiosity to stop by the Cathedral of Learning near lunch time and climb to the 36th floor, a curious form of exercise I hadn't engaged in for quite some time, maybe almost a year by now. I took off my shoes and socks and jacket, and stuffed them in my backpack before beginning the ascent. I am currently out of shape and started feeling nauseous probably around the 25th floor, but made it to the top:

There they were, the Harvard Classics!

Physically old books have a durability and charm to them. Here's "The Pilgrim's Progress", a book I actually acquired by accident at age 9 along with many others but never really read (I tried but it was too confusing, despite the illustrations):

A note on the "elevator modernization project"

After I climb to the top of the Cathedral of Learning, I have to choose whether to take an elevator down, and this time was no exception.

It turned out that an elevator appeared quickly before I had to decide whether to just walk down 36 floors, so I hopped in with some other people.

I heard a lot of complaints about elevator waits thanks to elevators being out of service. People talked about waiting fifteen to twenty minutes before giving up sometimes.

I kept my mouth shut about the fact that it only takes far less time to either ascend or descend the entire Cathedral on the stairs; this is not a nation of walkers, and everyone has personal reasons not to take the stairs. There are many good reasons to improve accessibility between all the floors of the Cathedral for all people, and I have found the elevators unreliable.

Getting back to the bottom, I saw a sign that explained the situation: there is an "elevator modernization project" in progress to try to considerably improve the elevator situation:

Conclusion

I found the Harvard Classics where I expected to find them! I will continue to climb the Cathedral in the future to see what other oldies exist up there. I am particularly interested in encyclopedias and "world history" books, having seen some really old ones in the past that were fascinating in either their short-sighted parochial nature or in their far-sighted prophetic correctness. I will report on what I find that might be particularly noteworthy.

The Chess Improver: Basic endgames teach how to tie together mathematics and logic

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 07:10:54 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Basic endgames teach how to tie together mathematics and logic"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

In the game of chess, each lowly Pawn has the potential to promote to a powerful Queen by advancing all the way to the 8th rank. Also, there's a remarkable rule that if one side cannot make any legal moves, the game is actually a draw, rather than a loss for the paralyzed side. These two facts create the phase of a chess game called the endgame, where a player has the opportunity to out-think and out-trick the opponent.

Logic

Chess has a well-deserved reputation for being a game of logic. Indeed, fundamentally the game really is a matter of logic, in the sense that everything is about managing the fact that everything boils down to "if I do this, then she can do that, but then I can do this other thing", and therefore a decision tree of immense breadth and depth. Nowhere is this more true than in the endgame, where being one move ahead of the other side may mean the difference between a win and a draw: and in fact, being one move ahead does not always win, but sometimes even loses (in situations called Zugzwang where getting somewhere first means the other side can make a waiting move and then pounce).

For example, a basic endgame position everyone must learn is the following King and Pawn versus Pawn position. Black to move, there is only one move that draws; the other two moves lose.

This is a perfect position to use to teach children how to think logically, even if they don't otherwise play chess. They don't even need to know how to checkmate with a Queen against King. You can just teach them how the King and Pawn work, and set the goal for White as being to get the Pawn to the 8th rank without its being captured. In fact, I think chess would be much more useful in teaching logic if play was arranged starting from simplified positions in endgames, skipping the much more complex phases of the opening and middlegame.

<ChessGame pgn={`[FEN "8/4k3/4P3/4K3/8/8/8/8 b - - 1 1"] [Setup "1"]

1... Ke8 { The only move that draws.} ( 1... Kf8 $4 { Loses.} 2. Kf6 Ke8 3. e7 Kd7 4. Kf7 { And White Queens.} ) ( 1... Kd8 $4 { Loses.} ) 2. Kf6 Kf8 3. e7+ Ke8 4. Ke6 { Stalemate.} *`} />

Meta-reasoning

Once a chess player begins applying logical reasoning, an observant player will observe that she is reusing certain patterns in reasoning again and again. This is where reasoning about reasoning, or meta-reasoning, comes in. The concept of "taking the opposition" in chess is one of the simplest examples. In the position above, Black draws by arranging it so that if White's King advances, Black's King is in position to "take the opposition" and prevent further progress. So the principle of opposition is not a part of the game of chess, but part of how we can reasoning about the game of chess. A chess player could in theory just apply the "rule" of opposition to play chess well, but without actually understanding why it works, would be missing a huge part of what chess is about: discovering patterns, proving facts about them (this is the "meta-reasoning"), and applying the patterns as building blocks.

Mathematics

This leads to the topic of mathematics in chess. I take the point of view that certain ways of effectively making decisions in chess amount to doing mathematics, going beyond just logic: arithmetic, algebra, geometry. There are many connections to be made here that, when made explicit, can greatly aid in transferring skills out of chess itself.

For today, I'll just mention a connection with arithmetic and geometry. In the position below, White to move can win, but only by very precise play. The aim is to prevent Black from taking the opposition, and then for White to take the opposition and reduce the problem to the previously mentioned position. The concept of reducing to a previously proved fact is fundamental to logical reasoning, of course. So where does the mathematics come in?

First of all, it must be understood that there is a race between the two Kings to get to one of the critical squares in front of White's Pawn that will determine whether White can win: White must get the King to d6, e6, or f6. So there may be some kind of counting implicit in whatever logical reasoning is used.

From a geometrical point of view, what is important to understand is that because Kings have to move either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, "distance" on the chess board is not the same as the "bird's eye view" visual spatial distance: chess operates on a more abstract geometrical space where, for example, all things being equal, diagonal moves can get a King somewhere much faster than just horizontal or vertical moves.

Arithmetic comes in to tie in this geometric insight with the logic-based goal-setting and reduction: the simple way to determine whether this position is a win for White is to count how many moves it takes to reach a desired square, and to count whether Black can stop this. Arithmetic is basically a meta-reasoning shortcut for otherwise engaging in low-level "if this, then that" logical reasoning. Here, we see that White can, in 3 moves, reach d5 unimpeded, because in 2 moves, Black can at most reach f6. Then we tie up the reasoning with one bit of logic/geometry: after White's King is on d5 and Black's King on f6, Black's King must go to e7 to prevent White from getting to d6. But then this allows White to get to e5, taking the opposition and winning the game.

I believe that this endgame position is very instructive for showing how to apply multiple levels and styles of logical and mathematical understanding to be able to guarantee a desired result. Any student who can master (as tested by playing out as either side to the optimal result) and be able to explain the evaluation of each position in which the Pawn is on e4 and the other Kings are on any other squares on the board will have demonstrated a real understanding of logical reasoning.

<ChessGame pgn={`[FEN "7k/8/8/8/4P3/8/5K2/8 w - - 0 1"] [Setup "1"]

Ke3 { The only move that wins.} ( 1. Kf3 $4 Kg7 2. Kf4 Kf6 { Black draws.} ) 1... Kg7 2. Kd4 { The only move that wins.} 2... Kf6 3. Kd5 { The only move that wins.} 3... Ke7 4. Ke5 { The only move that wins.} 4... Kd7 5. Kf6 Ke8 6. e5 { We reach a position known to be a win from before.} *`} />

The Chess Improver: The temptation to play safe can prevent improvement

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 07:02:49 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""The temptation to play safe can prevent improvement"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

A student of mine lost a game almost straight out of the opening as a result of facing Alekhine's Defense as White and overextending and losing the advanced e5 Pawn; there may have been drawing chances later in the game, but losing the e5 Pawn at move 13 was not fun:

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Pittsburgh Chess League"] [Date "2014.09.14"] [Round "1"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "B03"] [EventDate "2014.09.14"]

e4 Nf6 2. e5 Nd5 3. d4 d6 4. c4 Nb6 5. f4 dxe5 6. fxe5 c5 7. Nf3 $2 Bg4 $2 8. d5 e6 9. Bg5 $2 Bxf3 $6 10. Bxd8 Bxd1 11. Bxb6 axb6 12. Kxd1 Nd7 { White loses the e5 Pawn.} 0-1`} />

Avoid overreacting to the loss

This kind of thing happens to all of us: we can play too aggressively or carelessly, and end up losing. That's natural. But how we respond to our failure can determine whether we improve or simply get demoralized. In his disappointment, he suggested that maybe he should meet Alekhine's Defense with the cautious d3, protecting the e4 Pawn and refusing to play into Black's provocative idea of causing White to advance with e5.

OK, d3 is objectively not horrible, so why not play this? There are a couple of reasons:

If Black plays …e5, then you as White are playing a Philidor reversed with an extra move. Now, if you already play the Philidor as Black, this might well be just fine for you.

But if you don't play the Philidor as Black because you don't like the cramped positions, then why would you want to play it in reverse as White? From a psychological point of view, it makes no sense to open the game with e4 if you don't have a clear plan on taking on the Alekhine. If you do not play e5, you are passing up a great opportunity to learn how to try to use a space advantage in chess. <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://chessimprover.com/space-point-count/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://chessimprover.com/space-point-count/">This is an important skill to work on</span>. In less "unusual" openings the the Alekhine, White has to fight hard to get an undisputed space advantage, so it is a shame not to take up the challenge immediately when it is presented on move 2.

Take a middle path

In the game, White played the ambitious Four Pawns Attack against the Alekhine, trying to support the e5 Pawn with the f-Pawn, etc. Another wrong lesson to learn would be that White should not play the Four Pawns Attack. It is quite playable, if one is tactically precise. So I could advise studying all the various tricky lines Black has against the Four Pawns Attack.

But for an improver, I advise taking a middle path. Instead of either cowering in fear with d3 or going all out with the Four Pawns Attack, there are two other possible variations for White that are positionally quite sound and should ensure White a pleasant game with a space advantage, and completely avoid the problem of a possibly overextended e5 Pawn.

The Modern Variation with 4 Nf3 is quite sound, intending to recapture on e5 with the Knight if necessary. The Exchange Variation with 4 exd6 is also sound, dissolving the e5 Pawn entirely. So I advise learning the ideas behind one of these variations before embarking on other possible variations against the Alekhine.

The advantages of taking a middle path:

The solid positional approach is always useful to learn and understand, even if later on one chooses the sharper approach. If is not yet prepared for tactical trickery, it is quite justifiable for an improver to step back from it and save exploration of sharp lines for later. It can sometimes be useful to build up confidence after an annoying loss by avoiding an awkward line in any case.

Pittsburgh Code and Supply: Making music with Overtone in Clojure; Conveying information through sound

Wed, 08 Oct 2014 01:10:18 GMT

I attended a fine meeting of Pittsburgh Code and Supply dedicated to two related topics: music and sonification. I thought it was a great idea to have presentations on both topics in the same session, thereby giving a broad view of what can be done with sound through computation.

Erik Swanson on Overtone in Clojure

Overtone is a very interesting environment for programmable music written in Clojure that I'd heard of years ago but never gotten around to playing with, simply because my primary interest in music is playing music on traditional physical instruments with my own hands, the old-fashioned way. However, I am definitely open to the idea of doing interesting new things with computer aid; it just has not been a priority to explore.

As preparation for the presentation (I don't like feeling completely lost during live demos; I usually do!), I actually finally set up an Overtone project with Leiningen and walked through a tutorial that simply used the Clojure CIDER mode in Emacs to operate in a REPL. I didn't do any real live-coding, however. I just wanted to get a taste.

Erik Swanson gave a great presentation in which he described what he was doing as he live-coded some music with Emacs, incrementally creating instruments and generating pitches. Because of his presentation, I feel more comfortable about the prospect of really digging into Overtone if I ever want to.

Here's a video of his presentation:

Keith Callenberg on conveying information through sound

I learned a new word today: "sonification", the use of non-speech audio to convey information.

I may have vaguely encountered sonification before, but never while fully attentive to it. That changed when Keith Callenberg, a computational scientist, gave a fine presentation in which he gave numerous striking examples of sonification. He made the important distinction between music and sonification: music is sound for an aesthetic purpose, but sonification is for information transfer.

He convincingly showed why sonification is useful for data analysis, and also noted that our culture is strangely dominated by the visual, so there remain many opportunities to use sound to understand data. (Also, sonification is used to help the visually impaired.)

One local example he gave was a particulate monitoring study done at CMU.

David Souther on Web Audio in JavaScript

I thought we were done for the evening, but David Souther hopped up with an unscheduled lightning talk on using Web Audio in JavaScript.

Conclusion

I enjoyed the presentations on music and sound, and got some ideas for stuff I might want to do myself. Another excellent session for Pittsburgh Code and Supply!

A pretty exploratory fall hike in Frick Park and Duck Hollow

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 20:25:28 GMT

Abby and I hadn't gone hiking for a while, because of schedules, but decided on a free Sunday afternoon to simply go for an exploratory hike in our local Frick Park, as we've done many times before. There's never any shortage of ways to try something new. Lately, this has meant exploring narrow and hilly trails that mountain bikers use. We have to be careful on these to avoid a bike coming down out of nowhere!

We hiked about eight miles, starting with familiar territory but then entering the very strange!

Photos

I took a few photos along the way that you can check out.

Frick Park

We started by walking to and then entering Frick Park at the Blue Slide Playground at Beechwood and Nicholson, then taking Riverview Trail and then the Firelane Trail Extension down into Fern Hollow onto the Firelane Trail, meeting up with the Deer Creek Trail.

After crossing Commercial St, leaving Frick Park, we headed onto Nine Mile Run Trail. We noticed that the construction site that had been there for something like two years had finally been cleared away. It was about time!

It was peaceful and relaxing on Nine Mile Run.

Slag heap

Continuing on Nine Mile Run Trail, we reached the bridge and I was originally planning to continue on Nine Mile Run Trail, but happened to notice an intriguing steep trail up on a slag heap area right at the bridge. What the heck, why not explore it? We wished we had brought hiking poles, but fashioned some sticks from tree branches lying around, and proceeded up.

In theory I could have tried to figure out where we were, since I had my phone on me, but I like randomly exploring without having any idea where we are going; there was no way to get hopelessly lost anyway.

There were a whole bunch of switchbacks leading upward and we followed them for some time until reaching a particularly roller-coaster section going into a valley, and decided we had enough, especially since we spotted a mountain biker further up somewhere.

We turned off and took a trail heading just downhill, hoping to emerge somewhere in "civilization" eventually, maybe rejoin Nine Mile Run Trail that we had abandoned at the bridge. Meanwhile, we had clear views of the Waterfront across the Monongahela River. I figured we were in Duck Hollow somewhere.

Railroad tracks

Indeed, we emerged by the railroad tracks along the Mon. We walked along the railroad tracks for a bit and reached familiar territory, McFarren St. We got back onto the Nine Mile Run Trail to start heading home.

Back into Frick Park and home

Many trails lead to home.

Instead of returning the way we came, we took the very windy Iron Grate Trail instead, and eventually made it back to the Blue Slide Playground (taking Jay's Short Cut) and back onto the streets of Squirrel Hill.

What were those slag heap trails anyway?

I went online and looked for information on those slag heap trails and that whole area. As far as I can tell, the following are useful information from mountain bike community descriptions:

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.mtbproject.com/trail/5492893/slag-heap-switchbacks-to-plateau" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.mtbproject.com/trail/5492893/slag-heap-switchbacks-to-plateau">Slag heap switchbacks to plateau</span>
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.mtbproject.com/trail/4676264/crater-trail" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.mtbproject.com/trail/4676264/crater-trail">Crater trail</span>

Conclusion

Abby and I had fun time on a great fall afternoon exploring trails we'd never been on before. We definitely plan to go back and explore more, with hiking poles, ha!

I'm amazed by and grateful for what we can experience outdoors in nature even while embedded in the city of Pittsburgh.

The Chess Improver: Your Pawn is threatened: do you defend, advance, or trade?

Thu, 02 Oct 2014 07:02:40 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Your Pawn is threatened: do you defend, advance, or trade?""

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

In a chess game, both sides start out with a complete front line of Pawns, which means that to make progress, you have to break through that front line somehow. The only way to break through is to advance your own Pawns and bring out your pieces to attack your opponent's front line. At some point, a head-to-head clash occurs in which one side's Pawn is attacked by a Pawn from the other side. The question then is always:

Do I advance my Pawn past the attacking Pawn (if not otherwise blocked)? Do I capture my opponent's Pawn with mine (usually meaning a trade, unless it was a deflecting gambit)? Do I defend my Pawn (or overprotected it, if it was already defended)?

This question pops up early in the opening in particularly interesting fashion in the King's Indian Defense, in which Black challenges White's d4 Pawn with a Pawn to e5 that "threatens" the d4 Pawn.

At club level, I see players respond in each of the different ways, and sometimes I get asked "what is best?" The truth is, despite the particular popularity of certain responses at elite level, all three are definitely valid reactions at club level; in fact, I see White winning many games playing each way. The important thing is to know the reason behind each valid choice.

Even if you don't play the King's Indian Defense for either color, the strategic ideas are extremely interesting and worth studying, and can pop up in many openings.

Here is a typical decision point (I have chosen the "old main line" rather than the modern main line because it illustrates the themes more clearly). I want to discuss the fundamental ideas, not go into detailed opening variations: for that, you can consult an appropriate opening manual.

Closing the center

At club level, it is very common to see White immediately close the center by advancing d5, avoiding a trade of the d4 Pawn. Why would you want to do that?

Pros

Forever avoid any threats against the d4 Pawn, especially in light of Black's fianchettoed Bishop on g7. Forever avoid having an e4 Pawn exposed on a half-open e-file (if Black chose to capture with …exd4). Gain space on the Queen side.

Cons

Black's Knight gets a great outpost at c5, which is now a hole no longer covered by White's d4 Pawn. Black can plan to maneuver to get in an …f5 Pawn break attacking White's e4 Pawn and gaining space on the King side.

If you play this as White, you have committed to trying to win on the Queen side, by somehow advancing b4 to dislodge the Black Knight and somehow getting the c5 Pawn break in or taking control of the a-file or something. You are not going to win on the King side.

Exchanging Pawns

Also popular at club level is immediately exchanging Pawns.

Pros

As with closing the center, you no longer have to worry about the d4 Pawn.

As with closing the center, your e4 Pawn is safe and Black's fianchettoed Bishop is blocked in. You retain a space advantage because of the c4 Pawn controlling d5 and possibly having plans to get to c5.

Cons

Giving up control of the c5 square. The resulting Pawn structure leaves White with no immediate Pawn break but Black may have plans to maneuver to enable …f5.

If you play this as White, you have committed to trying to win on the Queen side, by somehow advancing b4, c5, b5, something like that. You are not going to win on the King side.

Holding the center

Finally, the most interesting option for White is to hold the center. I think it's useful to gain experience with the first two approaches above in order to appreciate why it might be beneficial but also risky to hold the center.

Pros

White continues to develop. Black is denied the c5 square. Black remains cramped, because the Knight on d7 has no place to go. White keeps the option of advancing or trading any time in the future as desired, if Black does not capture first. In the case of Be3, White has a possible plan of preparing d5 followed immediately by Nd2 to protect the e4 Pawn.

Cons

Black may capture on d4, freeing up c5 for the Knight, opening the dark diagonal, and half-opening the e-file.

Be3 is one of three common ways to continue developing while "waiting" for Black to do something, and the most subtle. It protects the d4 Pawn more, in anticipation of Black capturing it.

Now Black is the one with a choice: take up the challenge or put pressure on White's e4 Pawn to force White to make a decision about advancing or trading. Many variations are possible, and I'm not discussing them here, but the point is that both sides are subtly fighting over what to do and what to encourage the other side to do. Note that if Black plays the waiting move …c6, White's d5 suddenly has a lot more effect than when Black's Pawn was on c7. Also, if Black plays …Re8, again, White can play d5 making Black's Rook look funny on the closed e-file. Finally, after …Ng4, White can argue that this does nothing other than misplace the Knight.

Another way to hold the center

Qc2 is another way to hold the center, with a double purpose:

Overprotect the e4 Pawn. Prepare to play Rd1 protecting the d4 Pawn and also threatening to capture on e5 with a discovered pin.

<ChessGame pgn={1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7 4. e4 d6 5. Nf3 O-O 6. Be2 Nbd7 7. O-O e5 8. Qc2 { White holds the center.} *} /> A third way to hold the center

Finally, Re1 is also another way to hold the center. It may look mysterious, but the point is to play Bf1 to "discover" overprotection of the e4 Pawn.

The Chess Improver: Accept the sacrifice if the alternative is to lose anyway

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 07:03:23 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""The Chess Improver: Accept the sacrifice if the alternative is to lose anyway"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

When I was in my final year of high school, I played in the last tournament of my life before I returned to chess two decades later: I played in the 1987 Michigan High School Team Championship. I ended up winning the first board prize with a perfect score of 5 points, but I always felt funny about how I achieved that, because in one of my games I played a sacrifice that I felt guilty about for two decades. Also, that was the only tournament in my life that I ended up losing my score sheets for, so I do not even have the full score of that game. But I do remember vividly the moves leading up to the critical position, and my mindset.

Seeing the possibility of a Greek gift sacrifice

On move 10 out of the opening, I suddenly spent a huge amount of time deciding whether to play the "Greek gift" sacrifice against my opponent's King, sacrificing my Bishop on h7 with check.

But in my attempt to calculate a win, I could not find a forced win. I saw defensive resources, so I was reluctant to play an unsound sacrifice. But the idea of playing the sacrifice really appealed to me. You have to understand that I had never played the Greek gift sacrifice before, only read about it in books, and also I knew this might be the last chess tournament of my life, as I was going off to college in the fall, and I had actually "retired" from chess in my sophomore year of high school, and came out to play in the Michigan High School State Championship only because I had started up a chess club in my high school in the fall in hope of boosting my college application (I brought four teammates who had never played in a tournament before). I outrated my opponent by over 500 USCF rating points, so there was no need for me to play recklessly to win, so my motivation was just to finish my chess-playing days in style.

I did see that I would get compensation for the sacrifice, and therefore should not lose if I played the sacrifice, but that was all I could see. Even after I went home to analyze the game, because I did not have access to good computational power in the 1980s, I did not believe I had the full truth of the position until the 2000s, on my return to chess, when chess engines by then had become very strong.

Sacrifice declined!

I was simultaneously ashamed and relieved when my opponent thought only briefly and declined the sacrifice, and therefore easily lost, being a Pawn down without compensation, and having a weakened King side also.

My opponent must have concluded that my deep thought meant I had figured everything out, but in fact, my deep thought came from not having figured it out! Granted, I was much higher-rated than my opponent, but higher-rated players can make terrible moves too, and sometimes even deliberately as a swindle, so you should think for yourself for a bit, and not always assume your higher-rated opponent has everything figured out. Granted, psychologically it was clearly a shocker to him that I thought mysteriously for such a long time moves before the sacrifice.

In club play, I often see fear of accepting sacrifices, and painful losses resulting from declining. The loss is usually painful because a sacrifice significantly disrupts a position, so if your position is disrupted anyway, and there is no visible immediate mate, maybe you might as well grab some material for your trouble; if the attack goes wrong, then you may have a good chance of consolidating and winning as a successful defender. Part of chess is choosing to defend.

So I'm saying, accept the sacrifice if you honestly do not see anything wrong with doing so. You might be making a mistake, but at least make the mistake and lose rather than choosing the path of sure loss, losing material against a much higher-rated player.

How sound was the sacrifice?

The fact that White is missing the dark-squared Bishop and only has a Queen and two Knights really restricts White from having a win in this position. The only possible things White can do are try to push h4, maybe castle Queen side, and use the two Rooks somehow. Meanwhile, Black can defend the King and develop. Note that if White tries to win back an exchange, the result is an unfavorable balance of material in which White gets a Rook and a Pawn or two for two minor pieces, so it is no use for White to regain material.

I've inserted some variations into my annotations below.

Irony: there could have been an alternative Greek gift sacrifice!

The irony is that if I had played Nc3 instead of Bd2, and "normal" development had continued, with Black "castling into it", then the Greek gift sacrifice would have been obviously sound and winning. The huge difference is that with White's dark-squared Bishop still on the board, and guarding the Knight on g5, White does not have to support the Knight with the Queen, but can calmly play h4, followed by Qg4, with a deadly barrage of discovered checks to follow: a check with the Queen or with the Bishop on c1 if the King goes to h6.

Note that it is important to play h4 first, to avoid Black's tempo-gaining …f5 against the Queen on g4, because with the Pawn on h4 first, then h5+ can be played at any time, and optimally when Black's King on g6 cannot escape to f5. Check it out with a computer engine if you want to verify that it's a quick win for White.

Why did I play Bd2 anyway? I had some vague idea that getting rid of Black's "good" Bishop for my "bad" one was advantageous. Also, note that I recaptured "wrong" with Nbxd2; I just recently wrote an article about why Qxd2 is usually best. But in 1987, my positional understanding was not so good.

Some resources on the Greek gift sacrifice

A <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.chess.com/article/view/the-greek-gift-sacrifice-lives-on" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.chess.com/article/view/the-greek-gift-sacrifice-lives-on">well-written overview</span> by GM Daniel Naroditsky.

A previous Chess Improver article by Ashvin Chauhan.

A 2012 game of mine in which I played a correct Greek gift sacrifice.

The game (up to the point of the sacrifice)

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Michigan High School Team Championship"] [Site "Lapeer, MI"] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black ""] [Result "1-0"] [ECO "C02"] [EventDate "1987.02.28"] [WhiteElo "2050"] [WhiteTeam "Ann Arbor Huron High School"]

e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. e5 c5 4. c3 Nc6 5. Nf3 cxd4 6. cxd4 Bb4+ $2 7. Bd2 $2 ( 7. Nc3 { Obvious and good.} 7... Nge7 8. Bd3 O-O $4 { This time the Greek gift sacrifice wins.} 9. Bxh7+ Kxh7 10. Ng5+ Kg6 11. h4 $201 ) 7... Bxd2+ 8. Nbxd2 $6 ( 8. Qxd2 { The correct recapture.} ) 8... Nge7 ( 8... Qb6 { Putting pressure on the d4 Pawn was good.} ) 9. Bd3 $6 O-O $201 ( 9... Qb6) 10. Bxh7+ $5 Kh8 $2 { In the game, my opponent declined the sacrifice, and easily lost as a result.} ( 10... Kxh7 { The critical test is to accept the sacrifice.} 11. Ng5+ Kg6 12. Qg4 f5 $201 13. Qf4 ( 13. Qg3 $2 f4 $1 { Gaining time and freeing up the f5 square.} 14. Qg4 Qe8 $1 { Not fearing any discovered check.} 15. Nxe6+ Kf7 16. Nf3 Bxe6 17. Ng5+ Kg8 18. Qxe6+ Rf7 { White's attack is over. White will end up with a Rook and two Pawns for two Knights, with nothing better than equality at best.} ) ( 13. exf6 $2 Kxf6 { Black will consolidate soon by bringing the King to safety with ...g6 and ...Kg7} 14. Nh7+ Kf7 15. Nxf8 Qxf8 { White has a Rook and Pawn for a Bishop and Knight, and Black has a clear advantage, will consolidate with ...Kg8 and ...e5.} ) 13... Rh8 { White doesn't have anough material to come up with an immediate win but has some pressure.} ) 11. Bd3 { I won after some number of unmemorable moves.} 1-0`} />

Observing Constitution Day with "The Supreme Court and Privacy: The Fourth Amendment in the Digital Age"

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 21:54:01 GMT

I have a habit of observing Constitution Day every year by attending a presentation at CMU and thinking about issues relating to the Constitution.

Last year (2013), I was too disheartened to observe Constitution Day but wrote a little bit about why.

This year, I returned because the topic for discussion sounded interesting: <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://thebridge.cmu.edu/organization/SLO/calendar/details/466499" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://thebridge.cmu.edu/organization/SLO/calendar/details/466499">Mary Jo Miller gave a talk "The Supreme Court and Privacy: The Fourth Amendment in the Digital Age"</span> in the Posner Center. (Miller is a Staff Attorney for the Pennsylvania State Education Association and an adjunct professor in Carnegie Mellon's Social and Decision Sciences Department.)

The fourth amendment

<blockquote> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. </blockquote>

Mary Jo Miller gave an entertaining and instructive talk in which she discussed various rulings by the Supreme Court involving interpretations of the fourth amendment in various circumstances.

First, she reminded us that the fourth amendment came about because of the colonialists' bad experiences with England when arbitrary searches of people's home happened.

Then she argued that although it is popularly held that there is a "conservative" ("originalist") wing of the Supreme Court (typified currently by Scalia) and a "liberal" ("living Constitution") wing (typified in the past by Stevens), on fourth amendment issues, they are not always split. In fact, she gave examples of where the Court was unanimous.

The primary concern by the Court has been to respect (in the absence of probable cause) the doctrine that "each man's home is his castle". Miller gave examples involving surveillance of a marijuana grower's home through a heat detector, as well as examining the contents of a drug dealer's cell phone, as being judged a violation of fourth amendment rights because of what can be considered one's "home": a cell phone is actually a computer containing much of one's possession, so it is in fact one's "home" and requires a proper warrant in order to search it!

That's about the "exclusionary rule" and "fruits of the poison tree":

What about the NSA?

After almost an hour, I had to leave, and therefore did not stay for questions and answers. I would have asked about what the current thinking is by the Court about NSA surveillance. When is information far enough removed that it is no longer considered one's "home"?

Conclusion

I did enjoy this year's Constitution Day observance at CMU. Mary Jo Miller gave an excellent talk discussing various Supreme Court rulings and different aspects of the fourth amendment.

The Chess Improver: The difference between a Knight developed at c3 and at d2

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 11:10:29 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""The difference between a Knight developed at c3 and at d2"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

There is a well-known trap in the Bogo-Indian Defense that raises an interesting question whenever I show it to someone. The trap is as follows and involves a question of how White should recapture after a trade of Bishops by Black:

The question after this trap is always, "Well, why would White ever want to play Qxd2 anyway, exposing the Queen to an attack by …Ne4? Isn't it obviously better to recapture with Nbxd2, simultaneously developing the Queen Knight?" This is an excellent question. It is best answered by examining some long-term issues in the middlegame arising from this opening.

Comparing Knight developed at c3 and Knight at d2

Knight at c3

First, we look at what can happen if Black mistakenly allows White to recapture the Bishop with Qxd2 instead of Nbxd2, by not taking White's Bishop early enough for the "trap".

Black's plan in this variation of the Bogo-Indian is to play …d6 and …e5, attacking White's Pawn on d4 and encouraging White to close the center with d5. After the center is closed, all attention must be directed toward Pawn breaks by either side.

White is acknowledged by theory to have some advantage in this opening, having more space and a lead in development, and can think about attacking either on the Queen side (with plans such as a3, b4, c5) or on the King side (with plans such as e4, Ne1, Nd3, f4). But Black has a solid position, and can aim for counterplay with …a5 with …Na6 or …Nbd7 aiming for …Nc5, and/or …c6, to prevent White from gaining too much ground on the Queen side, and perhaps preparing slowly for …f5 to further attack White's e4 Pawn chain base.

Knight at d2

By contrast, let's see what happens when Black correctly forces White to recapture the Bishop with Nbxd2.

below is a sample continuation, in which at move 13, probably White's best move is the paradoxical undeveloping move Nb1! The Knight at d2 is not doing much, being blocked by White's own c4 and e4 Pawns. More important, it is not controlling the important a4 square (that Black can possibly aim to occupy with …a4), and it is not controlling the b5 square that could also be important (in a later attack against Black's c7 and d6).

But this retreat wastes two moves (the original Nbxd2 and the Nb1) before getting to c3. However, in the Qxd2 situation, White wasted a move with the Queen, which is not so well-placed on d2: White's Queen is actually better placed on d1, where it controls a4, than on d2. But White's Rooks are not connected, so White will eventually want to develop the Queen anyway, perhaps to c2. So overall, White has lost one move, net, and, and this does make some difference in White advantage, even in a closed position, because the extra White move in the Nc3 variation makes it that much harder for Black to catch up in development and begin counterplay.

Summary

The summary of the situation is that paradoxically, since White wants the Knight on c3 anyway eventually, "saving" time by recapturing with development by playing Nbxd2 actually ends up wasting a move because the Knight will have to spend two more moves to get back to c3. Knights are funny pieces because any time a Knight has a choice to go to one of two different squares, if it chooses to go to one of them, it will always require two more moves to get to the alternate square. This is something to think about when planning Knight maneuvers: it is efficient, when possible, to plan to get to a desired square with the smallest number of moves possible (given the tactical constraints).

The other point to remember is that "wasting" moves to get a Knight to a good square may be justified. "Backwards" Knight moves are very important in chess, because a Knight on a good square can be so powerful that it is worth spending the time to get the Knight there. Look at how White thematically "undevelops" the Knight on f3, where it is doing nothing, to e1 and then to d3, to control the c5 square and b4 square (in case of a Pawn advance to b4 in the future) and also regain pressure on Black's e5 Pawn and help support an f4 advance.

Study of typical middlegame positions in the Bogo-Indian can pay off with better understanding of the roles of both of White's Knights and both of Black's Knights (Black's King Knight was not discussed here, but it has plans too).

The Chess Improver: Fianchettoing your King's Bishop may weaken your c4-Pawn

Thu, 04 Sep 2014 11:11:17 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Fianchettoing your King's Bishop may weaken your c4-Pawn"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

I saw a curious position recently in which strangely, White was in a position to lose a c-Pawn placed on c4. I then remembered that it is actually not uncommon for this Pawn on c4 to be undefended when White has fianchettoed the Bishop to g2, because unlike classical development of the Bishop, where the Bishop is on e2 or d3 and therefore protects the Pawn on c4, the Bishop on g2 does nothing to protect the light squares from f1 to a6. Check out this position:

A standard theme for Black counterplay

Many middlegame plans by Black in these kinds of opening development setups in fact target White's c4 Pawn and the light squares on the Queen side in general, while White tries to make something long-term out of increased central control of e5 and d5 (over classical development of the Bishop) and of course the long diagonal from h1 to a8. These positions can be very subtle for both sides to play. In this article I'm not discussing any of these subtleties, but simply pointing out a common theme for Black.

A variation of the King's Indian Defense:

A variation of the English Opening:

And of course, the concept behind a popular approach to the Queen's Indian Defense:

I just saw and heard the most amazing performance of Schumann's Fantasy for piano by Alexandre Moutouzkine

Fri, 29 Aug 2014 03:42:37 GMT

My single favorite work of music by Robert Schumann is his Fantasie in C for piano, Op. 17. I was introduced to this piece in a course for non-musicians I took first semester of freshman year in college.

I have to confess that in the past two decades since discovering that piece, I never found a perfect performance of it, although Sviatoslav Richter's came close, and I remember rushing to buy it when it was reissued on CD (back when one had to wait to transition from LPs). But I always felt something was missing.

I just accidentally discovered the performance of a lifetime, captured in video on YouTube. Why did I like this one so much?

YouTube accidental find

Just last week I had a YouTube accidental find, of Robert Hill. I had another find now, while not even searching for Schumann. Somehow my YouTube sidebar popped up a suggestion to check out a performance of Schumann's Fantasie in C for piano by some random dude named Alexandre Moutouzkine.

The YouTube video appeared to be highly rated, and was recorded live at a piano competition in 2011. I'm a sucker for live performances with actual video, so I checked it out.

Alexandre Moutouzkine

First impressions are important. Well, I was hooked after just twenty seconds, because he was playing it the way I hear it in my mind! The lyrical flow and phrasing and drama got me hooked. Not square, but freely emotional, yet under control. My experience was also much enhanced by seeing him in action, as he moved his body completely in sync with the music, as though his entire being was part of the instrument. I'm not a fan of musicians who move a lot but don't actually add to the musical expression, but it seemed like this guy was the real deal.

Before a minute was up, I was already totally entranced by his fluidity of tempo and dynamic contrast. He was maxing out on emotional expression in just the way that I've always wanted to hear and see this piece performed. Schumann wrote this in a dark period of life when it was not clear he would ever get to marry Clara Wieck (which he eventually did).

I'll stop with the blow-by-blow, but just say that I was sitting on the edge of my seat at home for half an hour while he performed the entirety of this piece. I was not disappointed. It was like the spirit of Schumann had entered him and he was showing how Schumann felt. The final movement, the slow movement, was particularly lovely.

A bit of nitpicking: of course there were some botched notes, but it would be stupid to focus on that; more seriously, the second movement (fiendishly difficult to play, admittedly) was not as solid as it could have been. But I loved the first and third movements.

Video vs. just audio?

My experience does leave me with some questions. Is it possible that I am actually deceived about the quality of interpretation because there was video and I saw the performer up close? What if there were video of Richter available? Would it change my mind about him either positively or negatively? Some naysayers would argue we should do some kind of blind comparison. But I don't think that. Because I perform music now as an amateur, and prefer attending live performances of music, I understand now (as I did not when I merely collected audio recordings and listened) that the "music" does not just exist on paper or as audio, but as the full performance context, and seeing video helps a lot in filling in that context.

This issue has come up this year in the news, and I may write more about it in the future.

Some naysayers in the YouTube comments decry the physical emoting by Alexandre Moutouzkine, but I do not.

I am ready to admit that at least part of what was missing for me in listening to Sviatoslav Richter was that I did not see him, but only heard him.

Listen for yourself

Here's the video.

More about Alexandre Moutouzkine

Only after watching the video did I do a Web search on this young guy. He's 34 now and here's a Wikipedia page about him. Definitely someone to keep an eye on.

Performances by Sviatoslav Richter

If you want to compare (but only audio, no video), here is Sviatoslav's classic 1961 studio recording (the one I've treasured for decades):

There's also a 1959 Prague live recording, which I was not aware of till looking Richter up on YouTube just now; it does have more of a sense of freedom than the studio recording:

Video footage of Richter in action

There is video footage of Richter in action in other music. I particularly like this video of Richter playing Brahms' intermezzo in E minor, Op. 116, No. 5. You can see Richter rocking rhythmically to the music as he plays it:

Conclusion

I was very pleased to have discovered Alexandre Moutouzkine's live performance of Schumann's Fantasie in C for piano. Time will tell whether I will always consider it as amazing as I do now, but it really touched my heart.

Do you consider it important to experience music live and/or visually? Or do you think that is just a distraction and the best way to experience music is privately through pure audio?

The Chess Improver: What not to do if you have the isolated Pawn

Thu, 28 Aug 2014 11:11:37 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""What not to do if you have the isolated Pawn"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

A typical introduction to positional principles in chess covers the advantages and disadvantages of having an isolated Pawn, a Pawn that has no Pawns on the files adjacent to it and therefore cannot be protected by another Pawn. (In particular, the most common isolated Pawn is the isolated d-Pawn.) Since it is easiest to understand why an isolated Pawn might be a long-term static disadvantage, many players reflexively go out of their way to avoid ending up with one. The situation is not helped by the use of illustrative games in which one side has an isolated Pawn and suffers quite a bit before losing the Pawn and the game.

But as a student of mine pointed out while studying such games, the situation is not actually that simple. Yes, it can be frustrating defending a position in which you have an isolated Pawn without any of the benefits (not discussed here) of having one, but that does not mean the position is actually lost. Whether your opponent can actually make any progress is another matter. It is instructive to know how to play for a draw in an unpleasant defensive position. Much chess instruction focuses on how to win, but ignores questions of how to avoid losing.

Here's a classic isolated-Pawn game that ended poorly for the defender.

Korchnoi-Karpov, World Championship in Merano, 1981

Sliding from an advantage to equality

In the opening, Korchnoi as White accepted an isolated d-Pawn position. Karpov responded with a "Knight on the rim" move 11…Nh5 to trade off dark-squared Bishops. This wasn't actually very good. It potentially gave White precious time to create a thematic good position: White could have played Re1, Ne5 with pressure against Black's f7 and e6 Pawns, then begun a thematic attack on Black's King side (especially with the h6 advance weakening the King side already), either through a Qd3/Bc2 lineup and/or a Rook lift with Re3/Rg3, something like that. (Full discussion of how to attack if you have an isolated d-Pawn is outside the scope of this article.)

White dawdled with 13 Bb3 and then 15 Qe2, which did nothing to create threats against Black's position. And then White played 16 Ne4? which resulted in a simplification that left White fighting for a draw.

Simplifying trades are what you do if you are playing for a draw with an isolated Pawn, to reduce the other side's attacking possibilities.

Refusing to accept that the goal should be to defend a draw

On move 19, White had the opportunity to trade Rooks and practically guarantee a draw. The fewer the pieces, especially powerful long-ranging major pieces, Rooks and Queens, the fewer opportunities for the opposing side to win the Pawn and still have a middlegame initiative to win the game. So White should have simplified here. The task of drawing would still have been slightly tricky, but doable, requiring keeping track of Black's Queen, Rook, and Knight activity.

On move 22, White made another mistake and played the backward-moving 22 Qe1? It was best to simply wait around and do nothing, after having everything well-defended: White's Queen was centralized at e4, protecting the d4 Pawn and exerting pressure on the d5 square.

Often, in a defensive position, the best thing to do is to wait for the draw to happen. Trying a funny plan when there is nothing really going for you can backfire badly. White has no winning chances in this position.

Unnecessary passivity

On move 23, White played 23 Rcd3? which just turned a fine Rook (on the open c-file) into a purely defensive piece. OK, the idea may have been to dissolve the isolated Pawn by playing d5, but this was easily parried by 23…Rd6.

Final simplification

On move 27, White traded the Bishop for the Knight on d5. Objectively this is OK, actually, if the goal is to draw. But the followup shows that was apparently not the goal. So the real problem is a mismatch between an idea and what is consistent with that idea.

Own pieces in disarray

28 Rb3? was a terrible move that took a defensive Rook and removed it from its defensive function, and also exposed the White Queen to a pin of the d-Pawn, in case Black ever got in …e5. 29 Qc3? compounded the problem by leaving the Rook on d1 completely undefended.

33 Qa3? removed the Queen from the action in the center and King side after White had already weakened his King's position with the necessary 30 f4 earlier.

Now all that was needed for Black to win was to tactically take advantage of White's uncoordinated pieces and unprotected King, and Karpov did that precisely.

An important note about how to draw

Sometimes the easiest way to draw is to just give up the weak isolated Pawn without a fight, in exchange for activity and simplification. Instead of risking King unsafety with 30 f4, White could have decided to just lose the d-Pawn but keep King safety intact and Rooks and Queen active, say with 30 Qf3. I will confess that I have been held to a draw a couple of times in games in which I expended effort to win an isolated Pawn but at the cost of massive simplification and could not win the ending.

Summary

To answer my student's question about this game: yes, there were multiple turning points in the game at which White could have held still and played for a draw. Especially in the case of an isolated Pawn and much piece simplification, there is often no way to win the Pawn or force some other concession somewhere else, if one just puts pieces on good defensive squares and then just waits. The only way for the other side to win is to break through by distracting the defensive pieces and taking advantage of pins and the single possible Pawn break (…e5 here) to create threats elsewhere on the board (such as on an exposed King). Note that the game was not lost because of losing the isolated Pawn: the game was lost by trying too hard to hang on to it.

The complete annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "World Championship"] [Site "Merano"] [Date "1981"] [Round "?"] [White "Korchnoi"] [Black "Karpov"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "D53"] [PlyCount "86"] [TimeControl "40/7200:20/3600:1800"]

c4 e6 2. Nc3 d5 3. d4 Be7 4. Nf3 Nf6 5. Bg5 h6 6. Bh4 O-O 7. Rc1 $5 dxc4 8. e3 c5 9. Bxc4 cxd4 10. exd4 $5 ( 10. Nxd4 { Safe, avoiding the isolated Pawn.} ) 10... Nc6 11. O-O Nh5 $6 ( 11... b6 { Normal and good.} ) 12. Bxe7 Nxe7 13. Bb3 $6 { I don't like this committal move before completing development.} ( 13. Re1 { Natural and good. In particular, White has potential thematic sacrifice ideas against f7 and e6 if Black is not careful.} 13... Nf6 14. Ne5 { I love White's position here.} ) 13... Nf6 14. Ne5 Bd7 15. Qe2 $2 { The standard plan of putting the Queen on d3 and Bishop on c2.} ( 15. Re1 Rc8 16. Qd3 ) 15... Rc8 ( 15... Bc6) 16. Ne4 $2 { Makes little sense. White can only play for a draw after simplifying like this.} 16... Nxe4 17. Qxe4 Bc6 18. Nxc6 Rxc6 $201 { White has no winning chances and should think about securing the draw.} 19. Rc3 $2 ( 19. Rxc6 bxc6 20. Rd1 { Simplifying makes it harder for Black to make progress. Black can win the d4 Pawn only by piling up the Queen Rook and Knight on it, but White can just keep everything defended and chase the Knight away as needed. Black's isolated Queen side Pawns prevent a successful Pawn break there.} ) 19... Qd6 20. g3 Rd8 21. Rd1 Rb6 $1 { Keeping the Rook on the board and active.} 22. Qe1 $2 { Just undefending the d4 Pawn and going passive.} ( 22. Kg2 { White could just sit around and wait.} ) 22... Qd7 23. Rcd3 $2 { Useless, since Black is not going to allow d5.} 23... Rd6 { Black has effectively immobilized White. The game should still be a draw, because Black cannot win the d4 Pawn and does not have a useful Pawn break.} 24. Qe4 Qc6 25. Qf4 Nd5 26. Qd2 Qb6 27. Bxd5 Rxd5 $201 { Only Queens and Rooks and Pawns are left. White does have to watch for a possible ...e5 Pawn break.} 28. Rb3 $2 { Terrible, making the d4 Pawn pinned because of the Queen on d2.} ( 28. Qc3 { Keeping everything protected should hold the draw with ease.} ) 28... Qc6 29. Qc3 $2 Qd7 { Now Black can play for ...e5 to win the d4 Pawn.} 30. f4 { Now White has weakened the King and the Rook on b3 is out of play.} ( 30. Qf3 $5 { White could have played to draw a one-Pawn down ending.} ) 30... b6 ( 30... f6 { Immediate aggression was possible.} ) 31. Rb4 b5 32. a4 bxa4 33. Qa3 $2 { Now the Queen is totally out of the action, far away from the center and from the defense of the King.} 33... a5 34. Rxa4 Qb5 { White's Rook on a4 is immobilized and White's Queen is stuck defending it.} 35. Rd2 e5 36. fxe5 Rxe5 { Black already has a won position. Black will invade White's back rank soon.} 37. Qa1 $2 Qe8 { Threatening to win White's Queen on the back rank.} 38. dxe5 ( 38. Rd1 Re2 { And White will be mated shortly as the Queen invades.} ) 38... Rxd2 39. Rxa5 Qc6 { Threatening mate on g2.} 40. Ra8+ Kh7 41. Qb1+ g6 42. Qf1 Qc5+ 43. Kh1 Qd5+ { White loses the Rook on a8.} 0-1`} />

Discovering the beautiful keyboard playing of Robert Hill by accident on YouTube changed my life

Fri, 22 Aug 2014 02:14:23 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://www.mh-freiburg.de/typo3temp/processed/csm_prof.-dr.-robert-hill_c7981b16bc.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.mh-freiburg.de/typo3temp/processed/csm_prof.-dr.-robert-hill_c7981b16bc.jpg">[image: Robert Hill]</span>

Recently, I completely accidentally discovered a fascinating musician, Robert Hill, on YouTube.

The story is as you might expect: I heard a piece of music, and wanted to find some performance of it by somebody, anybody on YouTube as long as it had a decent user rating (yes, I find ratings actually useful when checking out unfamiliar music), and I happened to come across some random guy's performance, and it was so fascinating that I looked at other uploads of his, subscribed to his YouTube channel, and looked him up on the Web to find out who he was!

It's especially great that he regularly uploads new videos to his YouTube channel.

So who is Robert Hill, and why do I like his performances so much that I'm recommending that you check them out?

How I found Robert Hill

The short story is that I just heard someone playing, on piano, Johann Sebastian Bach's Allemande from the French Suite no. 4 in E-flat, BWV 815.

Note that I actually have had very little interest in much of Bach's keyboard music and have almost completely ignored them for decades; there are only two exceptions: the Goldberg Variations and some of the Well-Tempered Clavier. In particular, I have not listened to the French Suites, English Suites, or Partitas at all!

But because I just accidentally heard this Allemande played live, and liked it, I wanted to hear it again when I got home, and so I went to YouTube to find it.

I found a lot of performances online, of course, but I'm a sucker for the unusual, so I was particularly interested when I saw in the search results a link to some guy, Robert Hill, performing it on an unusual instrument I had never heard of in my life, a "lute-harpsichord". And it got well over a hundred thumb-up ratings and only one thumb-down, so of course I was going to check it out!

I watched the video, and was totally blown away by the beauty of the performance:

The instrument has a gorgeous sound.
Robert Hill played very expressively, with the full freedom and emotion that treasure.
Structurally, I could hear the different voices and phrases with total clarity because of how he plays.
This single performance made me think that I needed to give old Bach another shot and check out more of his keyboard music.

Listen for yourself (it's less than two minutes long):

Who is Robert Hill?

I did a Web search on Robert Hill and found information about him. He is an American keyboard instrument performer (especially early keyboard instruments such as harpsichord, clavichord, lute-harpsichord, fortepiano) and musicologist.

I had to search hard to find an actual Web site of his own, and it's <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://robert-hill.tripod.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://robert-hill.tripod.com/">here</span>. It basically looks like it hasn't been updated since around 2001, which is also his last recording time period on his <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://robert-hill.tripod.com/id11.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://robert-hill.tripod.com/id11.html">discography</span>. At some point he must have decided to just share his music through YouTube. He is a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.mh-freiburg.de/lehrende/person/details/hill/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.mh-freiburg.de/lehrende/person/details/hill/">music professor in Freiburg</span>.

As I just mentioned, my fascination with the performances of Robert Hill comes from his expressiveness, which comes about from adjustments of tempo, rhetorical gestures, ornamentation, rhythmic sense. He plays a lot more expressively than many keyboard musicians do today, and I like that. I now believe that I was turned off by much of Bach's keyboard music not because of Bach, but because of the relatively bland performances his music has received, especially from modern pianists. Bach was an emotional man living in an emotional age (the Baroque era of affect), and I feel blessed that musicians like Robert Hill are taking this seriously. There are others, of course, besides him, but I think his performances have a particular edge to them.

Regular harpsichord

Here is an example of Robert Hill playing regular harpsichord.

Bach's Allemande from the Partita in D major, BWV 828

I discovered this beautiful, haunting work of music by Bach for the first time, by sheer accident, when browsing Hill's YouTube channel (live performance from 1997):

I cannot believe I went four decades without ever having heard this piece in my life. Now I can't get it out of my head.

Hill did some extreme things in this performance (tempo modifications and hesitations) that are not to my taste, but I applaud him for having the courage to play from the heart, because much of what he did spoke to mine! He lives dangerously. Maybe that's why he only posts live recording clips to YouTube now rather than make CDs?

Fortepiano

He also plays fortepiano, which is a fascinating instrument I love. I have mentioned my first experience with a fortepiano in college in a blog post earlier this year celebrating the 300th birthday of Johann Sebastian's son Carl Philipp Emanuel.

CPE Bach's Fantasie in F-sharp minor

Heck, I had to check out Hill's performance of my favorite CPE Bach keyboard work. In my earlier blog post, I had praised Andreas Staier's performance I discovered in college, but now having heard Hill's, I have another favorite (live from April 2014). This totally plays up Hill's maximally emotive expressive style:

JS Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier selections

It was fascinating to find Hill performing JS Bach on fortepiano; I had never heard anyone playing JS Bach on fortepiano before. I love that he experiments with different styles.

The famous WTC I, Prelude in C major, in a fluid, beautiful Romantic-style (vs. Baroque-style) performance he just uploaded a couple of days ago:

A totally gorgeous Romantic-style interpretation of the slow Bach WTC I, Prelude in C# minor:

I love how he makes full use of the expressive possibilities of the fortepiano (power and dynamics and sustain).

Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata

Yes, he plays Beethoven too, on fortepiano.

Note that Beethoven did call it "sonata quasi fantasia" so it should be played freely "like a fantasy", freely, and he does this. If you've only heard it played more "squarely", check this out. In this case, I prefer a more subtle freedom than the exaggerated gestures Hill provides, because I feel he disrupts the rhythmic flow too much, so I consider his experiment not a full success, but still, I respect his willingness to go all out:

Pianoforte!

Yes, of course Robert Hill plays the modern piano too. And I love what he does with it.

Brahms

Hill brings out the different voices very well, the counterpoint through the thick textures of Brahms. These are truly beautiful performances of some of my favorite piano music of all time, Brahms' intermezzi.

A passionate performance of Op. 117, No. 2 in B-flat minor:

And Op. 119, No. 1 in B minor (some favorite performances of which I discussed in my blog post last year):

This is one of the most emotionally raw performances I have ever heard of this intermezzo. Hill makes the most of the suspensions, silences, dissonances, and clashing lines.

Conclusion

Discovering the musical performances of Robert Hill on keyboard instruments has been one of the happy surprises of my life this year. Not only has he provided me listening pleasure, but also has sharpened my conception of what the music he plays is about and how to express it. He has forever changed my expectation from myself of how I should play music. I expect that from now on, I will never again hold back from "weird" interpretations that I feel come from my heart and mind. I don't expect that all my experiments will succeed, but seeing someone else try, and publicly, how can I not do likewise?

Have you recently discovered a musician who has changed your hearing and/or your own playing? Who was it and what did you learn?

The Chess Improver: For the love of doubled Pawns

Thu, 21 Aug 2014 11:09:57 GMT

I wrote "For the love of doubled Pawns" for The Chess Improver blog.

Unfortunately, the original article at https://chessimprover.com/for-the-love-of-doubled-pawns/ could not be recovered from the Wayback Machine or any other archive. We apologize that this content has been lost.

The Chess Improver: Beware of trying to win poisoned Pawns

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 11:15:31 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Beware of trying to win poisoned Pawns"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

An important and advanced theme in chess openings is that of the "poisoned" Pawn belonging to one's opponent, a Pawn that is unprotected and may be attacked with hope of winning it. I like to call "poisoned" the specific Pawn on one of four squares, directly diagonal to the opponent's Rook in the initial position, that is often tempting to try to win using one's Queen when the protecting Bishop is away:

White's Pawn on b2 (which Black can try to win with a move like …Qb6) Black's Pawn on b7 (which White can try to win with a move like Qb3) White's Pawn on g2 (which Black can try to win with a move like …Qg5) Black's Pawn on g7 (which White can try to win with a move like Qg4)

A paradox in pedagogy

An important part of one's chess education is understanding the value of material, of trying to keep one's Pawns and pieces protected and finding opportunities to win material by capturing the opponent's Pawns and pieces, either for free or for an advantageous trade according to a heuristic formula of worth (such as taking a Rook, worth 5 points, in return for giving up one's Knight, worth 3 points).

The paradox is that once one has absorbed this lesson, at some point one must learn to balance the hard-earned attention to material with more nuanced attention to other factors in a game. On general principles, as the next step after internalizing the value of material, I advise against club players trying to play opening variations involving winning a poisoned Pawn, because the effort to win it usually requires wasting three moves:

Moving the Queen to attack the Pawn. Capturing the Pawn. Retreating the Queen to avoid getting captured or trapped.

Three moves is quite a lot of time to lose for the sake of winning a Pawn in the opening, when development and one's own King safety are critical and can be compromised. Granted, there are some very popular opening variations that involve taking the risk and winning such a Pawn, but they require absolute precision to even be able to defend a draw against a fierce attack coming from falling so behind in development.

At some point after one's tactical and defensive strength has improved enough, it may be worth trying these risky ideas, but I have seen too many instances of a club player moving a Queen out early in the game to win material and then failing to consolidate well. This is a habit that, although it sometimes works against weak competition, results in postponing one's development as a more principled middle game player.

Some concrete examples of disaster

Quick one

Here is a brutal example of punishing an early Queen excursion.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "1-0"] [ECO "C23"]

e4 e5 2. Bc4 Qg5 $2 3. Nf3 ( 3. g3 $6 { Even passive defense gives White an advantage.} ) 3... Qxg2 $4 4. Rg1 Qh3 5. Bxf7+ $1 Kd8 ( 5... Kxf7 $4 6. Ng5+ { White wins the Queen.} ) 6. d4 exd4 $4 7. Rg3 { Black's Queen is trapped.} 1-0`} />

More subtle one

The following is a more subtle win in which Black, a world-class defender, won 2 Pawns at the expense of a whopping 9 Queen moves in the opening and middle game, and finally lost after hardly developing any pieces.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site "Wijk aan Zee"] [Date "2003"] [Round ""] [White "Shirov, Alexei"] [Black "Bareev, Evgeny"] [Result "1-0"] [ECO "C11"] [PlyCount "75"] [TimeControl "40/7200:20/3600:1800"]

e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. e5 Nfd7 5. f4 c5 6. Nf3 Nc6 7. Be3 cxd4 8. Nxd4 Bc5 9. Qd2 Bxd4 $6 { With a concrete idea of going after White's b-Pawn.} 10. Bxd4 Nxd4 11. Qxd4 Qb6 { Black's idea was to "force" an exchange of Queens.} 12. Qd2 { Offering a poisoned Pawn instead.} 12... Qxb2 13. Rb1 Qa3 14. Nb5 Qxa2 { White sacrifices a second Pawn.} 15. Nd6+ Kf8 $2 ( 15... Ke7 { Better, allowing the King to try to escape to the Queen side.} ) 16. Rd1 Qb2 17. Be2 Qb6 { Black has wasted 5 moves to win 2 Pawns.} 18. c4 d4 19. Bf3 a5 20. O-O d3+ 21. Kh1 $1 Qd4 22. Nb5 $1 { Giving up a third Pawn. White already has a winning position!} 22... Qc5 { Trying to keep the c file blocked, at least.} ( 22... Qxc4 $4 23. Nd6 { Black is dead because White will come down on the c and d files.} ) 23. Qxd3 g6 24. Nd6 { Threatening to win the Knight on d7.} 24... Nb6 25. Rb1 Kg7 26. Rb5 Qc7 27. Qd4 { Now attacking the Knight on b6.} 27... Nd7 ( 27... Ra6 28. Rfb1 ) 28. f5 $1 gxf5 29. Nxf5+ { Breaking through to the King.} 29... exf5 30. e6+ Ne5 31. Rxe5 f6 32. Rxf5 Rf8 33. Bd5 { Slow but good enough.} ( 33. Rg5+ Kh8 34. Bxb7 { A more forcing win.} ) 33... Qe7 34. Rh5 Kh8 $2 ( 34... Bxe6 35. Re1 ) 35. Be4 Bxe6 36. Rxh7+ Qxh7 37. Bxh7 Kxh7 38. Qe4+ 1-0`} />

Understanding Clojure transducers through types

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 02:58:16 GMT

Yesterday, Rich Hickey published a blog post, "Transducers are Coming", which attracted a lot of attention.

I have a confession to make, which I have made before: I find it very difficult to understand ideas or code not presented with types. So I decided that the only way I could possibly understand what "transducers" are would be to actually implement them in a typed language. I ended up doing so and am sharing my findings here.

Vague types in the original blog post

Rich informally gave some type signatures in his blog post:

;;reducing function signature
whatever, input -> whatever

;;transducer signature
(whatever, input -> whatever) -> (whatever, input -> whatever)

This was, unfortunately, not very helpful. It is hard to make sense of this pseudo-notation for types. What is quantified over what? And what is bound to what? I'll explain later what I mean by these questions.

First discussion thread I saw

There was much tweeting online about transducers after Rich Hickey's initial announcement; the tweets did not help me, except for links posted to discussion elsewhere.

One of them was on Hacker News. I browsed through it but found it mostly not useful. The problem was that although a lot of interesting Haskell code was thrown around, it tended to be related to transducers but not an exact translation of the concept. I already had my own intuitions about transducers being related to well-known types such as foldables, iteratees, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://lens.github.io/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://lens.github.io/">lenses</span>, etc. That "ordinary function composition" was involved immediately suggested the connections, because function composition is huge in these existing Haskell libraries.

But what I wanted was to understand transducers as they are, before even thinking about generalizations and comparisons.

What are the types?

Rich Hickey informally offered some types (which he said were "a la Haskell") to try to help out:

    ;;reducing fn
    x->a->x

    ;;transducer fn
    (x->a->x)->(x->b->x)

OK, by using type variables a, b, and x, that indicates what is bound to what. The blog post should have used this notation rather than

;;transducer signature
(whatever, input -> whatever) -> (whatever, input -> whatever)

Sample Clojure code

He also posted some sample Clojure code:

View Gist on GitHub

Second discussion thread I saw

Then today, I saw a discussion thread on Reddit, titled <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2cv6l4/clojures_transducers_are_perverse_lenses/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2cv6l4/clojures_transducers_are_perverse_lenses/">"Clojure's Transducers are Perverse Lenses"</span>.

Actual runnable Haskell code

Rich finally posted some actual <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2cv6l4/clojures_transducers_are_perverse_lenses/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2cv6l4/clojures_transducers_are_perverse_lenses/">type-checked, runnable Haskell code</span>!

-- Transducers in Haskell

mapping :: (a -> b) -> (r -> b -> r) -> (r -> a -> r)
-- Original was (b -> a) -> (r -> a -> r) -> (r -> b -> r)
-- but Michael O'Keefe in comment pointed out this is misleading
mapping f xf r a = xf r (f a)

filtering :: (a -> Bool) -> (r -> a -> r) -> (r -> a -> r)
filtering p xf r a = if p a then xf r a else r

flatmapping :: (a -> [b]) -> (r -> b -> r) -> (r -> a -> r)
flatmapping f xf r a = foldl xf r (f a)

-- for exposition only, yes, conj is gross for lazy lists
-- in Clojure conj and left folds dominate
conj xs x = xs ++ [x]
xlist xf = foldl (xf conj) []

-- build any old list function with its transducer, all the same way
xmap :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
xmap f = xlist $ mapping f

xfilter :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> [a]
xfilter p = xlist $ filtering p

xflatmap :: (a -> [b]) -> [a] -> [b]
xflatmap f = xlist $ flatmapping f

-- again, not interesting for lists, but the same transform
-- can be put to use wherever there's a step fn

xform :: (r -> Integer -> r) -> (r -> Integer -> r)
xform = mapping (+ 1) . filtering even . flatmapping (\x -> [0 .. x])


print $ xlist xform [1..5]
-- [0,1,2,0,1,2,3,4,0,1,2,3,4,5,6]

After this post, I knew it would not take me long to figure out transducers.

Refactoring his Haskell code

Two things to notice about the original code:

It has long, low-level function types rather than types that actually name the concepts being discussed (reducers and transducers).
It uses hardcoded list types [a].

Type synonyms and higher-rank types

Defining lots and lots of types (whether synonyms or newtypes is standard practice when programming in a modern typed language. OK, so I defined a type synonym

-- Left reduce
type Reducer a r = r -> a -> r

But what about transducer? This is trickier.

An invalid attempt at a type would be

-- Illegal!
type Transducer a b = Reducer a r -> Reducer b r

because the type variable r is not bound in the type definition. And it would be incorrect to just randomly add r on the left hand side as an extra parameter to the Transducer type, because in fact it is critical that a transducer does not care about the underlying reducer's return type r. How do we write the desired type?

It turns out you need <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Rank-N_types" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Rank-N_types">higher-rank types</span>. Rank-1 types are not sufficient; we need a rank-2 type to quantify r, to say that a transducer from a to b is a transformation that takes a reducer to a specific r and returns another reducer to the same r.

-- Here's where the rank-2 type is needed
type Transducer a b = forall r . Reducer a r -> Reducer b r

Now we can see more clearly some completely generic ways to create a transducer:

mapping :: (a -> b) -> Transducer b a
mapping f xf r a = xf r (f a)

filtering :: (a -> Bool) -> Transducer a a
filtering p xf r a = if p a then xf r a else r

A bit of history

Higher-rank types are a powerful technique for expressing "hiding" of unnecessary details about types going on somewhere. My first recollection of the real world use of rank-2 types is from 1994 (the year I started using Haskell, although I did not actually use it in my work as a software engineer until 1995), when I was excited to read a paper by John Launchbury and Simon Peyton Jones that solved, using a rank-2 type, a specific, important, practical problem, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.50.3299" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.50.3299">"Lazy Functional State Threads"</span>; twenty years later, their <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.7.0.1/docs/Control-Monad-ST.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.7.0.1/docs/Control-Monad-ST.html">ST monad</span> is still part of the standard library!

Introducing type classes

Clojure uses <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://clojure.org/protocols" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://clojure.org/protocols">protocols</span> as an abstraction mechanism, and the "magic" of transducers uses protocols. In Haskell, type classes are the major abstraction mechanism (this is true of Scala also).

So I abstracted away from the hardcoded list-oriented functions and values in Rich Hickey's Haskell code:

foldl abstracted to a class Foldable
conj and empty list [] abstracted to a class Conjable

-- Left fold
class Foldable f where
  fold :: Transducer a (f a)

class Conjable f where
  empty :: f a
  conj :: Reducer a (f a)

Note our reliance on transducing and reducing from one type a to another, f a.

`Foldable` constraint

Unlike mapping and filtering, flatmapping is not completely generic, because it depends on something being Foldable (implementing a fold):

flatmapping :: Foldable f => (a -> f b) -> Transducer b a
flatmapping f xf r a = fold xf r (f a)

`Conjable` constraint

Finally, here's the originally list-specific code that now depends only on Foldable and Conjable:

-- I changed Rich Hickey's code to be more general than just list
-- but accept anything Conjable
xlist :: (Foldable f, Conjable f) => Transducer b a -> f a -> f b
xlist xf = fold (xf conj) empty

-- build any old Foldable function with its transducer, all the same way
xmap :: (Foldable f, Conjable f) => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b
xmap f = xlist $ mapping f

xfilter :: (Foldable f, Conjable f) => (a -> Bool) -> f a -> f a
xfilter p = xlist $ filtering p

xflatmap :: (Foldable f, Conjable f) => (a -> f b) -> f a -> f b
xflatmap f = xlist $ flatmapping f

List-specific stuff

Here is the list-specific code:

-- Stuff specialized to lists.
-- To use another type, just make it a Foldable and Conjable.
instance Foldable [] where
  fold = foldl

-- for exposition only, yes, conj is gross for lazy lists
-- in Clojure conj and left folds dominate
instance Conjable [] where
  empty = []
  conj xs x = xs ++ [x]

-- Note: the type does not say anything about Foldable or Conjable,
-- even though the implementation just happens to use a list!
xform :: Transducer Integer Integer
xform = mapping (+ 1) . filtering even . flatmapping (\x -> [0 .. x])

-- Again, this can munge anything Foldable and Conjable, not just a list.
munge :: (Foldable f, Conjable f) => f Integer -> f Integer
munge = xlist xform

Notice some very important properties of this code:

xform has a type that does not mention lists at all, even though it is implemented using a list and cannot compile without the list instance implementations.
munge also does not mention lists, and can transform anything that is Foldable and Conjable.

Example:

-- munge a list
-- [0,1,2,0,1,2,3,4,0,1,2,3,4,5,6]
example1 :: [Integer]
example1 = munge [1..5]

Implementing another type to illustrate the genericity of transducers

To illustrate Rich Hickey's main point, I implemented instances of Foldable and Conjable for a standard Haskell Vector library as an alternate "collection-like" type.

-- For example using Vector instead of list
import qualified Data.Vector as V

-- Implement Foldable, Conjable type classes for Vector
instance Foldable V.Vector where
  fold = V.foldl

instance Conjable V.Vector where
  empty = V.empty
  conj = V.snoc

And we can run munge directly on a vector instead of a list, without making any changes:

-- return a vector rather than a list; note the fact that munge actually
-- internally uses a list
example2 :: V.Vector Integer
example2 = munge $ V.enumFromN 1 5

This is code reuse at its best.

Note that there is nothing that ties transducers to any concrete "collection" type. We could write instances of Foldable and Conjable for some kind of "channel" abstraction, for example, and instantaneously be able to munge data coming from it and to another. In fact, this is already what is done in the real world, where Haskell and Scala are used in production at places like Facebook and Twitter to efficiently handle large amounts of data.

My code repository

My complete code is available on GitHub.

Conclusion

It was pretty exciting to see the announcement of the transducers library for Clojure, because it represents a level of abstraction that I think has not been expressed much in the world of dynamically typed languages, although the techniques are two decades old in the Haskell community in a statically typed setting. And I hope that I was able to convey the sheer elegance of Haskell as a way to express interesting types with practical ramifications for abstraction and pluggability.

The Chess Improver: When weaknesses didn't matter (and when they did)

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 11:09:42 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""When weaknesses didn't matter (and when they did)"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

When one first begins learning about "positional chess", one quickly learns concepts such as "weaknesses", such as

weak square in your territory (a square you don't have much control over, especially if you cannot protect it with one of your own Pawns) backward Pawn (a Pawn that is behind its neighbor Pawn(s) and therefore cannot be protected by another Pawn) weakness on a half-open file (such that the opponent can multiply attack your Pawns and pieces by means of a battery of Rooks and a Queen)

These are very important concepts, and one is taught to recognize these patterns and avoid weaknesses. One is often also shown instructive games in which one side had these weaknesses and eventually lost. This is all well and good, and an important step in chess improvement is to understand these structural weaknesses and to try to avoid them for one's own setup as well as try to induce them and exploit them in one's opponent's setup.

However, time and again, when I work with chess players to help them improve, I get asked some very good questions:

"The position looks bad, but is it really that bad?" "What do I do if I end up in one of these positions with weaknesses?"

In other words, many chess books geared at improvement present a biased view of the game, showing "how to plan an attack" and "how to punish weaknesses", rather than "how to defend" and "how to deal with having weaknesses". They present exciting games where somebody wins. Well, today I present a "boring" game where nobody wins, despite Black having all three of the example weaknesses I mentioned at the beginning of this article! And in fact, nobody was really ever in danger of losing. I think boring, "correct" games have much to teach as well as the exciting, flawed ones.

Summary of the game Baramidze-Leko, Dortmund 2014

I saw this game while following the Dortmund 2014 tournament earlier. Nobody annotated it, because it was so boring. But I thought it would be a great illustration of when "weaknesses" don't matter, and why.

At move 12 in an Open Catalan, a characteristic Pawn structure arose, in which Black can be considered to have certain weaknesses: the backward c-Pawn on c7 cannot advance to c5, because of White's bind with the Pawns on b4 and d4 controlling c5, and White has the half-open c-file. Also, White has the extra center Pawn (d-Pawn) vs. Black's c-Pawn. So it could be considered that Black might be in trouble.

But a "weakness" is a problem only if it can be exploited. In this kind of position, White usually tries some combination of these ideas (see the game Kramnik-Carlsen, Dortmund 2007 at the end of this article, for example):

plant a Knight on c5 or a5 plant a piece on c6 to constrict Black double Rooks on the half-open c-file win Black's c-Pawn advance e4 to get the big Pawn center

However, Black in this game basically thwarted all of these ideas:

Move 13: maneuvered the Queen to a8, controlling not only c6 but the long diagonal and prevented e4 Move 15: advanced with c6 after the light-squared Bishops were traded off, so even though the c-Pawn is still backward, it is defensible; also, this prepared for a5 counterplay Move 16: White, under danger of a5 counterplay against the b-Pawn, decided to trade Knights to allow the dark-squared Bishop to protect b4. Move 17: maneuvered a Knight to b6, noting that White's attempt to bind the c5 square had the side effect of creating a White weak square at c4 Move 19: a5 created counterplay against White's b-Pawn and ensured that White would end up with an isolated Queen side Pawn Move 20: Nc4 put the Knight on a great outpost in White's weak c4 square Move 23: White could not bear to leave Black's Knight on c4 and forced a trade

After the final simplification on move 23, the game could have been called a draw already. Each side had a Queen, two Rooks, and a dark-squared Bishop.

White still had a bind on c5, but so what? In the rest of the game, he tried putting a Bishop there, then a Queen, then a Rook, but to no avail. That "outpost" did not help with any further penetration. If White had a Knight to put on c5, the story could have been very different, but note how in the game, Black virtually forced two Knight trades. Every trade brought Black closer to a comfortable position, because Knights are the best pieces to use against weaknesses, since if they can reach a good outpost, they can attack effectively from there.

All of Black's most important Pawns (b5, c6, e6) were on light squares, which meant they were immune from attack by White's only remaining minor piece, the dark-squared Bishop. Meanwhile, White had an isolated a-Pawn on a dark square to attend to on a3. Given this situation, and no Pawn breaks on the King side, the inevitable conclusion to the game was a draw, and it was agreed so after almost thirty more moves of shuffling around.

What conclusions can we draw from this game? One is that it is quite feasible to attempt to defend a position with weaknesses, if you play actively and force simplification in your favor so that your weaknesses do not matter. Another conclusion, unfortunately, might be that this main line opening variation of the Catalan, in which Black willingly plays dxc4 and then goes for counterplay with b5, allowing White to create a bind on c5, is drawish for both sides when each plays correctly.

However, there was once a time when this plan by White was very powerful, in the hands of Vladimir Kramnik, against those who did not adopt the right defensive plan as Black. In fact, 7 years ago at Dortmund 2007, Kramnik beat Magnus Carlsen with the Catalan. I have attached this game below so that you can see what it looks like when White's idea works perfectly! Make note of every mistake that Carlsen made as Black, allowing White to execute his plan cleanly.

The complete game Baramidze-Leko, Dortmund 2014

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Sparkassen-Chess-Meeting 2014"] [Site "Dortmund"] [Date "2014.07.16"] [Round "4"] [White "Baramidze, David"] [Black "Leko, Peter"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [BlackElo "2737"] [ECO "E05"] [EventCountry "GER"] [EventDate "2014.??.??"] [PlyCount "103"] [WhiteElo "2616"]

d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5 4. Bg2 Be7 5. Nf3 O-O 6. O-O dxc4 7. Qa4 a6 8. Qxc4 b5 9. Qc2 Bb7 10. Bd2 Bd6 11. a3 Nbd7 12. b4 { White has established a bind on the c5 square, and hopes to create pressure on the half-open c-file against Black's backward c-Pawn.} 12... Ra7 13. Nc3 Qa8 14. Nh4 Bxg2 15. Nxg2 c6 { Black correctly places the c-Pawn on a light-colored square out of reach of successful White attack and fortifies the b-Pawn in preparation for counterplay with the a-Pawn.} 16. Ne4 Nxe4 17. Qxe4 Nb6 { White has a weakness on c4.} 18. Rfc1 Rc8 19. Ra2 a5 20. bxa5 Nc4 21. Bb4 Bc7 22. Ne3 Nxe3 23. Qxe3 Bxa5 { The players could safely have agreed to a draw here. Neither side should be able to make progress.} 24. Bc5 Ra6 25. Rac2 h6 26. Qe4 Qb7 27. e3 Qd7 28. Bb4 Bd8 29. Rc3 Bf6 30. h4 Bd8 31. R1c2 Bf6 32. Rc1 Bd8 33. R1c2 Bf6 34. Kg2 Bd8 35. Qe5 Bf6 36. Qc5 Rd8 37. Qh5 Rc8 38. Qc5 Rd8 39. Qh5 Rc8 40. Kh2 Rd8 41. Qf3 Rc8 42. Qh1 Qc7 43. Qe4 Qd7 44. Qh1 Qc7 45. Qe4 Qd7 46. h5 Bd8 47. Qh1 Bf6 48. Qc1 Rb6 49. Rc5 Be7 50. R5c3 Bf6 51. Rc5 Be7 52. R5c3 1/2-1/2`} />

Kramnik-Carlsen, Dortmund 2007

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Dortmund"] [Site "Dortmund, Germany"] [Date "2007.06.27"] [Round "4"] [White "Vladimir Kramnik"] [Black "Magnus Carlsen"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "2698"] [ECO "E05"] [EventDate "2007.06.22"] [PlyCount "59"] [WhiteElo "2811"]

Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5 4. d4 Be7 5. Bg2 O-O 6. O-O dxc4 7. Qc2 a6 8. Qxc4 b5 9. Qc2 Bb7 10. Bd2 Nc6 $6 { The beginning of a suspect plan.} 11. e3 Nb4 12. Bxb4 Bxb4 13. a3 Be7 $2 { This looks very passive. The Black Pawn on c7 is looking weak, and White has total control of the e5 square.} 14. Nbd2 Rc8 15. b4 { Establishing the classic bind on c5.} 15... a5 { The thematic attempt at counterplay.} 16. Ne5 { If Black's dark Bishop were at d6 rather than e7, White's Knight would not have gotten this strong.} 16... Nd5 $2 { A serious blunder.} ( 16... Bxg2 17. Kxg2 c6 { Trading off the light-squared Bishops and advancing c6 thematically to defend the Queen side.} ) 17. Nb3 $1 { Sacrificing the b-Pawn in return for domination with the Knight.} 17... axb4 18. Na5 Ba8 19. Nac6 Bxc6 $2 ( 19... Qe8 20. Bxd5 exd5 21. Nxe7+ Qxe7 22. axb4 c6 { Looks terrible, but the simplification means the position may be defensible.} ) 20. Nxc6 Qd7 21. Bxd5 exd5 22. axb4 { White still has a monster Knight on c6.} 22... Rfe8 23. Ra5 { Black's Queen side is completely ruptured.} 23... Bf8 24. Ne5 Qe6 25. Rxb5 { Winning a critical Pawn.} 25... Rb8 $2 { Giving up another Pawn.} 26. Rxb8 Rxb8 27. Qxc7 Bd6 ( 27... Rxb4 $4 28. Ra1 { It's game over as White threatens Nd7 and further invasion.} ) 28. Qa5 Bxb4 $4 29. Rb1 Qd6 30. Qa4 { White will win more material shortly and the game.} 1-0`} />

Thoughts on the construction of the new Frick Environmental Center

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 01:12:30 GMT

Almost exactly twelve years ago, in 2002, tragedy struck in Frick Park in Pittsburgh. I was on a long evening run in Frick Park when I unwittingly came across what had happened earlier in the day.

From my journal, August 4, 2002

"91 degrees, heat index 93. The Frick Park entrance was closed off for some reason with tape, so that I could not access the water fountain I had counted on using, so I ran up to Forbes instead and to Braddock to get a fountain at that end of the park."

Later in the evening, I found out what had happened:

"Whoa!!! The Frick Environmental Center was burned down in the morning. No wonder it was all closed off when I tried to run to the water fountain."

This was <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://old.post-gazette.com/neigh_city/20020805frickpark0805p1.asp" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://old.post-gazette.com/neigh_city/20020805frickpark0805p1.asp">reported the next day in the Post-Gazette</span>.

Construction

Yesterday, construction of the new <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.pittsburghparks.org/environmentalcenter" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.pittsburghparks.org/environmentalcenter">Frick Environmental Center</span> began, finally, after twelve years of uncertainty and controversy.

On my evening run tonight (very cool, in the 60s, this summer, unlike the summer of twelve years ago!), I checked out the construction site.

Road sign on Beechwood Blvd:

Old burned building still there:

Some trail detour signs:

Controversy

There was controversy because of <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/natural-selection-critics-question-choice-of-site-for-new-frick-environmental-center/Content?oid=1760832" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/natural-selection-critics-question-choice-of-site-for-new-frick-environmental-center/Content?oid=1760832">concerns</span> about the impact of the major development planned on Frick Park, which has been prized by many (certainly by me!) as the "wildest" space in Pittsburgh.

I understand the concerns, and realize there are some major tradeoffs in creating a new, fancy Environmental Center. It is argued by the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy that there are potentially tremendous benefits to having a modern community facility for education, especially for children. While I regret that some of the wildness of this part of Frick Park will be demolished, I hope that bringing interesting programs to children, especially urban children who might otherwise fail to ever appreciate nature, will be worth the development.

I will miss not accessing some trails of the park from this direction for a while, but having sadly seen the old burned building lying around abandoned for twelve years, I look forward to its being replaced.

Questions

If you live in the neighborhood of Frick Park, how do you feel about the controversy over the new Frick Environmental Center? Do you believe the risks are uncertain or not worthwhile? What do you think will be the actual outcome and impact, to the environment as well as to the community, of the development and of the planned educational center?

If you do not live in the neighborhood, how do you feel about these fancy developments in general? Have you seen them turn out badly somewhere else? Or turn out well?

The Chess Improver: An instructive ending with Bishop up for a Pawn

Thu, 31 Jul 2014 13:37:41 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""An instructive ending with Bishop up for a Pawn"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

My student Eric (currently rated USCF 15xx) showed me a recent tournament game of his in which a rather fascinating ending came up. As Black, he had a Bishop and four Pawns versus White's five Pawns. At first it seemed obvious that this ending should clearly be a win, but actually, it is not so obvious, because the semi-blocked nature of the position meant that it was not completely trivial for Black to break through White's wall of Pawns. It turned out that he did come up with a very clever idea that is part of a good winning plan, but he did not manage to follow up on it, and seeing no way to make progress, accepted a draw with his opponent.

Winning an ending given a material advantage is very important, because at some point during one's chess development, one plays well enough in the middlegame to get a material advantage, but if one is not able to convert in the endgame, it is a shame. In particular, when up more than two Pawns, there is usually a way to win, by taking advantage of imbalances on the board appropriately.

Looking at the game position carefully, we worked out a winning plan for Black. I think it is instructive because it brings together many important principles in endgame play. There are not any forced variations until the key transformative positions are reached. There may be other ways to win than the method I explain below; I would welcome feedback on other ways to win!

Initial position

First, let's look at the initial position. The fundamental material imbalance:

Black has an extra light-squared Bishop. White has an extra King-side Pawn, a g-Pawn that therefore could potentially be converted to a passed Pawn. However, Black is not in any danger of losing, because Black's Bishop can easily sacrifice itself if necessary to prevent successful Queening.

Other interesting features:

White is lucky to have most Pawns on dark squares, out of attack from Black's light-squared Bishop. Black's Pawns are currently all blocked up and therefore Black can win only by using an active King somehow to penetrate White's position and either win some more Pawns or transform the position in order to create a passed Pawn. But while activating the King, Black has to be careful about not letting White's g-Pawn Queen. However, note that Black's Bishop control's the g8 Queening square.

An active King

The single most important lesson in endings is that an active King is critical. Where can Black's King go? I think Eric was led astray because he was looking for a way to use the Black King to get through on White's King side, but that is where White is actually strongest and has an extra Pawn. But if we look at the whole board, we see that Black can try to reach c4 or a4 in White's position, to attack the d-Pawn or the b-Pawn with the King. Granted, White's King could move over to the Queen side to defend the Pawns, and at least prevent Black from getting to c4. Black could get to a4, but then White can protect the b-Pawn with a3 and protected the a3-Pawn with a King shuffling between a2 and b2. These static considerations make it look like Black's King cannot make progress.

Eric was also worried about how to get the Bishop involved in case of going over to the Queen side, because what if the Bishop got too far and White played g6 and then g7? We'll see later how to address this concern.

Notice a Pawn asymmetry

However, Black has another imbalance to use: the Pawn situation on the Queen side is not symmetric. This is important. White has a b-Pawn while Black has an a-Pawn. This means that if Black can prepare the Pawn break …a5, if White ever trades the b-Pawn for Black's a-Pawn, then White ends up with a passed a-Pawn but Black can then use the second Pawn break …c5 to create either a passed c-Pawn or passed d-Pawn. In an even-material ending, the "outside" passed Pawn (White's a-Pawn in this situation) is advantageous, but with Black having an extra Bishop, there is no advantage to having the outside passed Pawn, because Black's Bishop can cover it while Black's King is free to press on with its own "inside" passed Pawn.

If White protects the b4-Pawn with a3, then Black can just trade Pawns, leaving White with a weak b4-Pawn. In that case, the ending is easy to win for Black, because Black can simply gain the opposition (using waiting moves with the Bishop) to break through and win either the b-Pawn or the d-Pawn.

Therefore, our conclusion is that if Black can safely manage to get the King to b6 or b5 in order to prepare a5, the game is a win. Note that no calculation of sequences of moves is necessary to come to this conclusion: all that is needed is

Fundamental understanding of Pawn breaks and passed Pawns Understanding how to win by "taking the opposition" (in a King and Pawn setting)

The final question then is, how to perform this King manoeuvre while preventing White from trying to Queen the g-Pawn?

A clever Bishop manoeuvre

Eric hit upon a clever Bishop manoeuvre that, if followed up, would have worked great.

First, he played …f5 to force White to play g5. Then he moved his Bishop to d3, a6, c8, e6, and finally f7, in order to protect the g6 and h5 squares from White's King invasion. This was a fine creative plan.

Unfortunately, he agreed to a draw shortly after this manoeuvre, not being able to find the winning plan that involved activating the King and using two Pawn breaks. He saw that after getting the King around, if he ever tried to bring the Bishop around, that would risk White's g-Pawn advancing. This is in fact a valid concern, but the missing part of the picture was the importance of the …a5 Pawn break and the subsequent follow up. It turns out that there is something very subtle for Black black needs to do to time that Pawn break just properly, to avoid a draw.

Triangulation

The concept of triangulation is very important in endings. The main idea is to "waste time" in order to force the weaker side to reach a position on the move from a position in which the stronger side is on the move (but does not want to be on the move). In the analysis below, a critical position arises in which Black needs to prevent White's King from becoming too active after a planned Pawn break. By triangulation, Black forces White's King to the rim at a3 before playing the Pawn break …c5.

Control of the Queening square

It is also important to note that Black can wander just far enough with the Bishop to win White's a4-Pawn, because of the control of White's Queening square g8. Black's Bishop has enough time to make it back to d5 after White plays g6 and g7, to stop White from Queening on g8. Whew!

Conclusion

I thought this was an instructive ending to work out, because of the many themes necessary to understand and integrate in order to create a winning plan.

Full analysis

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "*"] [FEN "8/p7/2p2pk1/3p4/1P1PbPP1/6K1/P7/8 b - - 0 1"] [Setup "1"]

1... f5 { A committal move, giving White a passed g-Pawn, but fixing the global Pawn structure in preparation for an unstoppable plan by restricting White's activity.} ( 1... Kf7 2. Kh4 Ke6 3. Kh5 { White can try annoying things on the King side, even though there is clearly no win for White.} ) 2. g5 Bd3 { With a nice Bishop maneuvering idea.} 3. Kh4 Ba6 4. Kg3 Bc8 5. Kh4 Be6 6. Kg3 Bf7 { The point: Black can now move the King while not having to worry about a White invastion on h5 or g6.} 7. Kh4 Kg7 { Somewhere around here, my student got discouraged and did not see a way to win for Black, and accepted a draw.} 8. Kg3 Kf8 9. Kf3 Ke7 10. Ke3 Kd7 11. Kd3 Kc7 12. Kc3 Kb6 13. Kb3 a5 $201 { An important Pawn break.} 14. Ka4 axb4 15. Kxb4 Bh5 $1 { A waiting move, also preparing to bring the Bishop back to e8 or f7 as needed.} 16. a4 { Eventually White will have to push the a-Pawn here, or give way with the King.} ( 16. Kc3 { If White just retreats passively, Black's task is easy.} 16... Kb5 17. Kb3 c5 { Black's Pawn break wins.} 18. dxc5 Kxc5 19. a4 Be8 20. a5 Kb5 { Rounding up the a-Pawn.} 21. Kc3 Bf7 { Protecting the d-Pawn and also the g8 Queening square.} 22. Kd4 Kxa5 23. g6 Bg8 { Black's d-Pawn prevents White's King from wandering away.} ) ( 16. a3 Bf7 $1 { Still waiting for White to continue to push the a-Pawn forward to its own doom.} ) 16... Be8 $1 { Protecting the c6-Pawn in case of White King invasion on c5.} 17. Kc3 ( 17. a5+ Ka6 18. Kc5 Kxa5 19. Kd6 Kb5 20. Ke6 c5 { Black wins the race to Queen some Pawn, any Pawn.} 21. Kxf5 cxd4 22. g6 Bxg6+ 23. Kxg6 d3 24. f5 d2 25. f6 d1=Q 26. f7 Qf3 { White is not going to Queen successfully at all.} ) 17... Ka5 18. Kb3 $201 Bg6 $1 { A waiting move, to "triangulate" to cause White's King to end up on a passive square.} ( 18... c5 $4 { Allows a draw.} 19. dxc5 Bxa4+ 20. Kc3 { White's King gets too active and makes it impossible for Black to win. Black's King is far away from the action.} 20... Be8 21. Kd4 Bf7 22. Ke5 Kb5 23. Kd6 $1 { White's goal is simply to Queen the c-Pawn.} ) 19. Ka3 Bf7 20. Kb3 Be8 { Triangulation is complete.} 21. Ka3 c5 $1 { A perfect time for the Pawn break.} 22. dxc5 Bxa4 { This is now an easy win for Black. Unlike the non-triangulated position, White cannot play Kc3.} 23. Kb2 d4 24. g6 Bc6 25. g7 Bd5 { Stopping the g-Pawn just in time.} *`} />

The Chess Improver: How do you play against 1 h3?

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:35:02 GMT

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""How do you play against 1 h3?"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

When I was 10 years old in 1980, shortly after playing in my first couple of rated tournaments, I came under the influence of the then-current Michigan Open champion, a master who changed the course of my life by introducing me to the bizarre in chess and therefore stimulating my imagination, resulting in my developing a taste for the unorthodox (for both better and worse in my chess development). In particular, he showed me Grob's Attack, the opening in which White plays 1 g4 as the first move, a move that violates all the conventional principles that most chess players are taught when first learning the game. I never actually played this opening, because to his credit, he not only showed me the traps White can set for Black, but also how Black can sidestep the traps and get an advantage.

Knowing how to face unorthodox openings in chess, both technically and psychologically, is an important part of growth for a serious student of chess. It is extremely easy for chess players to fall into an unthinking automatism in the opening stages of a game, following some pattern of moves without understanding what their purpose is, or without doing at least some rudimentary calculation when the position starts becoming unfamiliar and out of the scope of memorized patterns.

In particular, many chess players as Black behave in a reactive way rather than an active way, because of the fact that many mainstream openings involve White placing considerable pressure on Black from the outset, such that Black is essentially forced to defend. But what if White plays in a less aggressive way? This is when true understanding and creativity are demanded.

I believe that every player as Black should have a prepared personal plan against each of White's twenty possible opening moves (eight possible Pawn advances of one square, eight possible Pawn advances of two squares, and two possible moves of each Knight). The plan should be not just some new memorized pattern, but one that can be explained in terms of strategic and tactical factors, whether general or specific. I find that being able to confidently verbalize one's reasoning (even if it is not necessarily entirely correct) is important.

1 h3 as an example

I'm not going to give a Black recommendation against 1 h3 here; instead, I want you to come up with your own, by considering some of the following questions, and answering them for yourself. Even better, go further by adding your own questions and answering them as well.

What is White's purpose?

The first step is to ask what purpose White has in making the move. There must be some objective to it (even if you can calculate that you can prevent White's plan from having an advantageous outcome). What squares are now attacked (or protected) that were not, before the move? What squares have been, by contrast, unprotected or weakened? What lines of development or attack have been opened, or closed?

In the case of 1 h3, by thinking about such questions, you might observe:

White has not made any progress in developing pieces, either by actually developing a piece or by opening a line to enable development of a piece. White still does not have any control over the center squares. White does control the g4 square now. White has weakened the g3 square, which is now only protected by the f-Pawn. White has made space on the h2 square for a piece to possibly be moved there.

Then you might hypothesize that perhaps:

White may be planning to support a g4 Pawn advance. White may be thinking way ahead, in anticipation of Black wanting to eventually put a Bishop or Knight on g4, but is preventing it already. White may be thinking way ahead, preparing to eventually develop the dark-squared Bishop to f4, and then having h2 as an escape square in case the Bishop is attacked.

If you considered the last two of these possibilities, you are probably an advanced player who already has a grasp of mainstream opening theory and are able to relate it to unorthodox moves.

What is your purpose as Black?

Let's say that you usually play the standard move 1…Nf6 as Black against mainstream opening moves other than 1 e4. Maybe you are used to playing for a Nimzo-Indian or Queen's Indian type of setup with 1…Nf3, 2…e6. If you went on autopilot, you might quickly play 1…Nf6 against 1 h3 only to be faced with 2 g4. And then if 2…e6, 3 g5 might follow, chasing your Knight away. Now, it's not the case that White actually has any advantage even if you played on autopilot; in fact, frankly, White still has a worse position despite autopilot. But if autopilot is a symptom of not thinking, you could quickly find yourself in a bad position after all, after several more indifferent moves.

You should probably question why you would play 1…Nf6 against 1 h3 at all. One observation you could make is that you are actually playing White in this game. For example, if you normally play 1 e4 as White, why not consider 1…e5 against 1 h3? Or if you normally play 1 d4 as White, why not consider 1…d5?

Against passive or slow moves by White, consider thinking in terms of actually "playing White", with reversed colors. Also, even one tempo down, there may be benefits for that missing tempo. For example, might it be possible to exploit White's weakened dark squares g3 and h2?

Conclusion

I believe there is considerable valuable in devoting some serious time thinking about and writing down your thoughts about how you would approach playing against an opening move like 1 h3. It will expose assumptions you have about the nature of the delicate balance between White and Black in the initial board position, and what you expect to happen in the middlegame when it comes to King safety, weak squares, and a head start in either defense or attack.

The growth of loyalty after seventeen years

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 01:44:11 GMT

Tonight I finally got a haircut.

For two weeks I'd been looking for my barber Joe, of Harry's Barber Shoppe in Squirrel Hill; I was due for my haircut. I'd called Joe's phone number from work in the afternoon. I'd driven by on the way home (the shop is just a block away from home). I'd taken a walk on Saturday to see if he was open. No sign of him. I was worried. I began imagining the worst.

I'm not kidding when I tell people that I don't know what I'd do without Joe to cut my hair. He's been the only one to cut my hair in the past seventeen years, apart from that one time he broke his hand and was out of commission for a while.

My first thought when I wondered whether Joe was OK was, if he was gone, I would miss not only a great cut (after the first couple of times in 1997, he figured out how to do things just the way I like), but also some kind of relationship. Since Joe is a lot older than me, I know that one day I will have to find a new barber; I was just thinking that when that day comes, I don't want just a haircut, but I want some kind of relationship. Joe doesn't just cut my hair. He asks me how my life is going; he was there before I was married, and now he inquires about Abby, whom he's met, that time when I was waiting so long for my turn that she walked over and brought me dinner. He knows the structure of my head and the properties of my hair more than I do. We take turns guessing who's singing the songs on his favorite radio station; I've absorbed some of his oldies into my consciousness.

Lucky

The whole haircut experience is about much more than my walking out with less hair. That's why I was relieved to find him accidentally after an evening run in Frick Park that ended with my spotting in the distance the light in Joe's shop and stopping by and seeing him there. It was already late in the evening, nearly 8:00 PM already, but he said he would take me (he was finishing up one guy in the chair), so I ran back home to change out of my running gear and get my wallet and return to the shop.

Joe said he was OK. He's continued to have back trouble and reduced his work, but he's still around. It does not even occur to me to get angry with him for causing me to look for him for two weeks. I'm simply grateful he's OK and able to work and cheerful. He thanks me for being patient and returning to him again and again. That is all. The rest is philosophical banter about what is important in life, and chuckling to myself as I easily identify "drunky" Dean Martin on the radio singing "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?" Such a dated song, I think, but it has a certain charm and who else could sing it in perfect character besides Dean Martin?

Questions

Are you loyal to someone who cuts your hair? What would you do (or have done) if that person is no longer present in your life?

Pittsburgh Code and Supply: Programming in journalism

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 01:21:19 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="http://static.squarespace.com/static/538f3cc8e4b00f52172b5560/t/53a4ec76e4b0488fb14c5a29/1403317372203/sign.png?format=500w" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: http://static.squarespace.com/static/538f3cc8e4b00f52172b5560/t/53a4ec76e4b0488fb14c5a29/1403317372203/sign.png?format=500w">[image defunct]</span>

I finally attended my first ever Pittsburgh Code and Supply meeting! The group, which posts its events on Meetup, was created by local Pittsburgh software developer Justin Reese just a few months ago, in March 2014. His vision is to create a local community that, unlike conventional specific language/technology-based meetups, is much more universal and broad. If you haven't do so already, read more about the goals of Pittsburgh Code and Supply. I'm very excited about this new group!

The Code and Supply meetup I just attended was about "Programming in journalism". This is a topic of huge importance, and I was excited to attend to hear more about what some local journalist/programmers are doing.

A bit about sponsors

Justin opened by briefly saying a few words about the goals of Pittsburgh Code and Supply. He then noted that this month, the group did not have sponsors, unfortunately.

Pittsburgh Code and Supply needs sponsors!

If you like what Code and Supply is doing, please consider seeing if your employer would be willing to step up as a sponsor for the group.

Contribute!

Also, in any case, spread the word about the group.

This is my first meeting, and next Monday, I am actually going to give my first presentation for the group, on "Type-Directed TDD in Rust". The group is always looking for people to speak about something or facilitate other formats of meetings, so <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.codeandsupply.co/speak/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.codeandsupply.co/speak/">sign up</span> if you have an idea! I personally have some ideas I'd like to propose for future meetings, such as discussions about technology-related topics such as philosophy, history, and education.

AmyJo Brown

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://amyjobrown.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://amyjobrown.com/">AmyJo Brown</span>, an independent journalist, gave a great talk about the kind of work that she does, and why it is important. She gave an overview of how journalism has changed because of the availability of data and because of the complexity of the world, both of which lead to the necessity of telling stories differently, as evidenced by what <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.propublica.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.propublica.org/">ProPublica</span>, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times have been doing.

Her own work involves tracking political donations ("follow the money").

She gave examples of software tools she uses to get data, clean it, analyze it, and archive the whole process. On the programming end, she programs in Python, for example (Django for Web development), and uses <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.documentcloud.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.documentcloud.org/">DocumentCloud</span>.

She talked about many things to keep in mind while doing this kind of data journalism. First of all, you have to know the limitations of the data you're getting. She has to deal with handwritten documents, and data in different formats. Data that is clearly incomplete or entered wrong (whether accidentally or maliciously). It is necessary to know the domain, know the context in which data was collected or required or submitted, to not fall into the trap of just blindly treating data as a record of the full truth and just get into programmatically processing it. There's a lot that involves human judgment calls. And this is why it is so important to save all the original information and document each step of data "cleaning" and interpretation.

Near the end of her talk, AmyJo had her colleague Katrina speak a bit also. Katrina was not originally trained as a programmer, but was always interested in politics. She ended up getting into programming later.

(I'm always very excited and impressed to hear of people with domain knowledge and passion who take up computer programming as a useful skill to apply to their domain. Sometimes I hear people saying "please don't code"; I totally disagree with this sentiment and believe that everyone can benefit from learning the fundamentals of computer science and programming.)

Andrew McGill

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.andrewrmcgill.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.andrewrmcgill.com/">Andrew McGill</span> bills himself as "your friendly neighborhood journalist", and works for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

He started by talking about his interesting career path, which involved being into computers before college, but then going to college and then finding other interests and abandoning programming, and then only later taking it back up, in the service of journalism, to enable him to find data and tell stories through visualization.

He showed us specific Web sites and articles he has created to provide better visualizations of data than what is available in raw form. For example, on the funny side, there is <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/wheresbill/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/wheresbill/">"Where's Bill?"</span>, which he created because he was not happy with the "official" boring text news feed of Mayor Bill Peduto's calendar. He scraped the official site with PHP. He also created a Bill Peduto Twitter bot using Python.

He also showed a D3-based visualization of <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/plugged-wells/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/plugged-wells/">"The Mystery of the Plugged Wells"</span>. Again, the point was to take already available data but to tell a story better with it than just giving raw tables or a purely text-based narrative.

He showed some other projects, such as a visualization of school comparisons based on PSSA data.

Questions and answers

There were quite a lot of questions posed to the presenters throughout the evening, on the technologies used, on work with graphic designers, on the process of obtaining data, and political implications of the work. Great discussions.

Technologies used

Here's something resembling a summary of technologies mentioned that the presenters use:

Python
Django
DocumentCloud
Bootstrap
Git
R
SQL
OpenRefine
D3

Interesting articles

Before the meetup, I posted to the event page a link to a provocative (perhaps too harsh and ranty) article warning about dangers in data journalism, by visualization expert Alberto Cairo. It got no response.

Later, I also posted a link to a thoughtful examination of the question of <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://source.opennews.org/en-US/learning/true-facts-maybe/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://source.opennews.org/en-US/learning/true-facts-maybe/">epistemology in data journalism</span>. I totally recommend reading that article.

AmyJo after the meetup posted some more links on the event page:

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://medium.com/@jeremybowers/why-im-a-newsroom-coder-860d9d49f684" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://medium.com/@jeremybowers/why-im-a-newsroom-coder-860d9d49f684">"Why I'm a newsroom coder"</span>
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/planting-next-crop-newsroom-coders/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/planting-next-crop-newsroom-coders/">"Planting the next crop of newsroom coders"</span>
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/opinion/the-fec-lags-on-campaign-finance-disclosures.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/opinion/the-fec-lags-on-campaign-finance-disclosures.html">"Data delayed is democracy denied"</span>

Conclusion

I was very excited to attend my first Pittsburgh Code and Supply meetup, on the fascinating topic of programming in journalism. I felt I learned a lot about what is at stake and how programming is being used in journalism to better inform people of what is going on in the world.

Why programming puzzlers make me sad

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 23:01:52 GMT

I recently saw a "guess what this does" article on a blog I follow, and this post presents mysterious Perl code for which the reader is asked to guess what it does:

perl -le 'print(two + two == five ? "true" : "false")'

I looked at it briefly, got a headache, and didn't even want to solve it. This despite using Perl as one of my main programming languages from 1993-2010 and considering myself fairly proficient at Perl.

Programming puzzlers just in general make me sad.

I know every programming language has quirks

It is a human reality, given human imperfection, that the languages we invent have quirks of some kind. You might expect that, unlike natural languages like English and Chinese, which have the burden of no centralized design and hundreds or thousands of year of history and random evolution, computer languages would be designed up front to avoid ambiguity and just plain confusion. But the human desire to make some things "easy" through clever defaults or implicit assumptions always results in an invented computer language that has irregularities or unexpected behavior somewhere.

The strange love of puzzlers

Still, it makes me sad when I see "puzzlers", and especially how they are used. For some reason, in some circles, it is considered a sign of intelligence or competence to be able to decode strange puzzlers. Many academic homework assignments and exams tend to focus on weird puzzlers as a way of supposedly testing proficiency in programming. Java certification exams and job interview questions often throw in puzzlers. I deplore this situation.

I understand that in specialized circumstances, you would want to value someone who was really good at puzzlers: someone who could write a conforming compiler for a language, diagnose strange bugs, etc. But that is not what most of us do or need to do. And too many puzzlers makes non-programmers wince and stay away from a field they consider to be pointlessly capricious.

When to understand puzzlers

The exception I make is when a "puzzler" is not actually rare code, but typical code that has some kind of mistake. Some languages have more of these puzzlers that are actually critical to understand in order to be functional at working with code in them. For example, almost all normally used features of C could be considered puzzlers!

Languages with "puzzler" books

Many languages have spawned "puzzler" books or sites. You can look them up for yourself if you are curious about puzzlers in your favorite languages. I won't list any here because I wouldn't know where to stop. I didn't mean to pick on Perl, of course, when writing this article.

An idea: how about learning from all the puzzlers?

I have an idea: how about pooling together all the puzzlers in all the languages that currently exist, classifying the language misfeatures that resulted in those puzzlers, and coming up with a plan to

teach the puzzlers in a systematic polyglot way
fix as many of these puzzlers as possible in the languages (I expect this to be very difficult because of compatibility needs)
write up a guide to what not to do in future new languages

Do you think there would be value in mining existing puzzlers for the purpose of a systematic resource for learning about programming language design?

Conclusion

I don't like programming puzzlers. They are supposed to be funny, and maybe sometimes they are, but often they are abused for status and mistaken as an accurate gauge of competence.

How do you feel about puzzlers? Do you use them for assessing your own or others' knowledge? Do you solve them for entertainment? Do you think minimizing the existence of puzzlers should be a criterion for design of any new programming languages?

The Chess Improver: Pawn moves in front of Black's castled King: looking at h6 and f5

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 11:35:27 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Pawn moves in front of Black's castled King: looking at h6 and f5"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

I stopped by the Pittsburgh Chess Club recently, met someone new, and played a couple of quick casual games with him. I felt that one of the games we played was instructive, illustrating the theme of king safety in the middlegame (and by extension, thinking about this straight from the opening).

King safety and Pawn advances

One important theme when paying attention to King safety in the middlegame is sometimes expressed, too simplistically, as "don't move Pawns in front of your castled King". Let's focus, for this article, on so-called classical development, versus modern development: we mean by "classical" that Bishops are developed toward the center rather than fianchettoed away from the center onto diagonals.

Taking the side of Black developing "classically" as an example, the maxim "don't move Pawns in front of your castled King" means not moving the f, g, or h Pawns unless necessary. The tricky part of interpreting this advice is understanding what "necessary" really means, and also an advanced player will want to know not only when to do something when it is necessary, but when it is not necessary but nevertheless advantageous. I will ignore the advanced case in this post.

I would like to begin a series of articles on concrete guidelines for when it is good or bad to move a Pawn in front of one's castled King. The quick game I just played illustrates two of the easiest considerations starkly.

Black's h6 when White may create a diagonal threat on h7

In the game, Black made a serious error by playing an unnecessary 11…h6. First of all, White had no real threat to place a piece on g5. But more generally, even if there is such a threat, the cure may be worse than letting it happen.

Here is a rule of thumb: in classical positions where Black no longer has a Knight (usually on f6) protecting the King side, h6 is often a serious weakening move. This is because it prevents Black from being able to solidly playing the "other" defensive Pawn move in the future, g6. Being able to play g6 is often very important to block White from delivering a mating attack on the light-squared diagonal from b1 to h7. The move h6 weakens not only the h6 Pawn (if White has a dark-squared Bishop aiming at h6), but also weakens h7 light-colored square and the g6 light-colored square, making defense of the King much more difficult. For example, with only the f7 Pawn protecting the g6 square, if Black ever needs to put either a Pawn or a piece on g6 to block any attack, White can potentially attack that square with multiple pieces, outnumbering Black. This is the kind of forward looking that a chess player must attend to when creating a defensive middlegame plan out of the opening, especially as Black.

In the game, you can see each of these dire predictions come true. Being on the other side of the board, knowing about these weaknesses around you opponent's King, you can often create a lethal attack very quickly!

In the annotations, note that if Black had just castled, and then defended with g6 only when forced to, the resulting position if White tried the same brute force mating plan against h7 would have been quite acceptable and solid for Black, with Pawns on f7, g6, and h7 blocking any quick mate. As White, I would therefore have refrained from the committal e5 advance, which has the disadvantage of ceding control of the d5 light-colored square and opened up the diagonal from a8 to h1 to my own King!

Black's f5 to block a diagonal threat on h7

The final error by Black was that of not cutting losses by pushing back and at least blocking White's powerful King side attack by fighting with well-timed f5. f5 looks very ugly, because White can take the f-Pawn en passant and leave Black with an isolated e-Pawn. For this reason, I have seen that many club players avoid playing such a move until it is too late to make maximum use of this blocking attempt/counterpunch.

When you are on the defensive, you have to ask yourself: what is the lesser evil, getting a weak Pawn and a King side that looks like Swiss cheese because of holes on g6 and h7, or getting mated through too-passive defense? If it seems that all other defenses will fail, choose to avoid getting mated, and choose to fight on even with an ugly-looking position. In fact, 13…f5 results in a position that, while rather unpleasant, at least offers opportunities for Black counterplay. Black does get rid of White's powerful e5 Pawn, open up the f-file, and develop the Queen, all while fighting White's center and avoiding getting suffocated to death.

The complete annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date "2014.07.05"] [Round ""] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black "NN"] [Result "1-0"] [ECO "D41"]

d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5 4. Nc3 c5 5. cxd5 Nxd5 6. e4 Nxc3 7. bxc3 cxd4 8. cxd4 Nc6 9. Bc4 Bd6 $2 ( 9... Bb4+ { Trading off the dark-squared Bishops is standard.} ) 10. O-O O-O 11. Qe2 h6 $4 { Wastes valuable development time and weakens the King.} ( 11... b6 { Black has to try to finish development.} 12. e5 $6 { White can try a brute-force attack on h7, but it is not best.} 12... Be7 13. Qe4 Bb7 14. Bd3 g6 15. Bh6 Re8 { White still has more space, but Black has a solid, defensible position.} ) 12. e5 Bc7 ( 12... Be7 $4 13. Qe4 { Wins immediately.} ) 13. Qe4 $5 { Going straight for the King.} ( 13. Ba3 { Was stronger, abandoning thoughts of a King side attack and focusing positionally on the Queen side instead.} 13... Re8 14. Qe4 Ne7 15. Bd3 Ng6 16. Rfc1 { Switching to Queen side pressure.} ) 13... Ne7 $4 ( 13... f5 { Ugly but prevents losing immediately.} 14. exf6 Qxf6 { White has a clear advantage because of Black's terrible e-Pawn and light square weaknesses near the King, but there is no forced win yet.} ) 14. Bd3 Ng6 15. Qg4 Qd5 16. Bxh6 $1 { I didn't actually play this move, but wish I had done it.} ( 16. Bxg6 { I chickened out and sacrificed the Bishop on h6 only after a couple more moves instead.} 16... fxg6 17. Qxg6 Kh8 $2 18. a4 $6 { I was obsessed with lifting my Queen Rook when I could have just used my King Rook.} ( 18. Bxh6 $1) 18... Bd7 19. Bxh6 { Finally.} 19... gxh6 20. Qxh6+ Kg8 21. Qg6+ Kh8 22. Ng5 ) 16... gxh6 17. Bxg6 fxg6 18. Qxg6+ Kh8 19. Qxh6+ Kg8 20. Qg6+ Kh8 $201 21. Rfe1 { A quiet but deadly move threatening a Rook lift to e4 and then either mate or winning a lot of material.} 21... Qd7 22. Qh6+ Kg8 23. Re4 Qg7 24. Qh3 { And Rg4 winning the Queen is coming.} 1-0`} />

The one thing I remember Lorin Maazel for

Sun, 13 Jul 2014 23:36:07 GMT

RIP, Lorin Maazel. A music conductor of fame and longevity has died (at age 84), generating no shortage of obituaries, such as <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/arts/music/lorin-maazel-brilliant-intense-and-enigmatic-conductor-dies-at-84.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/arts/music/lorin-maazel-brilliant-intense-and-enigmatic-conductor-dies-at-84.html">this one</span>.

Very often famous people die without my really having known much about them, and of course, this case was no exception. But this post isn't about what I didn't know, but what I do know, and remember.

The "Ring" Without Words

Lorin Maazel may have had a long and illustrious career, but actually, I don't believe I have listened to a single of his recordings (I never saw him in performance) other than one, his "Ring Without Words" purely orchestral arrangement of Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle of operas that fits in a CD-length 75-minute "summary" of the epic operatic cycle (which takes more like 17 hours for a complete performance, spread out over four separate operas).

So he touched my life in a single, unusual, but quite positive way. Ironically, the example obituary I mentioned does not even mention this work of Maazel's. This illustrates that obituaries hardly tell the whole story of the contributions of someone to people's lives. They may tell what is most prestigious or most scandalous, but may miss interesting quirky projects that have less measurable impact.

My story

In my senior year of college, I came across a CD in the campus library on the Telarc label of Maazel's recording of the "Ring Without Words". At the time, I knew fairly little about Richard Wagner or his music, but I was intrigued by the concept, since I was not an opera fan, and didn't mind trying out what some immediately criticized as a gimmicky "Reader's Digest" concept by Maazel.

I very much enjoyed the recording and listened to clips here and there without the "guilt" or confusion of choosing and listening to selected portions of recordings of the actual original operas. Basically, I appreciated Maazel's role as a curator and summarizer that brought in curious new listeners like me. I still believe there is a role for "popularizers" of "classical music".

I just looked on YouTube and found this very short clip of a performance by Maazel of the "Ring Without Words", so you can check it out to get an idea of how it works:

Authorial intent

I mentioned last year in my post for Wagner's 200th birthday that I had, before encountering Maazel's CD, tried to watch the Metropolitan Opera's four-evening TV broadcast in the summer of the "Ring" cycle and found it hard going. My overall philosophy was, and is, that authorial intent is overrated. Fact is, if we were really serious about authorial intent, Wagner actually originally forbade his opera "Parsifal" from being performed anywhere except in Bayreuth.

I'm not saying we shouldn't respect to one degree or other a composer's original setting or wishes. Actually, I'm probably more respectful than most other people, because of my involvement with early music! I'm just saying that alternative arrangements and excerpts are always possible, and as long as they do not misrepresent themselves, I have no problem with them.

Pittsburgh

You might expect me to say something how Maazel turned the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra into a world-class orchestra, but actually, I moved to Pittsburgh in 1997 after Maazel had just left, so when I started attending PSO concerts, it was under Mariss Jansons.

Here's the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://blogs.pittsburghsymphony.org/2014/07/statement-on-the-death-of-former-pittsburgh-symphony-orchestra-music-director-lorin-maazel/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://blogs.pittsburghsymphony.org/2014/07/statement-on-the-death-of-former-pittsburgh-symphony-orchestra-music-director-lorin-maazel/">Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's official statement on the passing of Lorin Maazel</span>.

Conclusion

Whatever else Lorin Maazel may have done in his life, one thing he did was bring Wagner to people like me, through his "Ring Without Words". I am grateful he carried out this project. Also, more indirectly, he shaped the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra into the world-class orchestra it was by the time I moved to Pittsburgh, so I benefited from something he did that I never personally saw.

The Chess Improver: Completing my first tournament: 7th round and summary of what I learned

Thu, 10 Jul 2014 11:08:25 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Completing my first tournament: 7th round and summary of what I learned"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Here I conclude my coverage of my first chess tournament, the 1980 Michigan Open (Reserve Section), achieving my first provisional USCF rating of 1546 after scoring 3.5/7.0 points. I also won a trophy for 2nd place Unrated in the Reserve Section (my father, also playing in his first tournament, won the trophy for 1st place Unrated in the Reserve Section). It was a great way to start my chess tournament life!

My goal in analyzing the games of my first tournament has been to begin exploring the development of a new chess tournament competitor (my young self of 1980) and examine common patterns of thoughts and behavior. I will continue further to track the evolution of my skill and style through analysis of further tournaments from 1980 and 1981.

Round 7

In my round 7 game, as Black I faced the Ruy Lopez (against White rated around USCF 1600), and as in round 3, did not know what I was doing and quickly gave up the center. My opponent did not know what he was doing either and we traded quickly into an endgame. As with many other endgames I played in this tournament, positions that are clearly draws at a higher level of play nevertheless contained imbalances and opportunities for going astray, and I played poorly, deliberately trading into what I should have known was a lost King and Pawn ending.

Summary of tournament

Openings

Move numbers after I was out of any theoretical knowledge:

1 (Bird's Opening as Black) 5 (Petroff Defense as White) 9 (Closed Ruy Lopez as Black) 5 (Exchange Ruy Lopez as Black) 4 (Open Sicilian as White) 6 (Philidor's Defense as White) 9 (Closed Ruy Lopez as Black)

Nobody lost a game straight out of the opening (except for the Open Sicilian where I won quickly as White), although poor positions of course arose. We could have used a better understanding and use of principles (such as development and central control) to improve beyond this 1500 level of play.

Middlegames

I did not understand the value of the Bishop pair, or that Knight on the rim is dim, and got destroyed on the King side. A lot of piece trades. My opponent did not understand the value of the Bishop pair. Highlighted the importance of using Pawn breaks. My opponent should have opened the position because of my poor opening development, but instead closed it, allowing me to consolidate and in return attack his King with a Pawn storm. (I won the game out of the opening because my opponent ignored development and created holes.) A lot of piece trades. I did not understand the weakness of my isolated Pawn and lost it. A lot of piece trades. I did not understand the weakness of my opponent's isolated Pawn and dissolved it instead of attacking it.

Endgames

5 of 7 games went all the way to an endgame. Many errors occurred, so the lesson is that there is much to be gained from studying the endgame. In addition, knowing what endgames are advantageous would have allowed me to make better decisions in the middlegame (regarding Pawn structures and Bishop vs. Knight). I feel that in the absence of clear attacks against the King, middlegame play often tend to be aimless simplification at the 1500 level. At top levels of chess, one plays openings with a goal toward certain kinds of endgames. Club level players who are no longer hanging material all the time and want to improve should also start to think this way.

(I lost in the middlegame.) I had the Bishop pair advantage but squandered it. Comedy of errors resulted in my winning because my opponent did not realize the King and Pawn ending was lost for him. Draw: I dawdled and simplified in an endgame I could have won. Draw: I simplified too much, then my opponent allowed a won King and Pawn ending but I did not know it was won for me. (I won in the opening.) Draw: one Pawn down, but Bishop vs. Knight; comedy of errors, but eventually I won a Pawn back and simplified to a draw. I mistakenly simplified repeatedly, resulting in a lost and King and Pawn ending.

The complete annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Michigan Open"] [Site "?"] [Date "1980.09.01"] [Round "7"] [White "Wilson"] [Black "Chen Franklin"] [Result "1-0"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [ECO "C91"] [TimeControl "40/2"] [WhiteElo "0"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. O-O Be7 6. Re1 b5 7. Bb3 O-O 8. c3 d6 9. d4 $5 exd4 $2 { As in round 3 previously, I had no idea of the strategic ideas of the Ruy Lopez. Here I gave up the center for no reason.} ( 9... Bg4 { Putting pressure on White's d4 Pawn is normal.} ) 10. cxd4 d5 $2 11. Nc3 $2 { White also showed little positional understanding. This move concedes an isolated d-Pawn.} ( 11. e5) 11... dxe4 12. Nxe4 Bf5 $6 ( 12... Nxe4 13. Rxe4 Bf5 { Removing White's strong Knight and developing with gain of time was good.} ) 13. Nc5 Na5 $2 { Knight on the rim is dim!} ( 13... Bg4) 14. Bd2 $2 { Giving up the Bishop pair for insufficient reason.} ( 14. Bc2) 14... Nxb3 15. axb3 Bxc5 { At this point, I was unhappy about the weak a-Pawn and wanted to start trading everything down to get a draw.} ( 15... Bg4) 16. dxc5 Re8 17. Bc3 $2 $201 Rxe1+ $2 ( 17... Qxd1 { Completely equal.} ) 18. Qxe1 Qd7 $6 { A provocative "developing" move that allows the doubling of the f-Pawns. I had hoped the exchange would simplify the position toward a draw.} 19. Bxf6 gxf6 20. Rd1 Re8 21. Qd2 $2 ( 21. Rxd7 Rxe1+ 22. Nxe1 Bxd7 23. b4 ) 21... Qxd2 22. Rxd2 b4 $5 { A positionally risky move. The point was to try to win White's c-Pawn, by artificially isolating it, but now Black's b-Pawn is on the wrong color square and potentially weak.} 23. h3 Re7 $2 { Planless move.} ( 23... Be4 { With an active Bishop and Rook, Black is fine.} ) 24. g4 ( 24. Rd8+ { Stronger was to seize the back rank and activate the Rook.} ) 24... Bd7 25. Kh2 Bb5 $2 { Still trying to trade, but this is a mistake now.} 26. Kg3 Re2 $4 { A horrific positional error, given Black's weak dark-squared Pawns.} 27. Rxe2 Bxe2 28. Nd4 Bb5 $4 { Senseless, inviting a trade into a lost King and Pawn ending.} ( 28... Bd3 29. Nc6 ) 29. Nxb5 axb5 $201 30. Kf4 Kf8 31. Ke4 { Dawdling pointlessly, but the game is won.} ( 31. Kf5) 31... c6 32. Kf5 Kg7 33. h4 Kh6 { Hope chess!} 34. f4 ( 34. Kxf6 $9 { Stalemate.} ) 34... Kg7 35. g5 fxg5 36. hxg5 Kf8 37. Kf6 Ke8 38. Kg7 Ke7 39. f5 Ke8 40. f6 1-0`} />

Third year at July 3 music party and finally participated in jamming

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 02:11:59 GMT

The past two years, Abby and I have gone to an annual July 3 music potluck/party, and we went again this year. Both in 2012 as well as in 2013, I was too intimidated to participate in music jamming, and only watched. This year I was determined to contribute, and I brought my ukulele (which I only started learning a month after last year's party, actually) and my Irish flute.

Piano

After my first round of food at the potluck, I went to Susan's piano and played David Raksin's theme from "Laura", which I had so botched up last month at the annual Pittsburgh Recorder Society potluck/recital. I play it much better now, although I somehow messed up the final chords today. There were a few people sitting around listening, and they wanted to hear more, but I didn't have any more, so I scurried away to eat more food.

Old time

As dinner started winding down, the old time musicians started gathering outside to play. I saw fiddles, banjos, and other instruments make an appearance.

Blues

Inside, the main guy who plays guitar and ukulele unpacked his soprano ukulele, and so I took out my concert ukulele, and two other guys with guitars appeared. Eventually a woman who sang also appeared, as well as a guy on fiddle.

I felt very intimidated, because although I've gotten some experience jamming while on recorder or flute or tin whistle, my ukulele experience without written music is still very minimal. Nevertheless, I joined in. I fumbled around, and had to ask what key each song was being played in, and even then, I'm still quite shaky in anticipating and knowing chord changes beyond the simplest I, IV, V, and some dominant and major 7th chords. I strummed very softly.

They're a great bunch, improvising melodic lines at will and even making up lyrics right on the spot, just as they had at the last two years when I only watched. And the singing in harmony was fantastic.

Abby got a little bit of video footage of us at one point:

Conclusion

For two years, I was afraid to join in the music jams at this annual July 3 party. This year I joined in a little bit. If we attend the party again next year, I hope to be in a position to contribute even more! Many thanks to Susan for hosting this annual party!

The Chess Improver: My 6th tournament game: an error that reveals an attempt to learn

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 11:15:03 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""My 6th tournament game: an error that reveals an attempt to learn"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Continuing my series on my first chess tournament, which I played in 1980, I cover my round 6 game, which ended up being the third draw in 6 rounds. There is a pattern here to note: at this USCF 1500-1600 level of play, games very easily end in draws, because of missed opportunities in the middlegame, inappropriate simplification into an endgame, and then inaccurate endgame play leading to a final simplification after which no progress can be made by either side. We already saw this in my round 3 game.

Summary of the game

Having scored 3 out of 5 points so far in the tournament, I got to play someone rated around 1600. I was White.

Opening

To my surprise, as Black he played an opening continuation in the Philidor Defense known to be bad. Unfortunately, because I saw the resemblance between the position and the famous 1858 game by Paul Morphy against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard, at move 7 I swung my Queen over to b3 just as Morphy had done, even though because Black's 6th move was different, this move was harmless. Playing by analogy rather than by calculation is sometimes reasonable, but in this case it was thoughtless.

The result was that Black forced a Queen trade immediately. This combined with the symmetrical Pawn structure meant that in the absence of gross errors, the likely result of the game was a draw. (Recall that in my round 2 game, in a Petroff where the Queens also got traded quickly, my game should have been a draw, but I accidentally won anyway.)

An error that reveals an attempt to learn

In the middlegame, I made a curious and admittedly ugly and poor positional and tactical error of advancing my f-Pawn with 13 f4, to try to undermine Black's e-Pawn and attack on the King side. This resulted in my isolating my own e-Pawn and then losing it. The resulting simplified position, nevertheless, was easily drawable.

What I want to talk about is the nature of this error. It's a pretty bad error, but I think it illustrates that sometimes, when progressing in chess, it is common to make an error that nevertheless has clear motivations behind it. Here, I made this error because

I wanted to unbalance a dead symmetrical position in order to play for a win, showing an active fighting spirit I had not always shown earlier in the tournament. I had been reluctant to make Pawn breaks in earlier games, but was warming up to the idea that Pawn breaks were important.

In other words, even though the plan was completely misguided, it showed that I was now willing to take risks to unbalance a position. I think an important stage in developing as a chess player is that of trying a different way of thinking, even if it is actually not carried out well. That is better than simply being stuck in a rut, in which case there is no way to improve. Currently, as an instructor and coach, I look for ways in which someone is stuck in a rut, a plateau, and encourage doing something different even if it initially backfires.

Endgame

I would call the position after move 18 and endgame: a lot of simplification, White a Pawn down, two Rooks and Bishop vs. two Rooks and Knight.

It turned out that neither player knew how to optimize using either the Bishop or the Knight imbalance in the endgame, so the endgame was a typical trading of errors until all the Pawns came off the board and all that was left was a Bishop vs. Knight, so a draw was agreed.

The complete annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Michigan Open"] [Site "?"] [Date "1980.09.01"] [Round "6"] [White "Chen Franklin"] [Black "Sunts"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [BlackElo "0"] [ECO "C41"] [TimeControl "40/2"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 Bg4 $2 { I knew this was bad, from the famous Morphy game I learned in a children's chess book when I was in Kindergarten.} 4. dxe5 Bxf3 5. Qxf3 dxe5 6. Bc4 Qe7 ( 6... Nf6 $4 7. Qb3 ) 7. Qb3 $6 { Mechanically following the Morphy idea of swinging the Queen over to attack the b7 Pawn.} ( 7. O-O) 7... Qb4+ { At a 1500-level of play, a Queen trade often leads to a draw.} 8. Nc3 Qxb3 9. Bxb3 $6 { Preserving a natural Pawn structure, but it was actually better to get the half-open a-file.} ( 9. axb3) 9... Nc6 10. Bd2 $5 { I didn't play Be3 because I feared ...Bb4 doubling my c-Pawns.} 10... Nf6 11. O-O-O Bd6 12. Rhf1 $6 { At this stage of my chess life, I still had the idea of quickly "developing" all my pieces including my Rooks.} 12... O-O 13. f4 $6 { With an idea of opening lines, although this is positionally suspect given that White's e-Pawn will become isolated.} 13... Na5 14. fxe5 $2 { Terrible. The e-Pawn becomes weak and will be lost.} 14... Nxb3+ 15. axb3 Bxe5 16. Bf4 Bxc3 17. bxc3 Nxe4 { White has lost a Pawn. But the position is simplified and should lead to a draw.} 18. Bxc7 Nxc3 19. Rd7 Nb5 $2 { The Knight has no future stuck here.} ( 19... Ne4) 20. Be5 $6 { The Bishop is an unprotected target here.} 20... Rae8 $2 21. Re1 $2 { Now we will have more simplification.} ( 21. Bb2 { Controlling the long diagonal and cutting off the Knight was strong.} ) 21... f6 22. Rxb7 a6 $2 ( 22... fxe5 { Simplifying was the easy route to a draw.} ) 23. Bg3 Rxe1+ ( 23... Nd4 { Good enough to draw.} 24. Rd1 Rd8 25. Kb2 Nf5 ) 24. Bxe1 Re8 25. Kd2 h6 $2 26. Bf2 $6 ( 26. c4 Nd4 27. c5 a5 28. Bf2 ) 26... Rd8+ 27. Ke2 Rd6 $2 ( 27... Nc3+ 28. Kf3 Rd2 29. Ra7 Rxc2 ) 28. Rb6 $2 { Trading gives Black an easy draw.} ( 28. c4) 28... Rxb6 29. Bxb6 Kf7 30. Kd3 Ke6 31. c4 Nd6 32. Kd4 Kd7 $2 { Passive.} 33. Kc5 $2 ( 33. Kd5) 33... g5 $2 34. Kb4 $2 { White should have kept the King centralized and started advancing Pawns.} 34... Kc6 35. Ka5 Kb7 36. Bc5 $2 { Senselessly driving the Knight to activity.} ( 36. g4) 36... Ne4 37. Be7 $2 f5 38. b4 $2 ( 38. h3 Nd2 { Now Black can get the King side majority moving.} 39. Kb4 Ne4 40. Bf8 ) 38... h5 $6 ( 38... Nd2) 39. c5 ( 39. h4 g4 40. Bg5 Nf2 41. b5 ) 39... g4 $2 ( 39... f4 40. h3 g4 41. hxg4 hxg4 ) 40. c6+ $2 Kxc6 41. Kxa6 Nc3 $2 ( 41... f4 { Now it's a clear draw again.} 42. b5+ Kd7 43. Bh4 Nd6 ) 42. Bf6 $6 ( 42. g3 Nb5 { +1.27 Tiger 2004} 43. Bd8 Nc3 44. Bg5 ) 42... Nb5 ( 42... Nd5 43. b5+ Kc5 44. Bd8 f4 ) 43. Be5 ( 43. g3 Nd6 44. Be5 Nb5 45. Ka5 ) 43... h4 44. h3 $2 ( 44. Ka5 Nc7 45. Ka4 Ne6 { Only barely not a losing move.} 46. Bf6 ) 44... Na3 $2 ( 44... Nc7+ 45. Bxc7 Kxc7 46. Ka7 { Black could have caused White some pain before a draw.} ) ( 44... g3 $1 45. Bf6 Nc7+ 46. Ka5 { White manages to draw.} 46... f4 { +0.89 Tiger 2004} 47. Bxh4 { !?} 47... Nd5 48. Bxg3 fxg3 49. h4 Nf4 50. Ka6 Nxg2 51. b5+ Kc7 52. Ka7 Nf4 53. b6+ Kc6 54. b7 g2 55. b8=Q g1=Q+ { +0.89 Tiger 2004} 56. Ka8 { !?} ) 45. Bf4 ( 45. Bf6 gxh3 46. gxh3 { +0.18 Tiger 2004} 46... f4 47. Bxh4 ) 45... Nb5 46. Be3 $2 ( 46. Bg5 g3 47. Ka5 Nc3 48. Bxh4 ) 46... Nc7+ 47. Ka5 Kb7 $6 ( 47... Ne6 48. Ka6 f4 49. b5+ Kd7 ) ( 47... g3 48. Bg5 { !?} 48... Nd5 49. Bxh4 f4 50. Bxg3 fxg3 51. h4 Nf4 { White barely draws.} 52. Ka6 Nxg2 53. b5+ Kc7 54. Ka7 Nf4 55. b6+ ) 48. Bd2 $4 ( 48. Bg5 gxh3 49. gxh3 Ne6 { A losing move!} 50. Bxh4 ) 48... Nd5 49. Kb5 $201 gxh3 $4 ( 49... f4 $1 50. hxg4 f3 51. gxf3 { Throwing away the win. Now the game is a dead draw.} 51... h3 { An important theme in how to Queen a Pawn when having a majority.} ) 50. gxh3 f4 51. Kc4 f3 { And the h-Pawn will Queen!} 52. Be1 Nf4 53. Bxh4 Nxh3 54. Kd3 f2 55. Ke2 Nf4+ 56. Kxf2 Nd3+ 1/2-1/2`} />

The Chess Improver: My 5th tournament game: lessons from an uncomfortable miniature

Thu, 26 Jun 2014 11:15:47 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""My 5th tournament game: lessons from an uncomfortable miniature"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Continuing in my series of posts covering the first chess tournament in my life as a new unrated player and member of USCF, here I present my 5th round game in the 1980 Michigan Open (Reserve Section). It was a very short game, lasting only 12 moves, and only a couple of minutes. This was in a tournament where the time control was the old classical 40 moves in 2 hours, so after the game, I had to hang around for hours waiting for my father to finish his game.

I felt embarrassed by this game, which I won by checkmating my opponent (rated around USCF 1500) on the 12th move. I definitely felt good that I played well and deserved to win, but some things about what happened bothered me.

Lessons I Learned

I had never seen my opponent's 4th move before in the opening, but just remembered to stay calm and play by ordinary principles of development. He then proceeded to break every opening principle I had learned: he moved his Queen out early, put his Knight on the rim, and even weakened the critical square d5.

I was surprised and disappointed by how quickly and poorly he played. I felt that he did not take me seriously, thinking he could just play garbage against an unrated 10-year-old boy at a time (1980) when very few kids were playing in chess tournaments. I did not believe that his play against matched his 1500 rating. I felt insulted for the first time in the tournament: in my first four rounds, all of my games had been quite hard-fought, no mercy shown me whatsoever. Fortunately, this was the only chess game in my life when I felt that I was not taken seriously because of my age and inexperience.

After the game, my opponent quickly exited to smoke. My assessment of the situation suddenly changed. I concluded that I might have been hasty in assuming he was deliberately insulting me. I thought to myself that he had not looked very well during the game and was fidgety. Maybe as a smoker he was having trouble functioning well because of withdrawal. I felt some compassion for his plight.

Then I got angry again: maybe he had deliberately thrown the game in order to go smoke? Was this possible? I no longer knew what to believe about what had happened, and I did not ask him.

Finally, I felt embarrassed that I had jumped to conclusions that may have simply reflected my own self-consciousness at being the little kid at the tournament. I realized that I could have trapped myself psychologically. From then on, I decided never to think of myself as the kid at the tournament. As long as I didn't think that, then it wouldn't matter whether anyone else thought it either. This was the real lesson I learned that day. Whatever was going on with my opponent, I would play the game and aim for the win. I could not control what he thought of me or whether he was sick or whether he was deliberately losing. I could not control any of these things, so it was pointless to dwell on them.

The complete annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Michigan Open"] [Site "?"] [Date "1980.08.31"] [Round "5"] [White "Chen Franklin"] [Black "Lungu"] [Result "1-0"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [ECO "B40"]

e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Bc5 { Immediately I was out of "book". I had never seen this move before.} 5. Nc3 { I just played a normal developing move.} 5... Qf6 $4 { An already losing move, actually.} 6. Be3 Nh6 $4 7. Be2 $2 { I was worried about ...Ng4 and simply developed to prevent it. I was not even looking for any tactics in this position.} ( 7. Nxe6 { An obvious tactic wins a Pawn.} 7... dxe6 ( 7... Bxe3 8. Nc7+ Kd8 9. fxe3 Kxc7 $4 10. Nd5+ ) 8. Bxc5 ) 7... e5 $4 { Now White will win a Rook, because a Knight will get to c7.} 8. Nd5 Qd6 9. Nb5 Qg6 $4 { Just giving up a Bishop in addition to all else.} 10. Bxc5 Qxg2 $4 { Missing a mate in 2.} 11. Nbc7+ Kd8 12. Be7# { I was amazed by how poorly my opponent played.} 1-0`} />

The Chess Improver: My 4th tournament game: first time I attacked in the middlegame

Thu, 19 Jun 2014 10:55:41 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""My 4th tournament game: first time I attacked in the middlegame"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

In my last three posts here, I analyzed the first three tournament games of my life, as a new unrated player in 1980:

I lost the first upon being attacked effectively in the middlegame. I won the second in a very uneven game in which both players simplified quickly and reaching an endgame which I won only because my opponent blundered into an obviously lost King and Pawn endgame. I drew the third after bumbling into an advantageous endgame but not knowing how to win, and allowing simplification to a draw.

Fourth game

My fourth game (my opponent was rated around USCF 1550) is interesting because for the first time in the tournament, I actually had a clear middlegame attacking plan in a blocked position, and correctly followed through on it, castling Queen side and attacking on my opponent's vulnerable King side with an obvious Pawn break as well as activating my pieces toward that side of the board. For the first time in the tournament, really, I displayed an active search for an initiative in the middlegame.

Unfortunately, a few moves before forced mate, I apparently did not realize the strength of my position and mysteriously simplified repeatedly, into an endgame with a useless Pawn up, and a draw resulted. The irony is that my opponent allowed me at two points the opportunity to trade my Bishop for his Knight, in which case the Pawn-up King and Pawn endgame would have been an easy win for me. Apparently my knowledge of King and Pawn endgames was still very limited, illustrating yet again how important it is to master these basic endgames.

The classic pattern I see in these early games is that of unwarranted simplification in advantageous middlegames and endgames, probably a result of the early emphasis on "counting points" of material, and not realizing that an active piece is worth more than a passive piece.

The complete annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Michigan Open"] [Site ""] [Date "1980.08.31"] [Round "4"] [White "Middlebrooks"] [Black "Chen Franklin"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [ECO "C68"] [WhiteElo "0"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Bxc6 dxc6 5. O-O Bd6 { I was already out of book, never having played against the Exchange Variation.} ( 5... Bg4 ) 6. h3 $6 ( 6. d4 ) 6... Nf6 $6 { Playable, but positionally not best. Black should develop the remaining Knight to e7, in order to then head to c6 or g6 for dark square control, and protect the e5 Pawn with f6.} ( 6... c5 { Immediately seizing control of d4 seems good.} ) 7. Re1 Bd7 $2 { Upon seeing White castled King side with the h3 Pawn advanced, I decided on the idea of castling Queen side, in order to attack White on the King side. But I completely missed the fact that White could strike in the center.} 8. d4 Qe7 { Black must try to hang onto the e5 square.} ( 8... exd4 $4 9. e5 ) 9. c4 $5 ( 9. Nbd2 $1 { Even stronger, threatening Nc4 to attack the e5 Pawn one more time.} ) 9... c5 { Stopping White's c5 threat.} 10. d5 $2 { A positional error. Blocking up the center allows Black to escape.} ( 10. dxe5 { -0.04 Tiger 2004} 10... Bxe5 11. Nxe5 Qxe5 { Mate in 6.} ) 10... O-O-O { Black has every reason now to think about attacking White on the King side.} 11. Na3 $2 { Aiming to go to c2, apparently, but this is slow.} 11... h6 12. Bd2 g5 13. Nh2 Rdg8 14. f3 $2 { Just creates a target for Black to open lines, and weakens the King side.} 14... Nh5 $5 ( 14... h5 { The obvious prelude to a g4 Pawn break.} ) 15. Nc2 Nf4 { Black has improved the Knight.} 16. Re3 $4 f6 $5 { Not terrible, but slow. The point was to prepare Qh7.} ( 16... h5 ) 17. a3 h5 18. Be1 g4 19. fxg4 hxg4 20. Nxg4 Bxg4 21. hxg4 Qh7 $201 { Black has built up a won position with logical play on the King side.} 22. Qf3 Qh1+ 23. Kf2 Rh2 24. Rc3 { There is now actually a forced mate in 8 for Black.} 24... Qxg2+ 25. Qxg2 Rxg2+ 26. Ke3 R8xg4 $2 { Losing the thread, missing the mate and going for material gain instead.} ( 26... Rh8 { Improving the remaining Rook delivers mate in 6.} ) 27. Bf2 Nh3 28. Rf1 Nxf2 $2 ( 28... Rf4 { Wins the Bishop on f2.} ) 29. Rxf2 R4g3+ $2 ( 29... Rxe4+ { Picks up a a second Pawn.} ) 30. Rf3 Bf8 $2 { Allowing simplification rather than keeping the strong Rook.} 31. Rxg3 Rxg3+ 32. Ke2 Rxc3 $2 { Terrible, simplifying even further.} ( 32... Rg2+ { Keeps the active Rook.} ) 33. bxc3 Bh6 34. Ne3 $4 c6 $4 { Missing that the King and Pawn ending is won.} ( 34... Bxe3 35. Kxe3 $201 { A trivial win for Black, because of the King side majority. Black just needs to push f5, get a passed Pawn, then push it, then abandon it to win White's Queen side Pawns.} ) 35. a4 $4 a5 $4 36. Ng4 { Dead draw now.} 36... Bg5 37. dxc6 bxc6 38. Kf3 Kd7 39. Nf2 Ke6 40. Nd3 Kd6 41. Kg4 Bd2 42. Kf5 Ke7 43. Nxc5 Bxc3 44. Nb3 Be1 45. Nc5 Bf2 46. Nd3 Bb6 47. Nc1 Bd8 48. Nb3 Kf7 49. Nc5 Be7 50. Nb7 Bb4 51. Nd8+ Ke7 52. Nxc6+ Kd6 53. Nd8 Kc5 54. Kxf6 Kxc4 55. Kxe5 Kb3 56. Kd5 Kxa4 57. Nc6 Kb5 58. Nxa5 1/2-1/2`} />

The Chess Improver: Lessons from my 3rd tournament game: the nature of endgames

Thu, 12 Jun 2014 11:11:03 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Lessons from my 3rd tournament game: the nature of endgames"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

I have now shown the first two tournament games of my life, from 1980: I lost the first game and won the second game. My third game, discussed here was a draw.

It was an instructive experience for me in my first tournament to experience all three possible results in the first three rounds! I believe it might have been devastating if, for example, I had lost too many games in my very first tournament. Instead, I was involved in some very long and interesting games from the start.

My opponent was rated around USCF 1500, and this shows in his play.

Common errors in 1500-level chess

Opening

In the opening, I had no idea how to play the Black side of a Ruy Lopez. Nobody had taught me the plans for White or Black. I was just winging it. I gave up the center at move 10; my opponent returned the favor by playing apparently mechanical moves that would have applied in a "standard" line, instead of more principled developing moves fitting the situation.

The first thing someone at a 1500 level can do, after mastering basic tactics, is to understand the basic principles of what to try to achieve in the middlegame after the first several opening moves. Many games at this level are decided, unfortunately, by "unorthodox" opening continuations that lead immediately to not knowing how to cope, being outside of one's memorization. Pointlessly giving up the center for Black should have led to trouble for me, but by accident, actually kept working well for me, against 1500-level opponents, even after this game, because they did not understand what to do any more than I did, and it became almost random who would enter the middlegame with an advantage.

Middlegame

One thing I noticed while looking at my first tournament games, including this third one, was that at the level of play of myself and my opponent, we shuffled a lot of pieces around, either

"attacking" without enough backup, or playing passive-looking retreating moves without a clear plan of reactivation.

In particular, I did not understand the importance of looking for Pawn breaks. Here, for example, c5 was crying out to be played, repeatedly. However, I did use a g4 Pawn break to achieve a lasting advantage, so I get some credit for that.

Also, I got into tactical trouble, hanging a piece in an elementary way. Luckily, my opponent got bamboozled and missed an elementary "capture Pawn with check and double attack" that would have left me completely lost, and instead allowed me a recapture with check that led to a Queen trade into an endgame favorable to me!

1500-level chess is still largely decided by big swings in evaluation resulting from missed tactics.

Endgame

The endgame was an unbalanced one, with Black having a Rook and two Pawns for two minor pieces. It favored Black because of the noticeable lead in development. My opponent as White made the elementary mistake of trading pieces in a bad endgame, rather than keeping them to maximize defensive possibilities. Trading the single remaining Rook led to a terrible Rook and two Pawns versus two Knights endgame.

However, again I did not know yet to aggressively use my Pawns, especially here the Queen side Pawn majority. There was a lot of random shuffling around of pieces, then an insidious swindle by my part when I finally realized I should attack on the Queen side. I succeeded in achieving a tactically won position against the pair of Knights, but never saw the win. After too much simplification, the result was a dead draw.

My observation about 1500-level endgame play is that players trade pieces and Pawns too readily, not realizing that there are times when a trade helps and there are times when a trade harms. As a result, many quick draws happen in actually interesting and unbalanced endgames. The 1500-level player who understands endgames can often survive terrible openings and middlegames and win in the endgame. I wish I had learned this lesson earlier in life. I now think that "working backwards", by knowing what to aim for in the endgame, and then approaching the middlegame with a goal of reaching a good endgame, and approaching the opening with a goal of reaching a good middlegame, should be addressed by students of chess who have reached a 1500-level and are no longer just making extreme tactical blunders constantly.

The complete annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Michigan Open"] [Site "?"] [Date "1980.08.30"] [Round "3"] [White "Luna Art"] [Black "Chen Franklin"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [ECO "C93"] [EventDate "1980.08.30"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. O-O Be7 6. Re1 b5 7. Bb3 O-O 8. c3 d6 9. h3 h6 $6 { I played this with no understanding at all. I knew the Closed Ruy Lopez position at this point, but had no idea how to play it with either color, since as White I played only Bc4.} 10. d4 exd4 $2 { Showing total lack of understanding of the point of Black's play, which is to fight for the center, not give it up.} ( 10… Bb7 ) 11. cxd4 $201 Bb7 12. Nbd2 $5 { My opponent was also playing mechanically.} ( 12. Nc3 { A more nature, active development for the Knight, now that the c3 square is open.} ) 12… Re8 13. Bc2 Nb4 14. Bb3 $2 { Strange reply that immediately gives Black an advantage.} ( 14. Bb1 { Maintaining protection of the e4 square and aiming at the h7 diagonal was simple and strong.} ) 14… Nd3 $6 { What is Black planning to do with this Knight? I did not understand the need for Pawn breaks.} ( 14… c5 $201 { Thematic flank attack on White's center, and very strong.} ) 15. Re3 Nf4 { OK, Black did get the Knight around to the King side, but with what plan?} 16. Nh2 $2 Nd7 $6 { Now it is clear Black has no real plan, but is shuffling pieces around.} ( 16… c5 ) 17. Qf3 Bg5 $4 { A horrible blunder, missing a tactic winning material.} 18. h4 { Obvious, attacking the defender of the Knight.} 18… Nxg2 { Trying to get something for the Knight.} 19. hxg5 Nxe3 20. Qxe3 $4 ( 20. Bxf7+ { Picking off an extra Pawn with check and a threat first wins immediately.} ) 20… Qxg5+ 21. Qxg5 hxg5 $201 { Miraculously, Black has emerged with perhaps a tiny advantage, with Rook and two Pawns for a Bishop and Knight, and better development!} 22. f3 $2 Nf6 $6 { Still not hitting White's center.} ( 22… c5 ) 23. Ndf1 $2 { Leaving the e4 Pawn weak.} 23… g4 { Give credit to Black for this Pawn break.} 24. fxg4 $2 Bxe4 $6 ( 24… Rxe4 { Activating the Rook with threats was obviously better.} ) 25. Bg5 c5 { Finally, this Pawn break, although not at the best time.} ( 25… Bb7 { Opens the e-file and prevents White's Rook from developing to e1.} ) 26. dxc5 $2 { Positionally suspect, opening the position for Black's Rooks.} ( 26. Bxf6 ) 26… dxc5 27. Bxf6 gxf6 $201 28. Re1 $2 { With a apparent plan to trade a lot of pieces to hope to draw, but White should be avoiding trades to try to draw! Especially his one Rook.} 28… c4 29. Bd1 Rad8 30. Bf3 Bxf3 31. Nxf3 Rxe1 32. Nxe1 $201 { Now, can Black win this simplified Rook and two Pawns versus two Knights ending? It's not so easy.} 32… Re8 $2 { Black clearly has no plan.} ( 32… a5 { Using the Queen side Pawn majority should have been an obvious plan.} ) 33. Kf2 Kg7 34. Nf3 $4 { White has no plan either, or would be taking care of Queen side dangers.} ( 34. Nc2 { Bringing the Knights to defend the Queen side should draw without too much difficulty.} ) 34… Kg6 $2 ( 34… Rc8 { Will break through on c3 then win White's a2 Pawn.} ) 35. Ne3 Rc8 36. Nd5 Kg7 $5 { Planning a devious trick.} 37. Nh4 Kf8 $5 38. Nxf6 $4 { Falling for the trick. Black finally saw the idea of advancing on the Queen side while White's Knights are out of range.} 38… c3 39. bxc3 Rxc3 40. g5 b4 41. Nd5 Rc5 $6 { Deciding to win the g-Pawn instead of the a-Pawn.} ( 41… Rc2+ 42. Ke3 Rxa2 43. Nxb4 Ra4 { I did not see this skewer.} 44. Nxa6 Rxh4 ) 42. Nxb4 Rxg5 $4 { It's a dead draw now.} ( 42… Rc4 { Yes, I missed this tactic winning a Knight.} 43. Nxa6 Rxh4 44. Nc5 Rh2+ 45. Kf3 Rxa2 $201 { This is an easy win for Black, who can use the King and Rook to drive White's Knight away in order to win the g-Pawn eventually.} ) 43. Nxa6 Ra5 44. Nc7 Rxa2+ 45. Kg3 Ra4 46. Nf5 f6 47. Nd5 Kf7 48. Nde3 Ke6 49. Kf3 Ke5 50. Kg3 Rf4 51. Nh4 Re4 52. Ng6+ Ke6 53. Nf4+ Ke5 54. Ng6+ Ke6 55. Nf4+ Ke5 1/2-1/2`} />

Celebrating the 150th birthday of my favorite second-rate composer: Richard Strauss

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 21:22:01 GMT

So it's the 150th birthday of Richard Strauss, the German composer who famously declared himself a "first-class second-rate composer", since he considered himself not in the rank of Mozart and Beethoven.

Nevertheless, I would certainly consider him one of the great composers of all time, because of his innovative explorations of color, and the tension between counterpoint and tonality.

Here's a tour of some of my favorite performances of his music.

My first discovery of Richard Strauss: "Also sprach Zarathustra"

Probably like everyone else born after 1968, the first time I heard any music by Strauss was surely while watching the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey". I watched it sometime in the 1980s. Kubrick took the opening "Sunrise" of Strauss's 1896 symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra as the opening musical theme of the film:

It took years until I actually learned this music wasn't composed for the film, but was a fragment of something old, and had a name. At some point, I finally heard the whole piece, on the radio. And then I listened to it more deeply in college, as I grappled with Strauss's playing with tonality, using B major against C major in the piece to contrast humanity with the universe.

If you've only heard the opening fanfare, you must listen to the whole piece. It's a story in itself.

A video of Mariss Jansons conducting this work:

My second discovery: "Im Abendrot"

In college, I watched the 1990 film "Wild at Heart" with friends as it came out. I was wowed by the opening music theme and wondered what that gorgeous music was. Well, it turned out to be the beginning of Richard Strauss's "Im Abendrot", one of his "Four Last Songs" composed in 1948 when he was 84 years old.

Check out the opening of the film, if you haven't seen it before or don't remember:

The music clip from that film was an excerpt from one sung by Jessye Norman, conducted by Kurt Masur. It turns out that she sang it really slowly, and I prefer the music as a whole to go more quickly, in the context of it being a whole song, not just an instrumental introduction. Here is a classic recording by Gundula Janowitz in 1973 conducted by Herbert von Karajan that may be my favorite one of this beautiful song, which is about reflections on approaching death: "We have gone through sorrow and joy hand in hand; now let us rest from our wanderings above the silent land."

Listen to the whole thing:

I find it marvelous and touching that Richard Strauss continued to give the world the gift of lovely music in his old age.

Some youthful music: piano sonata in B minor

Now, for something completely different: a piano sonata he wrote at age 16, in 1880. (Yes, 1880. One thing to remember about Richard Strauss is just how long he lived, and how many eras of musical and political change he survived through.)

Glenn Gould was a big champion of Richard Strauss, and I'm grateful he recorded a bunch of his Strauss's piano music. Obviously, this youthful piano music is not among Strauss's greatest work (it tends to be very repetitious, not yet fully individualist and economical), but it still has its charm, as a transitional late Romantic attempt of the 19th century. I can't possibly listen to the whole thing without falling asleep, but it's interesting to click around to get a glimpse of where he was coming from:

His masterpiece at the end: Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings

In 1944, near the end of his life, 64 years after the last musical selection I linked to, Strauss composed his final masterpiece, Metamorphosen, which he subtitled "in memoriam". "In memory" of what? He refused to say, so there is debate about this: it could be a statement of mourning over the Dresden destruction in World War II, or could be a more abstract statement about the horrors of war in general. See this recent article for more discussion.

This is my favorite music by him. It is a feat of emotional contrast and expression, and gorgeous orchestration, writing for strings.

Here is a wonderful video of Nathalie Stutzmann conducting Metamorphosen:

Other work

I have completely omitted any mention of decades of Strauss's most prominent masterpieces, because, ironically, most of them do not speak to me. I realize that by saying this, I am saying that Strauss is a problem for me: much of his music leaves me cold, however technically brilliant they might be. So I do not love that music. I remember him for his accomplished, nostalgic later work that I actually love.

Conducting

Richard Strauss was influential as a conductor.

His own music

Here is a video clip of Richard Strauss conducting his own music in 1944:

Mozart

Strauss loved Mozart. Here he is in a 1926 recording of Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony, no. 41:

It's not a great performance (I do not like the sloppiness or the rushing), but it is interesting how "modern" it sounds, in that it takes a brisk tempo and focuses on overall structural integrity and drive. Apparently he did not treat recording as a serious activity, however, so one cannot extrapolate from this recording how his live performances sounded in general.

Controversies

There are two controversies over Strauss: one is over music and one is over politics.

Musically, Strauss for a long time was considered to have fallen into conservatism, as he began as a radical innovator but did not follow through: he rejected the 20th century developments in atonality and serialism. I am not sure how entirely fair it is to level this charge against him, since he lived so long that one could not expect him to stay a radical forever. I also do not believe musical conservatism is necessarily horrible. Not everyone has the temperament or desire to be perpetually be on the cutting edge. I am perfectly happy that he wrote the "conservative" Metamorphosen and Four Last Songs that only he, who had lived half his life through the late Romantic era in the 19th century, could have created the way that they are.

Politically, there are charges of his conveniently going along with the Nazi regime for his own career gain. He is not alone, of course, in being a German musician under a cloud for not fleeing Germany or actively opposing Hitler. So there will always be <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.dw.de/richard-strauss-and-musical-seduction/a-17695663" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.dw.de/richard-strauss-and-musical-seduction/a-17695663">discussion of this aspect of his life</span>. I think it's clear that he had no Nazi ideological convictions, but was a career opportunist.

Conclusion

On Richard Strauss's 150th birthday, I decided to celebrate the music of his that I love most, and share it here. I hope you have checked out some of it.

Do you like the music of Richard Strauss? If so, what are your favorite pieces by him? Are they among those I mentioned, or those I did not? What do you think about him as a person?

Finally making rhubarb tasty to myself: flour-less rhubarb crisp

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 22:15:32 GMT

For the first forty years of my life, I believe I never ate any rhubarb. At least, I don't ever recall anything identified as rhubarb that I ate. It was just something I heard about, in the context of pie, and I rarely eat pies, and am rather particular about pie when I do eat it (for example, I have sometimes eaten pumpkin pie, because my father likes it, but I never once really enjoyed it).

My Krestschmann Farm box subscription has always recognized that some people don't like rhubarb, and allows opting out of receiving it. Since I never ate it, I didn't know whether I liked it, but looking up its description online, I felt no need to try it, so I always indicated that I did not want it.

Today was the first time I cooked rhubarb and made something that I actually enjoyed eating. Here's the story.

My first time cooking rhubarb was a disaster

Almost exactly a year ago, Abby and I accidentally did not specify rhubarb exclusion from our farm box (upon renewing our subscription). So we received rhubarb.

I didn't know what the heck to do with it. I decided to make an Indian-style lentil dish and "hide" rhubarb in it. At first I thought it was OK, but then I decided it was weird. Unfortunately, I had to finish the whole batch. Abby didn't help me finish it.

Abby's experiment didn't work for me

Abby also tried an experiment, cooking rhubarb with banana on the stove. The resulting concoction caused an argument, because after trying it, I refused to eat any more of it, but she had made a huge batch and so she was stuck with it.

My experiment today

Today I decided that instead of randomly making crap up, I would look for some kind of "recipe", and also incorporate the advice of friends from last year. The following is what I made. I found it surprisingly edible, and even had to stop myself from eating too much after dinner:

My ingredients:

Coconut oil
Rhubarb, chopped up
Honey (I tried to go easy with this!)
Cinnamon
Cloves
Orange zest
Lemon juice
Salt
Cocoa powder (a tiny sprinkle, just an improvisation)
Raw walnuts and pecans, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F, layer the nuts on top of the remainder of the mixture, and bake for 40 minutes.

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions to me last year!

The result was fairly tart, which is fine, but I didn't want to put too much sugar into this.

What next?

I was planning to notify Kretschmann Farm that we don't want to receive rhubarb, but I have second thoughts now.

Nevertheless, we will probably go ahead as planned and put rhubarb on our "do not want" list, simply because we'd rather get other stuff instead.

Lessons learned

I learned some lessons from this whole rhubarb incident:

I can learn to like stuff I never ate for decades, if I prepare it just so. (More generally, I try to continuously find opportunities to love what I used to hate.)
It is wise to listen to accumulated wisdom, especially from my friends (whose taste might be correlated a bit with mine).
Accidentally not choosing to opt out of my "default" preference led to some interesting experiences.

What's the latest food you feared or hated or didn't know about that you recently tried? How did it go? If it went poorly, will you try again, or just write it off?

The Chess Improver: Lessons from my 2nd tournament game

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 11:16:00 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Lessons from my 2nd tournament game"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Last week, I wrote about deciding to analyze my tournament games from over thirty years ago for my own benefit as well as for valuable teaching material. I started off with my first tournament game, from 1980, as an unrated 10-year-old boy, which I lost without much of a fight.

This week, I bring a much more interesting game, my second tournament game that took place probably an hour or two after my first one. This game, played against someone rated around USCF 1400, I ended up winning, but as is typical in games of this level, both sides made serious errors. The nature of these errors is instructive.

Themes to pay attention to

As is typical in weaker amateurs' games, we were out of opening "book" theory at move 5 in a Petroff Defense, when my opponent played a poor and strange Queen move. I reacted not terribly, but not best either. If I were coaching my younger self now, I would emphasize that general principles apply when facing strange moves in the opening. Here, just because my opponent moved his Queen doesn't mean that I should also move my Queen!

Quick piece trades into an ending; interesting imbalance of my having the Bishop pair

Typical of games at this level, a lot of piece trades happened, just because they could. Stronger players would evaluate whether it is advantageous to offer a particular trade or to accept one. The trade in this game at move 16 determined the course of the rest of the game: my opponent gave up a Bishop for my Knight, resulting in a permanent imbalance whose significance was not appreciated by either of us, as our endgame shows.

All the trades resulted in an endgame with two Bishops vs. Bishop and Knight, and symmetrical Petroff Pawn structures. I missed the win of a light-squared Pawn on the Queen side: a stronger player would have immediately spotted the possibility, because of Black missing a light-squared Bishop while the Knight was out of play on the other side of the board. When I finally did see the win, I inexplicably did not take the free Pawn. I don't remember what I was thinking 34 years ago, but perhaps I missed an elementary recapture with check?

Bishop versus Knight, symmetrical Pawns

At move 30, my opponent forced the trade of his remaining Bishop, leaving us with a Bishop versus Knight endgame. This is when things got strange. Neither of us knew what we were doing. We didn't have clear plans, clear points of attack or defense. We played somewhat randomly. I made the first terrible moves, pushing a Pawn so far, without any support of my King, that it was doomed. Miraculously, my opponent never figured out how to win that Pawn. Apparently, neither of us had been taught that an active King is the most important piece in a minor piece and Pawn ending.

At move 35, an interesting thing happened: my opponent tried to trick me into trading my Bishop for his Knight, which, because of his more active King and position, would have led to a won King and Pawn ending. Critically, in my chess education I had learned the basics of standard King and Pawn endings, so I did not fall into the trap.

At move 44, I made a horrific "active" Pawn push to attack Black's Knight, but this should have led easily to losing a Pawn by force, if the Knight simply danced around attacking all the Pawns in sight until one fell. Everyone should know basic examples of the special power of the Knight in an ending, especially against a Bishop that can only protect Pawns of one square color!

It turns out that at move 46, I horrifically gave up a Pawn voluntarily anyway. I can deduce what must have happened. There was a Knight check fork after which I could have taken the Knight with my Bishop, leading to a drawn King and Pawn ending, but I must have still felt (from the earlier trick attempt) that any King and Pawn ending was still lost for me. I didn't evaluate the position as it was, but only thought about a past "similar" position that was in fact critically different. I will confess that even at my much higher level of chess today, I still sometimes fall into the trap of making assumptions based on past positions.

After winning the Pawn, the ending should have been an easy win for Black, but he did not know what to do with his King and Knight, and actually ended up putting his Knight on the rim where it is dim! This enabled me to regain the lost Pawn.

At move 60, my opponent made a random Knight move that I could have punished by invading the King side with my King and mopping up Pawns and Queening. But I did not realize that the situation had changed and I was winning; I did not use my King. I had been defending for 25 moves, basically, since mistakenly advancing my b-Pawn and making it a target. I started retreating again to "defend" my Queen side, rather than win on the King side.

Winning King and Pawn ending

Just as I started retreating, my opponent made a horrific blunder at move 62, moving his Knight such that I could skewer it with a check and trade into an obviously won King and Pawn ending. Apparently, he fell into the mental trap just mentioned earlier of thinking that because at one point, King and Pawn endings were winning for him, they must always be winning for him.

The rest of the game was easy, but I am proud that I cleaned up efficiently. One important part of it was knowing how to win a Queen versus Pawn ending by forcing the defending King to block the Pawn's Queening square, gaining time. Finally I activated my King in the game! And I won without resorting to my other passed Pawn, just using my Queen and King.

The complete annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Michigan Open"] [Site ""] [Date "1980.08.30"] [Round "2"] [White "Chen Franklin"] [Black "Swathell Gary"] [Result "1-0"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [BlackElo "0"] [ECO "C42"] [EventDate "1980.08.30"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nxe5 d6 4. Nf3 Nxe4 5. d4 Qe7 $2 6. Qe2 $2 { I was "out of book" and confused, unable to think for myself.} ( 6. Be2 { Normal development is fine, and great for White.} ) 6… d5 7. Nbd2 Nxd2 8. Bxd2 Qxe2+ 9. Bxe2 Bf5 10. c3 Bd6 11. O-O O-O 12. Rfe1 { Still following my mechanical "rule" of developing all of my pieces, including my Rooks, before any other active play.} 12… c6 13. Rac1 { Simply the best square I could find for my remaining Rook, which I felt I needed to develop.} 13… Re8 $2 { My opponent broke the rule about developing minor pieces before Rooks!} 14. Nh4 Be6 15. Bd3 { Improving my Bishop and opening the way for my Rook on the e-file.} 15… Nd7 16. Nf5 { An active attacking move.} 16… Bxf5 $6 { Giving up the Bishop pair for no good reason.} 17. Rxe8+ Rxe8 18. Bxf5 Nf6 19. Re1 { Following the rule to face off against Rooks on open files.} 19… Rxe1+ $2 20. Bxe1 $201 Ne4 $2 { An "active" move that does not do anything but waste time. It also does not pay attention to serious Queen side threats.} 21. f3 $2 { A reactive move in fear of leaving the Knight at its "outpost".} ( 21. Bc8 { Would have won a light-squared Pawn!} ) 21… Nf6 22. Bh4 Nh5 $4 23. Bc8 { Finally seeing a target on the Queen side.} 23… b6 24. Bb7 c5 25. dxc5 $2 { Completely incomprehensible, avoiding the easy win of a Pawn.} ( 25. Bxd5 { Wins a Pawn for nothing.} ) 25… Bxc5+ { Did I miss that the recapture was with check?} 26. Kf1 d4 27. cxd4 Bxd4 28. b3 Be5 29. g3 h6 30. f4 Bf6 31. Bxf6 Nxf6 $201 32. Ke2 Kf8 33. Bc6 $2 { I was playing without a clear plan.} 33… Ke7 34. b4 $2 Kd6 35. b5 $2 { Terrible and totally misguided. Now White is overextended and should actually lose a Pawn soon.} 35… Nd5 { Trying to trick White into trading into a King and Pawn ending.} ( 35… Kc5 ) 36. Kd2 $4 { Not even at least trying to get closer to the defense of the b-Pawn.} ( 36. Bxd5 $4 ) 36… Nb4 $2 ( 36… Nc7 ) 37. Be8 f6 38. a4 Kc5 39. Bf7 Nd5 $2 ( 39… Kd4 ) 40. Kd3 Ne7 41. Kc3 Nd5+ { Still trying to trick White into a King and Pawn ending.} 42. Kd3 Ne7 43. Kc3 Nf5 { Avoiding a draw by repetition and trying to win.} 44. g4 $4 { Horrible, weakening the King side Pawns.} 44… Ne3 45. h3 Nd5+ $2 ( 45… Ng2 { A Knight dance would have won one of the Pawns.} 46. f5 Nf4 47. h4 Ng2 48. h5 Ne3 ) 46. Kb3 $4 { Horrific, giving up a Pawn without a fight. I did not recalculate that the new King and Pawn ending is a draw.} ( 46. Bxd5 { Now was the time to bail out into a draw.} ) 46… Nxf4 47. h4 g5 48. h5 Nd5 ( 48… f5 ) 49. Be6 Ne7 $6 { Strangely passive.} ( 49… Kd6 ) 50. Kc3 Kd6 51. Bc4 f5 52. Be2 f4 $2 ( 52… Ke5 { Again, activating the King was winning.} ) 53. Kd4 Nd5 54. Bf3 Nb4 $6 { Playing on the wrong side of the board. The goal should be to maneuver the Knight to kick away White's Bishop on f3.} ( 54… Nf6 { !?} 55. Be2 Nd7 56. Bf3 Ne5 ) 55. Be4 Na2 $4 { Knight on the rim is dim!} 56. Bd3 $4 ( 56. Kc4 { Immobilizing Black's Knight would have drawn immediately.} ) 56… Nc1 $2 ( 56… Nb4 ) 57. Bc4 f3 58. Ke3 { Now White will regain the Pawn.} 58… Kc5 59. Bf7 Ne2 60. Kxf3 Nf4 $4 { Allows White's King to invade the King side.} ( 60… Nc3 { Keeping the Knight active and pointed at White's Queen side would have held.} ) 61. Bg6 $4 { Completely ridiculous, not realizing it was time to attack and win.} ( 61. Ke4 { Should be an easy win for White on the King side.} ) 61… Kd5 62. Bc2 Ne6 $4 { Suicide.} ( 62… Kd4 { Activate the King!} ) 63. Bb3+ Ke5 64. Bxe6 Kxe6 $201 { The King and Pawn ending is winning for White.} 65. Ke4 { I knew about taking the opposition.} 65… Kf6 66. Kd5 Ke7 67. Kc6 Ke6 68. Kb7 Ke5 69. Kxa7 Kf4 70. Kxb6 Kxg4 71. a5 Kh3 72. a6 g4 73. a7 g3 74. a8=Q g2 $201 75. Qf3+ { I knew how to win with Queen versus Pawn.} 75… Kh2 76. Qf2 Kh1 77. Qh4+ Kg1 78. Kc5 { I knew the standard technique of forcing Black to block the Queening square to give time for White's King to come back.} 78… Kf1 79. Qf4+ Ke2 80. Qg3 Kf1 81. Qf3+ Kg1 82. Kd4 Kh2 83. Qf2 Kh3 84. Qg1 { Does the job, but was not necessary.} ( 84. Ke4 { Most thematic and efficient.} ) 84… Kh4 85. Qxg2 Kxh5 86. Ke5 Kh4 87. Kf4 h5 88. Qg3# { A very long game, but I was proud to win my second ever tournament game.} 1-0`} />

Thoughts on National Running Day 2014

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 23:19:21 GMT

This is my third year of celebrating <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.runningday.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.runningday.org/">National Running Day</span>. The first year, I did so by running in Schenley Park; last year, I quietly did my usual Frick Park run.

This year, I ran in Frick Park again, a shorter run, because I took such a long break from running since last October, and only recently returned to regular running.

Luna Venado Sandals

Since it was a shorter run of just 3 miles, I wore my thin Luna Venado Sandals (only 7 mm thick) instead of the Luna Mono Sandals that I wore on last year's run.

Thoughts

I'm grateful that I have returned to running after many months off. It's good for my body and most of all, my mind, actually.

I'm grateful that I have no excuse to go out since I live so close to Frick Park.

I'm grateful that running is one of those things that (assuming your legs and feet are doing OK) you can do as slowly or as easily as you need or want to. I'm just ramping up slowly right now, and feel no anxiety about what level of fitness I'm at now. If I get tired, I can always walk, no shame. It's all good.

Do you run? Do you make it a ritual, as apparently I have, of taking time out periodically to reflect on what running means to you?

Sometimes the best speech is the one you didn't have time to prepare

Fri, 30 May 2014 01:57:45 GMT

I went to something like my twelfth <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.hss.cmu.edu/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.hss.cmu.edu/">CMU Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences</span> staff appreciation lunch (I've lost track). Basically, they feed you, recognize people who have worked some multiple of five years, and hold a raffle for ten cash prizes topping out at $100 (I won $75 last year). It's a pleasant annual social event, but one whose details I don't really remember from one year to the next.

But this year was different. I will not forget this year.

Where's the dean?

The current dean, John Lehoczky, who always gives out the awards during the staff appreciation lunch, was nowhere to be found. This was especially mysterious because he was to be honored with a gift today, since he is stepping down as dean after fourteen years, to return to his duties as professor of statistics.

Food

Lunch was pretty good, for me anyway. I had steak, potatoes, steamed vegetables, and salad, and topped off with some coffee and cake.

But I was surprised by the absence of vegetarian entrees. I myself am not vegetarian, but I know many people who are, or are almost-vegetarian, and I enjoy vegetarian options, so I am always sensitive to the variety of food options at events. Vegetarians at this lunch today had to make do by loading up on only simple salad and steamed vegetables.

Dean Lehoczky appears

Finally, after everyone was done eating, Dean Lehoczky appeared.

He explained that last night he had been working on some fancy speech for us, but then his wife had an accident and he took her to the hospital and they had some adventures there. After they finally returned home, he decided to scrap his plans for his speech.

Instead, he gave a little talk that is the only one of his that I expect to remember in the past decade of this annual event (I have no memory of what he even said last year, for example). It was hilarious, and it was just him telling a story highlighting the humor in all the situations that arose after the accident last night.

I guarantee you that I will never forget this story he told, as long as I live, it was so funny and personal. I will remember this story for decades. Up till this moment, John Lehoczky was to me just some guy I saw around at events. I don't remember anything he might have said at any ceremonial speech I may have attended by him. But after yesterday, I saw a really funny guy who shared a personal story at his last staff appreciation lunch. The first thing when I got home from work was to tell Abby the story.

Conclusion

If you're going to give a speech, why not make it unique and interesting, rather than formal and boilerplate? It worked, by accident, for John Lehoczky in his final moments as dean of the CMU Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

When you have to speak in public, how do you feel about your obligation? Do you fall back on some impersonal formula based on some template, since nobody really cares anyway? Or do you tell a story, and make it interesting? Do you care if anyone cares?

The Chess Improver: Is it worth studying your own games from thirty years ago?

Thu, 29 May 2014 11:16:26 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Is it worth studying your own games from thirty years ago?"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

I am firmly convinced that the single best thing one can to do improve one's chess is to analyze one's actual games. For this reason, I make game analysis the cornerstone of my work with a student; from going over his games, and asking him why he played certain moves or what thoughts he was having, and how he evaluated certain positions, we get a lot of data to use in targeted improvement of endgame, middlegame, and opening understanding, as well as tactical themes.

But I didn't quite take my own advice

So it is ironic that I never fully analyzed the games of chess that I played in my first five years in tournaments, from 1980-1985, ages 10-15! Several years ago, upon returning to chess after an absence of twenty years, I decided I might as well enter into a database all the tournament games I have ever played in my life, starting from my very first games as a child 34 years ago now in 1980. I had kept all my old scoresheets (except for one stray tournament I played while in high school; I seem to have misplaced my scoresheets from that Michigan high school tournament).

But I never actually went back to analyze any of those old games, except for a handful that came to mind because of important positions that had stuck in my mind. I basically came back to chess tournament play in 2005 with a clean slate, as though I had never played before. I had in twenty years completely forgotten any opening theory I had ever known (which was very little, actually), and therefore rebuilt my game from scratch. I didn't feel that it was worth studying my old games from my childhood.

The reasons I did very little analysis of my games (other than sometimes a post mortem with some stronger players) during my tournament life in my youth:

My lack of access to computer engines in the early 1980s. Not having a chess coach.

I have, of course, analyzed all of my games during my adult return to chess in 2005.

But the question remains: is it worth analyzing my ancient games from more than thirty years ago?

A bit about the past

Recently, out of curiosity, I decided to look at all the games in my first tournament I ever played, which was the 1980 Michigan Open, when I was 10 years old. This was the first tournament for my father also: we simultaneously entered the tournament world only weeks after he discovered a local chess club and took me there. They had said, hey, there's an organization for official tournaments you should join, the United States Chess Federation, then you can play rated games, so we joined, we learned how to use chess clocks, and we both entered the Reserve (under-1800) Section of the Michigan Open.

Both my father and I did well in our first tournament in 1980. He won the First place Unrated trophy, and I won the Second place Unrated trophy, both of which he still has at home. I scored 3.5/7.0 points and my first provisional rating was 1546. Not bad for a 10-year-old who had only begun playing with people other than his father for a couple of weeks, and neither of us had ever had lessons, but just studied the game ourselves from old library books. My father achieved a provisional rating a bit higher, around 1574, I believe. He was still stronger than me; I would not surpass him until age 11, when he peaked at 17xx but I passed him, and also beat him at home for the first time ever.

The seeds of one's personality and strengths and weaknesses?

To my surprise, examining the first seven tournament games I ever played, I felt some kind of recognition. Obviously, my tactical and positional understanding were much poorer than they would become later, but certain oddities or weaknesses of how I still play today seem present in those early games, and they contain some elements I am still proud of as well.

In addition, looking at more early games, I found a lot of material that I think may be useful for teaching purposes, because I actually remember what kind of mindset, even specific thoughts, led me to play in certain ways. Since my rating surpassed 2000 by 1985, sometimes it's hard for me to remember specifically what it was like to play at a strength between 1500 and 2000. But it's necessary to know that, in order to better teach and explain things for players of that range of strength.

Therefore, both for my own benefit and for others' benefit, I may start selecting interesting games of mine from the 1980s for analysis.

As a basis, let's start with my first tournament game in my life. In future posts, I will show how I improved my play after this first game. I did end up scoring 3.5/7.0 in this tournament!

My first game

I still remember my first tournament game. I was ten years old, I didn't know what to expect, and I was on my own, as my father was also playing in his first tournament game. My opponent did not show up for something like twenty minutes. I sat there as my clock ticked.

I played pretty badly in my first game. My annotations show my memories of what I was thinking during the game.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Michigan Open"] [Site ""] [Date "1980.08.30"] [Round "1"] [White "Borders Michael"] [Black "Chen Franklin"] [Result "1-0"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [BlackElo "Unrated"] [ECO "A03"] [EventDate "1980.08.30"] [WhiteElo ""]

f4 { My first ever tournament game in my life, and my opponent arrived late, and played the Bird! I recall that his rating was 15xx.} 1… d5 { I already didn't know what I was doing. My father only played 1 e4 against me.} 2. Nf3 e6 { I had the idea that I need to develop my King side Bishop as quickly as possible.} 3. g3 b6 { I got "scared" and wanted to "cancel" White's fianchetto with my own.} 4. Bg2 Bb7 5. O-O Nf6 6. d3 Bc5+ $5 { Not actually pointless. My plan was to provoke an advance of White's e-Pawn to e3, to make White's dark-squared Bishop "worse".} 7. e3 O-O 8. c3 $6 ( 8. Ne5 Bd6 9. b3 c5 10. Bb2 ) 8… Bd6 { Weird to waste a tempo, but this was intentional. After provoking e3, I wanted to play c5.} 9. Qc2 c5 10. Nbd2 Re8 $6 { With a plan, but not a good one. I did not understand the value of the Bishop pair, and did not think about the drawbacks of a half-open f-file.} ( 10… Ng4 { Taking advantage of White's momentary weakness on e3.} 11. Nb3 Re8 12. e4 c4 ) 11. e4 e5 $2 { Positionally terrible.} ( 11… Ng4 ) 12. fxe5 Bxe5 13. Nxe5 Rxe5 14. Nf3 Re8 15. e5 Ng4 $4 { Not considering that the Knight would be stranded. But at this point in my chess development, I resisted moving my pieces backwards.} ( 15… Nfd7 16. d4 f6 17. exf6 Nxf6 ) 16. Bf4 $2 ( 16. d4 Ba6 17. Ng5 Bxf1 18. Qxh7+ ) 16… Nd7 17. Rae1 $2 ( 17. d4 Nf8 18. h3 Nh6 19. Rf2 ) 17… Rc8 $4 { Here you have to understand that I believed in "developing" every piece (including Rooks) before doing anything else in a game. This was the best square I could think of for the Rook.} ( 17… d4 18. Qb3 Qe7 19. h3 Nh6 ) 18. h3 Nh6 19. g4 d4 { To open up the way for my Bishop.} 20. Qd2 Nf8 21. c4 Re6 $4 { Protecting the Knight on h6, but providing a target. I simply did not think ahead for possible threats, but played one move at a time.} ( 21… Ng6 22. Bxh6 gxh6 23. Qxh6 Bxf3 ) 22. Ng5 Re7 $2 { OK, this protects the Bishop on b7, but I was not yet capable of realizing that it was best to give up an exchange and get my Knight out of h6.} ( 22… Bxg2 23. Nxe6 fxe6 24. Qxg2 Nf7 ) 23. Bxb7 Rxb7 24. Ne4 f5 $4 { I was focused on rescuing my Knight from h6 and thought I was being clever by playing an attacking move to get the time for the Knight to move.} ( 24… Rc6 { At least protects the Knight.} ) 25. Nd6 { Oops, I didn't look to see that White could move the Knight and also attack at the same time.} 25… Rf7 $4 { Trying to "trick" White into taking the Rook on f7, because I was fixated on rescuing my Knight from h6.} 26. Nxf7 { It still wins.} ( 26. Bxh6 { Was even stronger, but it doesn't matter here.} ) 26… Nxf7 27. gxf5 { Black is an exchange and Pawn down, totally lost, of course.} 27… Qd7 28. e6 Qe7 29. exf7+ Qxf7 30. Bd6 Nd7 $9 { Still obsessed with "developing" the Knight, and not watching out for threats.} 31. Re7 { Oops, I will lose a Knight.} 31… Qh5 { Maybe I'll get the h3 Pawn.} 32. Qg2 { No luck getting the h3 Pawn.} 32… Qh6 { Have to stop mate on g7.} 33. Rxd7 g6 $2 { Allowing mate in 3.} 34. Qd5+ Kh8 35. Be5+ 1-0`} />

Copland's Appalachian Spring danced by the orchestra musicians: confronting my memories of boredom four years ago

Thu, 29 May 2014 02:23:26 GMT

I follow Greg Sandow's blog on the "future of classical music". He posted an article that got me thinking: he was all excited about an unorthodox performance of Aaron Copland's half-hour-long "Appalachian Spring" by the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra in which the students of the orchestra actually moved around and danced as well as played their instruments.

I have a confession to make: back almost four years ago, in November 2010, I went to a "Carnegie Mellon Night at the Symphony" in which "Appalachian Spring" was on the program. I got very bored during the piece.

One thing to remember is that the orchestra suite was actually arranged by Copland from his original piece that was an actual ballet for Martha Graham! So it's actually kind of unnatural to experience this music "purely" as music. To me the suite is rather long and redundant without some kind of "story" to go along with it. So I watched the video of the orchestra-danced performance.

It was definitely more interesting seeing action. At the same time, I got bored eventually anyway, after about 15 minutes. But I lasted longer with the physical action. However, I was also distracted by thoughts of how difficult it must have been for the orchestra to pull this off. I mean, marching band is one thing, but this is an orchestra and there was a ton of choreography and it's not just marching.

It's interesting that a commenter on Sandow's blog criticized the effort, writing: It's nicely done, I suppose, if you must do this sort of thing. But when I go to an orchestral concert, I'm there for the music, not for this sort of thing. To me, this doesn't tell the audience "this music is worth your time and attention," it tells them "we have so little faith that you’ll enjoy the music that we feel compelled to trick it out with distractions." I used to sing in a chorus that was fond of "chorusography," and it annoyed me as a performer, too."

What do you think? Do you like this idea or does it annoy you?

Judge for yourself:

Remembering the gift of being introduced to kayaking six years ago by a total stranger

Mon, 26 May 2014 03:01:47 GMT

Over Memorial Day weekend, Abby and I went kayaking on the Kiski River, at the invitation of Steve, the guy we first met six years ago. There's a story I'd like to share about what happened by chance six years ago.

First meeting Steve at his "soup hike" in 2008

Abby and I met Steve on a Pittsburgh hiking meetup hike on June 8, 2008 that he hosted in Apollo, PA, the second "soup hike" that has since then become a regular tradition. 13 people attended that soup hike. (The first instance of the soup hike, which we did not attend, was on April 5, 2008.)

The original theme of the soup hike was that since the first one was in cold weather, participants were invited to bring soup to share in Steve's garage after the hike. It would turn out, of course, that people brought all kinds of food, not just "soup", but the name has stuck!

The truth is that I had to drag Abby into attending our first soup hike. Although we had done a little bit of hiking after we first met dancing, she had been uninterested in the longer hikes (over five miles) that I liked to do. (It turns out that she had a lot of knee and ankle and endurance problems at the time; we've found solutions in recent years, largely through the radical change in footwear to Vibram FiveFingers and also changes in diet.) I was very sad about this, because to be honest, I did not know how much longer I could date someone who was not going to be part of my weekend outdoors life (we had been together a year, but I was still spending much of my time hiking with my office mate John on weekends). It was a huge deal to me to encourage Abby to join me for hikes.

We both enjoyed the hike tremendously. It's a beautiful hike.

When Abby saw Jackson Falls, she knew she wanted to come back again to swim!

Kayaking

After the hike, I was surprised to see some people taking kayaks out to the Kiski River. Steve was letting people use his kayaks!

At this point in my life, I had never voluntarily been in the water before. I'm terrible at swimming, had near-drowning experiences when young, and had never touched a kayak or canoe before. But Abby was all excited, and the view on the river look so nice.

So Steve said we could briefly get on the river, and each of us took a kayak and just paddled around in the river for a few minutes. I was so scared the first time, and disoriented, but after a while, decided I really enjoyed this!

In summary, it was an amazing day, during which we met this great guy Steve who led us on a great hike, provided space and food in his garage, and even let us play with his kayaks. I was profoundly moved by his generosity, and the sense of fun that everyone brought to the event. Steve put us on his mailing list for his regular paddling trips, and ever since then, Abby and I have tried to join him for a couple of paddling trips a year, as our schedules and weather conditions allow.

Some photos from the paddling trip we just came back from

The paddling trip we just did with Steve was a 9-miler on the Conemaugh River, from Blairsville. The water was rather low this day, but the weather was perfect: sunny, temperature in the 70s, not too high, and breezy, not so humid.

It turns out that until today, we had not paddled in two years, because of our life situations last year, so we were really excited to have this opportunity this year.

Cute doggie coming with us:

The group starting down the river while I hang back to take a photo:

Passing a rookery:

Lunch break on the water because the water levels were too low for us to get off on solid ground.

A panorama:

One of several bridges along the route:

Turning off to take out:

Panorama at take-out point:

Logistics

It's really complicated setting up these paddling trips, because not only does Steve personally hoist up and tie up several kayaks to tow himself, but also we try to consolidate people into as few vehicles as possible in order to set up an efficient shuttle between the take-out and put-in points. And after paddling, all the kayaks have to be put back on, and everyone transported back to their appropriate vehicles, and some people ending back up at Steve's place while others just go back home. Basically, if you sign up for one of these trips, plan to spend the whole day outside.

For example, on this trip, which was especially involved because of how far everything was, and because it did not end at Steve's place, we met up at 9:30 AM but didn't leave till more like 10:30 AM. After arriving at the put-in location, we unloaded, Steve went with some others to drive to the take-out location, take one car back to the put-in, and then we finally got on the river at noon! We ended up getting off the river at 3:30 PM, but then had to get back to Steve's place and help unload and clean up, and by the time we were done, it was 5:00 PM, time for a quick shower and then dinner.

Very time-consuming, but it's good to invest the time to just relax and go with the flow all day and enjoy the scenery and camaraderie, rather than have anything else planned for later in the day!

Food

Abby made and brought a tasty zucchini dish, and some smoked Gouda cheese, to share for after paddling, and Steve provided burgers to grill. Many of the participants were newcomers and didn't realize they should bring food to contribute, but they know now. In any case, there was still leftover watermelon, chips, cookies, and beers from the previous day. People also brought in foccacia, cole slaw, and pasta salad.

I ate two leftover homemade cookies immediately!

Abby's zucchini was popular:

Steve's burger patties, just off his grill:

Bonfire

There have been occasions when we have stayed long enough to sit in front of the bonfire that Steve likes to make (we have camped overnight outside his place a couple of times), but usually we are really beat and head out to drive home before dark, so that's what we did.

Conclusion

Six years ago I never went into water, but then thanks to meeting Steve, have had the opportunity to do kayaking a couple of times a year with Abby, expanding my experience of the natural world. It's really a remarkable experience going down the river, powering yourself, facing the vastness of water and under the open sky. Also, it's been inspiring to meet someone like Steve who is so generous and shares his knowledge and love of nature.

Have you been introduced to something new and beautiful in recent years, thanks to the kindness of someone you just met? If so, what are your thoughts on your fortune?

The Chess Improver: You don't have to be who you think you are

Thu, 22 May 2014 11:24:59 GMT

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""You don't have to be who you think you are"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

I work with a chess student who sometimes expresses discomfort at facing a particular opening or kind of position. I know this feeling all too well, because I certainly experienced it as a young chess player, and even now as a not-so-young chess player! And I know that all of us have certain preferences. The question then becomes, what should we do about these preferences? Should we avoid entire openings and positions, or just hunker down and study what we don't like?

From a practical point of view, we have to choose a middle path. For example, suppose you really like to open with 1 e4, but you hate facing the French Defense, which follows if your opponent responds with 1…e6. It would be extreme to give up 1 e4 just because of the French Defense, if you had no other reason to switch your White opening. We never get exactly what we "want" in a real game of chess anyway, so we might as well get used to some discomfort and expand our tolerance and understanding, both for better performance and better enjoyment in the long run.

Switch sides

One interesting response to discomfort in a situation in chess is to take the other side. I've adopted this response sometimes, either casually or quite seriously. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" So, continuing the example above, maybe if you have a lot of trouble playing White against the French Defense, you should try playing it as Black.

There are two possible situations when switching sides.

Liking the other side

It is possible that you actually like the strategies of the Black side of the French Defense, but have never played this opening. Well, maybe this is a perfect opportunity for you to learn a new opening that intrigues you. And as you do so, you can take advantage of your prior experience as White, knowing what felt uncomfortable to you as White, and refining as Black how to cause your "White self" problems. Then you can transfer your knowledge to playing against other people.

Not liking the other side

I suspect that more likely, you may not like the other side either: you just don't like the French Defense as either White or Black. This is the real test of your commitment to chess. In a real chess game, you will often reach a position that seems weird and confusing, such that you don't know which side you'd rather be on. So an important skill and mindset to develop is that of making the most of a situation that is confusing.

My big switch

I find that our personal preferences are not necessarily fixed. Sometimes we like to identify as a certain kind of player and reflexively avoid openings or positions that don't conform to our own self-image. And I find that sometimes we dislike something not because we are born to, but because we don't understand it, and as a defense mechanism for our ego, we convince ourselves that we don't like it.

As a personal example: for many years, I dreaded facing the English Opening when I was Black. I even convinced myself that it was a boring opening played by boring people, "cowards" who avoided a quick and sharp opening struggle. But in my mid-30s, after returning to chess and having to face my old fears about the English Opening (and losing games against it), I decided to study it, finally.

I found that the English Opening is actually quite an interesting opening. I found that the more I understood it, the more I liked it, and in fact, I liked White a lot. I abandoned my self-identity as a "tactical" player and started playing it. This resulted in a large improvement in my chess performance (both as White and facing it as Black) and fun. The English Opening is not something I play all the time as White, but learning how it works, for both sides, is something that I feel has permanently affected my understanding and confidence. The irony is that I have not actually played many games with the English per se: Black always has a choice to transpose out into a d-Pawn opening type of structure, in which case White has to transpose in turn to a main line d-Pawn opening or otherwise a Reti. So my improved performance is not a result so much of getting to play the opening, but of the improved confidence and overall chess knowledge. Just knowing that I can play either side of the English has helped me!

It's like exploring new music or new food. We may have some innate preferences (from genes or our prenatal environment), and other preferences shaped at childhood and adolescence, but in the end, we can choose to expand our tastes, in order to enjoy a richer life. On the other hand, it can be unsatisfying to be a dilettante at many things, so if you are looking to truly expand yourself, try one new thing at a time, going into some depth, before moving to another.

And this is a lifelong process who loves learning. I am in fact right now exploring a type of opening/middlegame that has made me uncomfortable in the past.

Conclusion

To expand your understanding of chess, your enjoyment, and your performance, think about what kinds of chess positions make you uncomfortable. Consider whether you have to go to extreme lengths to avoid them; if so, it may be worth facing your discomfort and learning what you think you hate.

How a homemade ice cream cookie sandwich touched my heart seven years ago

Thu, 22 May 2014 00:09:43 GMT

Today's was Carnegie Mellon University's annual "staff picnic". Basically, they provide some reasonable food in the University Center, including a variety of sandwiches and wraps (with many good vegetarian selections, by the way), and salads, and ice cream billed as "homemade ice cream sandwiches".

The menu in recent years has been pretty good, and stayed the same.

I ate a single one of the ice cream cookie sandwiches, which was plenty! There were several different configurations: this time, I chose the chocolate ice cream sandwiched by chocolate chip cookies:

A big disappointment seven years ago, then an unexpected surprise

The funny thing is that even as I enjoyed the staff appreciation lunch, my colleagues and I still remember a disappointment from seven years ago, when because of budget cuts and/or bad judgment, CMU put on a staff picnic that went horrifically wrong.

Basically, they barely had enough food for everyone, there was no potato salad, and there was no ice cream at all! It was an insult to be "appreciated" in this manner: it would have been better to cancel the event than hold one that everyone would grumble about for seven years. I think only since last year did people really start forgetting about that one incident. Time heals.

For me, however, I still remember the incident if only because of a counterbalancing incident that happened just a few hours later, after work.

Seven years ago, when I had only recently started dating Abby, she had invited me to come after work to her friend's place for a little party the same day as the CMU staff picnic, so I went. I arrived complaining to her that I had not received my annual ice cream sandwich (in previous years of the CMU staff picnic, they always provided standard-brand ice cream sandwiches, nothing special, but at least something). It turned out that there was ice cream present at the party, and also cookies, so Abby just combined a pat of ice cream with two cookies and presented it to me! Although the ice cream melted quickly and so the "sandwich" didn't work so well after all, the gesture was funny and kind.

I know it's a tiny little thing to do, but it really touched my heart seven years ago. It was a surprise, unexpected, and just very sweet. It's one of those memories that, when it pops up (spontaneously or because Abby reminds me, as she did tonight when I told her about eating a chocolate one this year rather than a vanilla one), makes me smile. There I was, disappointed by how CMU apparently didn't care enough to truly "appreciate" its staff, and then there was Abby, making a little treat for me.

Our fifth anniversary of marriage is coming up soon. It's been easy to start forgetting the early moments from when we first met, but I've decided that it's important to keep remembering and remain grateful.

Conclusion

CMU must have gotten a lot of feedback from the debacle seven years ago, because the staff picnic went back to normal, and then eventually even improved further. In the past couple of years, they got away from the boring burgers and hot dogs entirely, and went to a much more healthy and interesting menu. Meanwhile, Abby still surprises me sometimes with a treat of some kind, such as when packing lunch for us when we got for a day of hiking. Life is the little things.

How do you react to either negative or positive surprises? Which do you remember more, after the passage of time?

Why I voted yet again

Wed, 21 May 2014 02:52:11 GMT

I voted again, as I've been doing regularly for some years now.

But why?

Last year, I vented a bit about voting but did so anyway.

This year, I paid almost no attention to any media coverage before the election. This included deleting answer machine messages, and summarily recycling all campaign flyers sent to my home, with an attempt not to even see who sent them. I don't know if it's just my imagination, but these flyers have gotten louder and more annoying and inane. I made the mistake of actually seeing one of these flyers (and therefore know who it was from). In all caps and colored, bold text (if I recall correctly), it said something like

<blockquote> Mike knows us.

And we know Mike. </blockquote>

That pretty much sums up what political campaigns are. And we know that psychologically, this stuff works. Just slamming someone's name into our brains, creating "familiarity", influences votes.

Yeah, I voted for Mike anyway. After all, "I know him".

Governor

However, I knew very little about the main race, the primary election for Pennsylvania governor.

The night before, I did a little bit of research, largely on whom to vote against. One candidate apparently stood out for pretty harsh negative ads.

On the whole, such negative ads turn me off. Now, I understand that psychologically, some people are motivated by negative ads to go vote against the target. But it's actually difficult to anticipate exactly what the tradeoff is, in terms of attracting support vs. fueling the opposition. Obviously, I would never make a decision based purely on campaign tactics, but in this case, I figured I would go with someone not particularly different on issues who did not engage in this kind of behavior.

But why vote at all?

I wish I could tell you that I feel I'm making a difference by voting. I'm not sure that's true.

I wish I could tell you that I feel it is my "civic duty" to vote, because I have the privilege of having the right to do so as a citizen of the United States. I'm not sure I feel that is my duty.

The truth is, I vote every election day now simply because I've developed a habit of it, and a system (avoiding media coverage that would piss me off, and doing a bit of homework the night before election day). So, it's just what I do now. I no longer question whether I will get out there and press the big red button. I just do it.

Do you vote? In every election or just high-profile primary or general elections, such as presidential? Why do you vote or not vote?

When I'm feeling too tired to venture out, there's always Frick Park

Mon, 19 May 2014 02:27:39 GMT

Because of the rain forecast and fatigue (I had a tough week), Abby and I ended up not venturing out of the city of Pittsburgh for a hike yesterday. But this afternoon, things seemed to clear up enough that we went for a hike in our local Frick Park. It was a bit chilly actually, so we wore raincoats and also I wore a hat in gloves (yes, it's May).

It's been a real blessing that Frick Park is so close to where we live, because that means we have no excuse not to go out into nature and to get some exercise, even if time or energy means we can't do something more adventurous. Fact is, I took Abby around a bunch of trails that she had not yet explored, so there is no shortage of novelty in Frick Park itself! We were out for almost three hours. I led Abby to the network of trails by Nine Mile Run, then backtracked and went north of Fern Hollow, going up Tranquil Trail and branching off, before coming back down, and then back up toward home.

Do you have a local favorite hangout (in nature or otherwise) that provides comfort and stimulation when you want to get out of the home but don't want to go too far? How do you keep your experiences there interesting?

Pittsburgh Recorder Society: discovering the beauty of Alonso Lobo

Sun, 18 May 2014 21:48:23 GMT

We had another great turnout for the monthly meeting of the Pittsburgh Recorder Society. We got another new member, Joanna. I counted fifteen of us, total.

Today, the highlight for me was discovering some music I don't remember encountering before, by Alonso Lobo, who lived roughly 1555-1617. Fred passed out parts for his "Versa est in luctum", a sacred motet for voice (which we are playing as a recorder ensemble instead).

This music is beautiful and new to me, and Fred provided instructive interpretive guidance I will discuss.

I'd never heard of Lobo before (outside of recorder playing, I simply have very little knowledge of early pre-Baroque music) and had to look up Lobo after the meeting.

"Versa est in luctum" by Alonso Lobo

This is passionate funeral music, written for a Spanish king's funeral. I found an interesting <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://luiscfhenriques.com/alonso-lobos-versa-est-in-luctum/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://luiscfhenriques.com/alonso-lobos-versa-est-in-luctum/">musicologist's blog post about the work</span>.

English translation printed on our recorder arrangement parts:

<blockquote> My harp is turned to mourning and my music into the voice of those that weep. </blockquote>

Fred put me on the alto 1 part. After some work on the piece, he called for those of us on alto 1 (there was at least one other person, but possibly no more, of us fifteen) to play louder, with more emotion, to really ring out. I had held back in part because I was afraid of going sharp if I blowed harder, but also in part because for other music we've been playing, I've been focusing on blending in playing tenor parts. I sometimes somehow get into a rut and "forget" the importance or impact of carrying the top line.

Fred was actually singing along quite expressively as he conducted us. It's inspirational to me that we have a leader who so believes in the music he has us play, and seeks to help us bring out its essence. The interesting thing about this piece is that there are phrases of longer notes as well as those that are more agitated, with faster movement. So there is a lot of beautiful interplay and contrast among the voices as well as within their own span throughout the piece. Fred advised on providing separation at the end of phrases so that they can be heard better in contrast against other voices as they enter and leave in different places.

Anyway, the other first alto(s) and I did play more confidently and louder, as did the rest of the ensemble, and when we did that, it was an amazing feeling, the sense of filling the air and resonating. I live for experiences like this! Let's keep it up.

A performance for choir you should check out

For reference, here is a fine performance by the Gabrieli Consort I discovered:

Group recording from before

Fred brought in a little boombox so we could hear the recording he had made earlier of us playing two months ago. We didn't sound terrible, actually!

Snacks

I ate three cookies.

In retrospect, I should not have eaten three cookies. Maybe two, or maybe one. I know, I made this observation last month. This time, I'm serious. Next meeting, I will eat no more than two cookies.

Conclusion

I enjoyed being shown yet another beautiful piece of music and getting the opportunity to play it with others.

How often do you discover beautiful music you have never heard before, through being given it to play? Is this experience different than just hearing it without playing it?

Thoughts upon uninstalling "Temple Run 2" from my phone

Sat, 17 May 2014 00:37:34 GMT

I have a confession to make.

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c4/TempleRun.jpg/150px-TempleRun.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c4/TempleRun.jpg/150px-TempleRun.jpg">[image: Temple Run logo]</span>

Two years ago, when I finally got my first smartphone, I downloaded a free game, Temple Run, and quickly became a bit obsessed with it.

This was the first computer game I had played in twenty years, actually; although in college I played a fair number of games (including actual physical arcade games in the basement of the college dining hall), including Dark Castle, which I commandeered friends' Macs to play (I owned only an Apple IIe in college, for word processing purposes), the last time I played computer games was in grad school twenty years ago, when I conquered a Mac game called "Kung Fu Chivalry". Somehow, after actually winning that game, I totally lost interest in playing computer games again (despite being annoyed about never finishing "Beyond Dark Castle").

I noticed that my reaction time and coordination were quite rusty after twenty years away from this kind of game, and was determined to get good at Temple Run. I was really bad for a while, but then everything started falling into place, and I got good enough that I got a bit bored. I forgot about the game for a long time.

Months later, Temple Run 2 came out, and I got that, and deleted the original Temple Run. The graphics were much better and the action was more interesting, but again, I got good enough that I got bored. Eventually I stopped playing the game. It's probably been almost a year since I last played it, actually.

But I still had it on my phone, just in case I got "bored" or wanted to check up on my reaction time to see if I had retained my improvements. I never did end up playing it again though. Finally, I just deleted it, to free up space on my phone and to commit to saying goodbye to the game.

Thoughts flashed through my mind as I deleted the game.

We are always choosing how to spend our time; we must own our choices

I felt guilty every time I played the game on the phone (or the iPad, on which I had also installed the game, but I didn't play it often on that). Part of me thought it was a waste of time. Part of me rationalized that I was "training" my brain and fingers to improve my overall reaction time and motor coordination.

I don't like feeling guilty about anything. I'd rather just do the thing in all good conscience, or not do it at all. At some point, I resolved the dissonance for good by no longer playing the game.

I noticed how I had let the smartphone intrude on my life

Obviously, upon getting my first smartphone, I was excited by all the things I could do that I couldn't do before. I could check my email anywhere, read my RSS feeds, Facebook, etc. I even loaded up some of my books onto the phone.

I found myself pulling out the phone to play the game when I was "bored" while riding in a car or something. Then I realized that I was missing the scenery, or just plain quiet time away from technology. Eventually, I decided to minimize the use of my phone when away from home or work, where I'm already in front of a computer most of the time already anyway. Yes, I can spend several hours without checking my phone for email (especially if I'm in the middle of nowhere with no reception).

I got sucked in by fear of losing my accumulated "wealth"

I took so long to delete the game because I kept thinking that if I ever wanted to keep playing, I had racked up a lot of points and "unlocked" various powers, so I wanted to keep all that "just in case". So keeping the game wasn't even really about my enjoyment of it any more; I just liked the "wealth" I had accumulated. I was hoarding what was really worthless. The only thing I could do with my unlocked powers was continue playing the game to earn more powers.

What was once fun and useful may become stale

I still believe that it was worth spending some time playing the game. It really did improve my mental functioning to a degree. But there were no further benefits to be gained. It is worth periodically evaluating whether old activities or habits are still doing us any good, even if they once did.

Conclusion

I had my fun with Temple Run, learned some things about myself along the way, and now am done.

How do you feel when you uninstall a favorite game or app, or declutter in some other way? Do you feel sadness? Relief? Regret? Pride?

Pittsburgh Scala Meetup: Exploring type-directed, test-driven development using FizzBuzz (my practice talk)

Fri, 16 May 2014 02:49:48 GMT

The Pittsburgh Scala Meetup met, with me presenting a practice talk for "Exploring type-directed, test-driven development using FizzBuzz", which I am presenting at the upcoming local Pittsburgh TechFest conference.

Presentation

I have only recently completed the slides and code for my talk, and had not actually given the talk yet, so this was a practice talk that did not go so well, unfortunately.

I spoke too quickly and had too much material to cover, and also got lost in some of my own slides. Oops. I think reaction to my talk was mixed. Some enjoyed it, while others seemed lost at places.

After going home, I frankly felt that I had failed.

But I believe I can do much better. I have plenty of time to do a thorough revision before Pittsburgh TechFest in three weeks. I need to cut out material that is not needed for the core of what I am trying to achieve and make some things clearer (especially for the intended Pittsburgh TechFest audience, which I do not expect to even know Scala).

Supporting material

Here is the GitHub repository.

I don't recommend looking at them, but for historical purposes, here are slides of the presentation as it was given in the first draft.

(Update of 2014-05-16)

One day makes a difference in my confidence and determination! I noticed that the new Pittsburgh Code and Supply group (which I have not yet attended) is soon having its inaugural Rust soon.

So I decided to offer to do a version of my talk for Pittsburgh Code and Supply using Rust as the programming language (rather than Scala). I want to spread the news about how to effectively use a sufficiently typed programming language, whether it's Scala or Rust or anything else sufficiently derived from the ML family of type systems.

Justin will schedule it for some time in July. That should give me enough time, after Pittsburgh TechFest in early June, to learn enough Rust to convert my Scala code over properly!

(Update of 2014-06-07)

I much improved the presentation for Pittsburgh TechFest, which I attended for the third year.

I recommend reading the article version of the presentation, rather than the slides. This is the first time I've created both an article version of a presentation and slides for use during the live presentation. I will do this in the future as well. Slides are not meant to stand alone or even be read alone, but in case you really want to see them, they are here:

(Update of 2014-07-17)

It's crunch time. My Rust version of the talk, "Type-Directed TDD in Rust" is coming next week.

The Chess Improver: Which Pawn would your rather live without and why?

Thu, 15 May 2014 11:40:37 GMT

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Which Pawn would your rather live without and why?"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

import ChessPosition from '@components/embeds/ChessPosition.astro';

Recently I watched an unusual and fascinating video clip by GM Roman Dzindzichashvili about playing White while accepting move and Pawn odds. In this particular context, he was talking about playing against computers. But actually, I got to thinking, someone wanting to deepen understanding of chess could do well to seriously reflect on how this <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1015076" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1015076">time-honored</span> handicap variant of chess should affect both White's play (going for the win starting with a huge advantage) and Black's play (struggling to survive). Many of us in our chess lives slowly end up playing on autopilot, falling back on familiar openings or familiar strategic ideas. An immediate imbalance straight out of the opening might be just the thing to get us out of our comfort zone to review our understanding of the game.

Several months ago, at a party, I played a Pawn and odds game (with my f-Pawn missing as Black) against a friend rated about 400 USCF rating points below me. I was dead lost for much of the game, frankly, but managed to claw back to a draw, I think. (My memory is fuzzy: it was, after all, a party.) After that game, I marveled that players like Paul Morphy were able to play with such a disadvantage. Clearly, for Black the f-Pawn is one of the worst Pawns to be missing at the beginning of a game, primarily because of lack of King safety. I decided that in the future, I would not play my friend again at such odds! Maybe some other Pawn, but not that Pawn!

An exercise

So the exercise raised the interesting question, "How would you order, from best to worst, the loss of one of your eight Pawns as Black?"

I think this is a rather stimulating question for a chess student to work on independently (without computer aid, of course). A teacher in a group setting could even make it into a game. I have not tried this out yet, but here are some ideas:

ask students to come up with their rankings and compare notes and debate each other assign a simpler task, picking just two missing-Pawn starting positions, and having students compare just those two ask for an in-depth analysis of just one missing Pawn having students actually playing out both sides against each other and then discussing the challenges faced

One great feature of this exercise is that it does not stray too far from "normal" chess (as Chess960 does), and so one good way to approach the exercise is to ask oneself how the absence of a Pawn alters what one has already learned about "normal" opening theory. Therefore, I feel the task is actually a good indirect way to improve one's understanding of the rationale behind normal opening theory. Also, it may be good training for how to react after blundering and losing a Pawn in a game, or after winning a Pawn: or, given a choice, which to give up or which to win.

A sample analysis: missing b-Pawn

Here is a sample analysis that might give ideas into what kinds of questions to ask oneself (or a student) as a guide for study. Let's remove Black's b-Pawn.

Development: we note that in return for the missing Pawn, Black does potentially get a head start in development, because the light-squared Bishop is ready to be fianchettoed to b7. Also, potentially Black could use the half-open b-file to place a Rook on to attack White's b2 Pawn. I picked this example to illustrate that missing a Pawn can actually have some advantages, despite the disadvantages. One could consider this position to be in essence a gambit (although not a good one).

Weak squares: the missing b-Pawn means that the a6 square and the c6 square are weakened. White could think about ways to exploit these weaknesses.

Pawn structure: Black is starting out with an isolated a-Pawn. This may be a liability for White to attack. Especially, in case of an endgame, Black may have a lot of trouble and lose on the Queenside if the a-Pawn is lost, and then White has an outside passed Pawn. (I have in fact lost endgames a Pawn down in Pawn structures such as these.)

Center control: Losing the b-Pawn is not as bad as losing a center Pawn, because Black can at least still fight for the center.

Loss of a counterattacking resource: In many openings, Black depends on the b-Pawn to fight back against White, whether pushing away White's light-squared Bishop with a6/b5 or c6/b5, or advancing the b-Pawn to b4 to undermine White's Pawn on c3 or Knight on c3.

Castling: White should probably not play some standard pet opening variation that involves castling Queen side.

Conclusion

I have found it fun, and I think instructive for myself, to actually take some serious time, for each Pawn and move odds opening position, to consider different dimensions of what White gains and what Black loses, for each position. I think this would be a great exercise for anyone wanting to remember what the basic principles of chess play are and why.

Is there a grounding problem in empirical computational linguistics?

Wed, 14 May 2014 00:28:29 GMT

I saw an announcement for a lunch talk at CMU with the intriguing title "Theoretical and Practical Grounding in Empirical Computational Linguistics", by Stefan Riezler of Heidelberg University.

Abstract: Philosophy of science has pointed out a circularity problem in empirical sciences that arises if all known measuring procedures for a quantity of a theory presuppose the validity of this theory. We discuss how this problem relates to empirical computational linguistics, and define a criterion of T-non-theoretical grounding as guidance to avoid such circularities. We exemplify how this criterion can be met by crowdsourcing, task-related data annotation, or data in the wild. In particular, we illustrate the benefits of grounded learning in the area of statistical machine translation, e.g., by grounding machine translation in semantic parsing and in cross-lingual information retrieval.

I attended the talk because of my long-standing interest in the philosophy of science, a subject I spent a lot of time studying in college (although my degree was in physics).

The problem

When using machine learning, there is a fundamental issue of whether one can run around in circles during feature discovery. For example, if you have labeled data, and you train a system, and then claim to find useful features which are actually just equivalent to what you were given, then there is a problem. Your system may not generalize to unseen data.

Riezler opened with a simple example of the circularity problem of grounding in science involving Archimedean statics. Suppose you measure mass through use of a balance scale. Then how do you evaluate an empirical claim about the theory of Archimedean statics? If you use a balance scale, there is a circularity in the use of theoretical terms. Is there a way out? Yes, there is: use a different theory to ground your terms: make a distinction, for a theory T, between T-theoretical and T-non-theoretical terms, and make a correspondence (some kind of "transfer"), so that non-circular progress can actually be made.

In his talk, Riezler presented methods of learning for machine translation that he claimed to be free of the circularity problem. One method is "naive" coders (rather than expert coders) and crowdsourcing. Another is semantic parsing in which evaluation is based on a real-world task, getting the right answer according to a gold standard.

Questions

Some interesting questions were posed by the audience.

"Isn't circularity only a problem for science, but not for engineering systems?"

Answer: a system that fails to generalize is a problem.

"How can we know if we are doing it wrong?"

Answer: talk to a social scientist!

Cookies

Cookies were available as part of lunch. In accordance with my promise, here are photos of two I ate:

They were big. I should probably have eaten just the first one.

Conclusion

I'm not a working computational linguist, and it's been over a decade since the only course I've taken in computational linguistics at CMU (in 2003), so I can't pretend that I entirely followed the presentation, but I found interesting his attempt to apply philosophical considerations toward generating new ways to tackle empirical computational linguistics, and hope more people take philosophy seriously in the field of machine learning in general. I have an impression that some practitioners just sling data and numbers around, but may not be aware of the pitfalls of the grounding problem.

A short Sunday hike in Frick Park

Mon, 12 May 2014 01:09:24 GMT

Abby and I had planned to go on a hike yesterday, but rain discouraged us, plus we had a late start to the day, and we were planning to check out part of the Bach Festival in Pittsburgh anyway (and did). This afternoon, it was nice and clear, so we did a little exploratory hike in Frick Park.

A little stream crossing:

Poison ivy lurks everywhere:

A bridge that has gotten lopsided:

Ducks:

What does it mean that I've never liked the "Mona Lisa" painting?

Sat, 10 May 2014 03:45:29 GMT

I saw an interesting article recently, "Why the Mona Lisa stands out". Read it! The summary of the article is that research has shown that the "mere-exposure" psychological effect really matters in determining what gets popular or gets considered "great", so that these evaluations are not based entirely on "intrinsic" merits.

One example used was the "Mona Lisa" painting by Leonardo da Vinci.

Somehow this painting became famous and praised widely. Everyone knows the "Mona Lisa".

Yet, I've never liked it, and I've always been puzzled by its popularity.

Artistic quality or social pressure?

I have a confession to make: I didn't like my seventh grade required "art" class in school. For whatever reason, I am not fundamentally drawn to the visual arts in general. My loves are music and literature. I don't care particularly for painting, photography, or film. In fact, in my senior year in high school, I deliberately did not enroll in a course that was very popular among many seniors, and even considered to be the highlight of their high school experience. This course was called "Humanities" and apparently discussed not only literature, but art and music. I avoided it. I feared "art".

Why did I fear art? Part of it was that I got the impression that I saw things differently from others and had trouble enjoying what others enjoyed. I could not tell whether I was simply artistically untrained and unperceptive, or whether there was some kind of social game going on where people decided to pretend to like something that made no sense to me.

I chose not to be an all-out cynic, so my default assumption was that I was defective, and therefore I might as well stay away. I chose not to assume that the emperor has no clothes.

One element of my being defective, obviously, was that I got nothing out of looking at the famous "Mona Lisa". Nothing at all. I did not see anything remarkable, or experience some emotion. So it was interesting to me, and maybe a little vindicating, to learn just now that the "Mona Lisa" was once obscure and became famous largely because of a burglary!

Against cynicism

Nevertheless, I still stand against the cynicism that says there is no such thing as quality at all. Sure, what we consider "great" may be relative, or dependent on historical accidents, and every era always experiences rediscoveries of the once-forgotten, but actually, I don't think art is just a silly game. I am in fact profoundly disappointed and disturbed by how many people I have encountered who adopt the ultimate cynical attitude, not only toward art, but to music, to food, to science, to life itself. Yes, there's a sucker born every minute, but I think it takes more courage to choose to be vulnerable, and choose to sometimes maybe be a sucker, than to make oneself hard and pretend that everyone just has ill intentions and is actively conspiring to make fools of all of us.

It is possible that if only I had taken the "Humanities" course in high school, I would have better perception or taste. I don't rule out this possibility, because by skipping "Humanities" I also missed a survey of Western classical music, and only came to truly discover and expand my love of it through taking a course in my first semester of freshman year in college, as well as making new friends who were huge music fans and shared recordings with me and took me to free concerts on campus. For whatever reason, perhaps simply temperament, there have almost never been art enthusiasts in my close social circles, people who might have aggressively encouraged me to expand my experiences of art. Never in my life has anyone come up to me and said, "hey, check out this painting" or "you should come to me and see this art show in town".

Is it an accident what I like?

Despite my claim that I don't care much for art, in fact, there has been some art that I have accidentally come across and found very beautiful and compelling. And they happen to be famous too. Coincidence?

For example, I don't remember when I first saw the art of Vincent Van Gogh, but I immediately found his work deeply moving; it spoke to me. It just did. On the other hand, was I contaminated already because as a child I had come into a copy of Irving Stone's novel "Lust for Life"? I didn't really read the novel, but the planting of a name (and a lurid story) into my head must have bred familiarity.

For example, "Sunflowers" popped out at me the first time I saw it in a book:

More generally, if pressed, I would say I am drawn toward expressionist art, because it "pops out" and speaks boldly and directly, intensely reflecting some aspect of reality. That said, this kind of art also often makes me uncomfortable, so I don't actively seek it out.

For example, Emil Nolde's "The Prophet":

Conclusion

I cannot be sure how influenced I am about what I "like" by popularity and name recognition. The one thing that is certain is that I still do not understand the appeal of the Mona Lisa painting!

Do you like the Mona Lisa or not? Do you feel your taste in art reflects some intrinsic quality you are perceiving, or do you suspect it is a matter of marketing and your upbringing or peers? Do you care?

The Chess Improver: Try loving your Knights more than your Bishops

Thu, 08 May 2014 11:09:55 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Try loving your Knights more than your Bishops"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

The imbalance between the Knight and the Bishop, which traditionally are taught as having material values of 3 each, is one of the most fascinating in the game of chess. There are times when the Bishop is stronger, especially when you have the Bishop pair against a Bishop and Knight or against the Knight pair, but there are also times when the Knight is stronger, or even the Knight pair against a Bishop pair.

In my more recent style of play, I have often chosen to try to make the most use of my Bishops, but I believe that it is fun, and beneficial to long-term chess improvement, to try out loving your Knights more than your Bishops. I have had phases in my chess life in which I was particularly fond of my Knights. I always learned quite a lot about chess when trying my best to make my Knights happy. I thought I'd share three games of mine from 30-31 years ago, when I was a young 13-14 year old. At that time in my life, I so disliked the task of memorizing mysterious mainstream opening theory that I sought refuge in side lines where I could simply get a reasonable middlegame with clear strategic ideas. For example, as White against the Sicilian Defense, I liked exchanging my Bishops for Knights in return for quick development and good central control and maneuvering possibilities. These youthful games were not very high-level games (I was rated around USCF 1900 at the time), but show how effective it can be to simply play chess with a clear theme in mind (in this case, loving my Knights).

Three examples of Knight play

The first game features White exchanging both Bishops for Knights and achieving a dominating position.

The second game features Black's Bishops being poorly placed during a White buildup on the King side.

The third game features a slow, positional struggle in which Black was OK until the mistake of forcing White to give up his remaining Bishop for Black's remaining Knight: the two Knights eventually proved better than the two Bishops, given the structure of the position.

The complete games

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "1983 Southeastern Michigan Open"] [Site "?"] [Date "1983.07.04"] [Round "6"] [White "Chen Franklin"] [Black "Whitacre Frederick"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "0"] [ECO "B53"]

e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Qxd4 Nc6 5. Bb5 Bd7 6. Bxc6 Bxc6 7. Nc3 Nf6 8. Bg5 h6 $2 { A waste of valuable development time, and also gets doubled Pawns.} 9. Bxf6 gxf6 10. O-O-O Bg7 11. Nh4 Qc7 $4 { Black is actually already lost now.} 12. Nf5 Rg8 13. Qe3 $6 ( 13. Nd5 { Wins immediately.} 13… Bxd5 14. exd5 { Black's Bishop will be useless while White continues the rest of the game.} ) 13… O-O-O $4 14. Nd5 $5 ( 14. Qxa7 { Wins immediately.} ) 14… Bxd5 15. exd5 Kb8 16. Qxe7 { Black is completely lost.} 16… Rd7 17. Qe3 Rc8 18. c3 Bf8 19. Nxh6 $6 { It was not worth taking this Pawn.} ( 19. Qd4 { With an easy win, because the f6 Pawn is undefended.} ) 19… Re7 $2 ( 19… Qc4 ) 20. Qf4 $4 Re2 $4 ( 20… Qc4 ) 21. Rd2 Rce8 22. Nf5 { Now White is in control again with the good Knight against the useless Bishop.} 22… R2e4 23. Qf3 Qa5 24. Kb1 Qa4 25. Rd4 Re1+ 26. Rd1 R1e4 27. h4 Re2 28. Rc1 Qb5 29. b3 Qa5 30. a4 Qb6 31. Nd4 R2e5 32. Rhd1 Bh6 33. Rc2 f5 34. Kb2 Qd8 35. Nxf5 { White is three Pawns up!} 35… Bf8 36. h5 Qf6 37. g4 Bh6 38. Qd3 Bg5 39. Qd4 Qd8 40. Qb4 Be7 41. f4 Rxf5 42. gxf5 Rh8 43. Re2 Bh4 44. Rh1 Bf6 45. h6 Qd7 46. Qe4 Rc8 47. Rh3 b5 48. Qb4 Qxf5 49. Qxb5+ Ka8 50. Rf3 Qh5 51. Re8 Qh2+ 52. Ka3 Bd8 53. Qd7 { Mate is coming soon.} 1-0`} />

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Ann Arbor Super Tornado"] [Site "Ann Arbor (USA)"] [Date "1984.07.29"] [Round "2"] [White "Chen Franklin"] [Black "Foord Allan"] [Result "1-0"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [BlackElo "1621"] [ECO "B53"]

e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Qxd4 Nc6 5. Bb5 Bd7 6. Bxc6 Bxc6 7. Nc3 Nf6 8. Bg5 e6 9. O-O-O Be7 10. e5 $6 { Prematurely opening the position.} ( 10. Rhe1 { The standard move.} ) 10… dxe5 11. Qxe5 Qb8 12. Qe2 O-O 13. Ne5 Bxg2 $6 { Playable but a bit risky.} 14. Rhg1 Bh3 $4 { Loses immediately.} ( 14… Bc6 15. Nxc6 bxc6 16. Qf3 Qe5 { White has compensation for the Pawn sacrificed, but no win.} ) 15. Qe3 Bf5 16. Nd7 Qxh2 $4 17. Bxf6 Bxf6 18. Nxf6+ Kh8 19. Rh1 Qc7 20. Qg5 gxf6 $4 { Allows a forced mate.} 21. Qxf6+ Kg8 22. Rdg1+ Bg6 23. Rxh7 Kxh7 24. Rh1+ 1-0`} />

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Ann Arbor Super Tornado"] [Site "Ann Arbor (USA)"] [Date "1984.07.29"] [Round "5"] [White "Chen Franklin"] [Black "Riegel"] [Result "1-0"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [BlackElo "1815"] [ECO "B53"]

{ This game is a good illustration of the power of the Knight pair! } 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Qxd4 Nc6 5. Bb5 a6 $5 { Wastes some time but does pick up the Bishop pair.} 6. Bxc6+ bxc6 7. O-O e5 8. Qd3 Nf6 9. c4 $5 { Playing in a positional style, setting up a bind on d5.} 9… Be7 10. Nc3 Be6 11. Rd1 Qc7 12. Bg5 Rd8 13. Rac1 { White has completed development with a pleasant position but Black is quite solid.} 13… Qb7 14. b3 O-O 15. Rc2 $2 Rd7 $2 ( 15… d5 ) 16. Rcd2 Rfd8 17. Qe2 Qc7 $2 { The Queen is very passive here.} 18. h3 h6 $2 { Forcing White to do what he wanted.} 19. Bxf6 Bxf6 20. Qe3 $5 ( 20. Nd5 $1 ) 20… Qa5 $2 21. Na4 $1 { White continues to have a positional bind.} 21… d5 $4 22. Qc5 $6 { Deciding to avoid complications.} ( 22. exd5 cxd5 23. Nxe5 d4 24. Nxd7 $1 dxe3 25. Nxf6+ gxf6 26. Rxd8+ Kg7 27. fxe3 Bxc4 28. R8d4 ) 22… Qxc5 $4 ( 22… Qc7 23. cxd5 cxd5 24. Qxc7 Rxc7 25. exd5 ) 23. Nxc5 d4 24. Nd3 $6 { Deciding to try to win a Pawn instead of the exchange.} ( 24. Nxd7 { Winning the exchange was obvious and good.} ) 24… Rc7 25. c5 Be7 $4 { Giving up the Pawn without a fight.} ( 25… Re8 ) 26. Nfxe5 a5 27. Rc1 f5 28. exf5 Bxf5 29. f4 $2 ( 29. g4 ) 29… Bf6 $2 30. Nc4 { Black is lost.} 30… Re7 $4 { Just gives up without a fight.} ( 30… a4 31. b4 ) 31. Nxa5 { White is two Pawns up now.} 31… Rc8 32. Nc4 Ra8 33. Nde5 { Black is about to lose even more material.} 1-0`} />

Tchaikovsky's 174th birthday: I'm finally coming out as a lover of his music

Thu, 08 May 2014 02:29:37 GMT

It's birthday time for Tchaikovsky. Actually, it's also Brahms's birthday, which I celebrated last year. But this year I decided to do something I've been thinking about doing for probably twenty years now: I'm "coming out" as one who has loved his music for a long time now and will continue to love it.

Why have I been relatively silent, even "closeted", about being a Tchaikovsky fan?

Discovering Tchaikovsky

Although I did not grow up with classical music training, it was basically unavoidable to encounter a lot of excerpts of Tchaikovsky's music from radio, TV, movies. Late in high school, I started listening to a local radio station at night while studying, and found that WQRS Detroit, the classical station, provided good "music to study to". Now and then I would hear something familiar and realize that I had heard some of it in a cartoon or ad, and make note of what the musical piece really was: who it was by and what its title was. This was when I started identifying music as being by Tchaikovsky (whoever that was; some Russian): for example, my favorite cartoon around age ten was "Tom and Jerry" and I distinctly remembered music from that cartoon.

The thing about his music was that it was very easy to remember and hum and much of it made me want to move. He wrote a lot of waltzes, for example. He clearly had a gift for melody. Also, in his orchestral music you can always hear different instruments playing distinctive lines. I simply effortlessly enjoyed his music, and I know that many others do, and that is why his music is still popular.

Broken innocence

In college, many things changed for me that led to my basically deciding to keep quiet about my love for Tchaikovsky's music.

Tchaikovsky unfashionable

The main thing that happened was that early in freshman year, in 1987, as I made friends and encountered classmates and others with much more of a classical music background than me (I arrived at college never actually having attended an orchestra concert or even seen a string quartet), at least two specific individuals (one of them a new friend who introduced me to Mozart, for which I am tremendously grateful for) questioned my "taste" and declared Tchaikovsky to be second-rate and sentimental.

Basically, I learned that in certain circles, it was not correct to like Tchaikovsky's music. It's easy to make light of this now, but think about it: I bet that in your own current social circles, some kinds of music or performers are deemed inferior and it would be embarrassing (maybe even actually ostracizing) to admit to liking them.

Note that the criticism of Tchaikovsky was not actually without musical point. I was told that his music was too repetitious, that he didn't know how to do "development", and so forth. On reflection, I sensed that yes, his music was not perfect, and I did get bored when listening to his longer works (like his symphonies). But I couldn't help noting that the tone of the criticism wasn't entirely just objective, but also was a kind of snobbery, an identity marker.

Sexuality

Remember that the year was 1987.

The other thing that happened was learning more about Tchaikovsky, the man. I learned that he was probably homosexual (I believe that later, by the 1990s, a general consensus about this had developed).

In the general population in the US, attitudes toward homosexuality were very different from attitudes today.

I went through four years of college without knowing that three individuals who were part of my social circles (one of them a dorm suite mate) were gay. I learned only later, a year or two after graduating in 1991, that coincidentally each of them came out as gay after entering grad school somewhere. I had no idea. In fact, two of them actually frequently made remarks and jokes disparaging homosexuality.

I do not know how I would have reacted if my dorm suite mate had revealed to me that he was gay. It was a different time; 27 years later, I know plenty of openly gay people now, but back then, words like "fag" were thrown around casually in conversation in my social circles. When I think about that, it is not a surprise that an apparently sizeable number of friends and classmates of mine were gay and closeted. If you need a reminder of the conversational climate, watch the "Bill and Ted" movies from the period (which I watched happily with my friends); <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/bill-ted-universal-studios-show-shuts-homophobia-accusations.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/bill-ted-universal-studios-show-shuts-homophobia-accusations.html">you may cringe</span>.

In any case, returning to Tchaikovsky, there was something of atmosphere of disparaging his music as "effeminate" or some such thing, as opposed to the "masculinity" of Beethoven.

By the way, note that even today, there are still those who, despite all the historical evidence, try to deny Tchaikovsky's sexual orientation.

Private reassertion

For the first year or two in college, while I was exploring a lot of music I hadn't heard before anyway, I let go of my youthful enthusiasm for Tchaikovsky.

But by senior year, I was done with pointlessly internalizing any external pressures I thought I faced. If anyone had asked me, I would not have denied enjoying Tchaikovsky's music.

I still remember excitedly discovering an old LP recording, in one of the campus libraries, of Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting a performance of Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony, the "Pathétique", I jumped to check it out and copy it to cassette tape.

Public declaration

But today, I am going further than just standing my ground. I am declaring that in fact, Tchaikovsky wrote a lot of beautiful, worthy music. It would be a mistake to focus on how he did not write music structured like Beethoven's. Why should we judge someone by whether his work is like someone else's? In fact, Tchaikovsky outspokenly did not like the music of Beethoven anyway. His favorite composer was Mozart!

Ironically, it is completely unremarkable for me to be praising Tchaikovsky today. You might even wonder why I'm doing this. I believe that sometime in the 1990s, it became OK again to like Tchaikovsky. So my whole awkward experience early in college was a glimpse into an earlier era of taste. I wrote this post mainly to share some memories of what the atmosphere was still like in the 1980s. Maybe if you are over forty or fifty years old, you can remember also.

Lessons learned

The main lesson I have learned is to be true to myself, and not play bullshit games with trying to "fit in" socially through markers of musical (or other) taste.

I feel like my teens and even my twenties were wasted by caring what the hell people thought about me. Today, I hide nothing. Maybe I'm just old and cranky now, but it seems silly to me to base my identity or ego on what kind of music or food or clothing or hairstyle or car I like or don't. Well, here I am. I love Tchaikovsky; do you have a problem with that? That's what I'd tell my 17-year-old self if I could travel back in time. And I'm saying it now to you, if case you're reading this and you're in your teens or twenties! Free your soul. Don't care what your closest friends think; it's OK to be different from them.

The other lesson I have learned is that being in the majority can easily blind you to the realities of life for a minority. I'm not gay. As a result, I never quite understood how life was for gay people in the US in the 1980s. It was really eye-opening to me when a year after graduating from college, I kept hearing about people I thought I knew coming out as gay. I learned that I could not make assumptions any more about people.

Some musical excerpts

It wouldn't be a birthday celebration without some musical excerpts.

"June" barcarolle from "The Seasons"

I played a bit of "June" for myself on my digital piano to celebrate. I'd never actually touched it till today. I may work on learning the whole thing. Or not. Anyway, I was in the mood. It's still only May, but here's a beautiful live performance by pianist Lev Oborin, possibly the best I've found on YouTube:

"Swan Lake"

I still haven't gone to a ballet performance of "Swan Lake" but mean to sometime. (No, I have not watched the "Black Swan" film yet and don't know that I will!) There is a lot of beautiful music in "Swan Lake".

I played for myself a piano transcription by Bantock of the famous act 2 scene 10 (sorry, there is no recording of myself of that yet).

Here's a live video of a performance of the original orchestral version:

Symphony no. 6, "Pathétique"

Great music, if depressing. Live performance conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1951:

1812 Overture on melodica and violin

Now for something hilarious and delightful: James Howard Young and Cliff Bernzweig in action.

Conclusion

A quarter of a century ago, I was made to feel uncomfortable about enjoying Tchaikovsky's music. Times have changed, but I wanted to share my story (and also some favorite musical selections).

How do you feel about Tchaikovsky's music? Do you participate in uncomfortable social cliques of taste revolving around policing of musical taste? When do you think everyone will finally accept that Tchaikovsky was gay?

Our first hike at Coopers Rock State Forest

Sun, 04 May 2014 01:36:12 GMT

Abby and I went on our first hike at Coopers Rock State Forest, joining a Pittsburgh hiking meetup event led by Terri and Jeff. This is a regularly held hike that we simply never got around to in previous years because of schedule conflicts or other circumstances, so we were delighted to have the opportunity to go this time.

I'd only been to Coopers Rock once, as part of a rock climbing trip, which turned out to be an embarrassing disaster for me, because after climbing only a few minutes, I decided the whole thing just made me nervous, and I sat out the rest of the day. But I was there long enough to see how beautiful the area was, and knew I wanted to go back just to hike, not to climb!

Getting there

The drive from Pittsburgh took just over an hour and a half; we took the most direct, shortest route involving taking route 51 south. (We returned instead by way of Morgantown, the long route that uses I-79, but this was a huge mistake because of traffic as we neared Pittsburgh. I don't see any reason to take this longer route in the future, since it doesn't actually save any time even if there had not been congestion on the highways.)

Abby and I took John and Courtney, since each of them also live in Squirrel Hill, in our car to carpool together.

Parking

It turns out, as I suspected, that parking is quite scarce in the main Coopers Rock parking lot. Now that spring is here, this is prime season for people to be visiting, of course. We arrived early enough to grab the very last spot, actually, in the main parking lot. There are other parking spaces further out, but even those were not plentiful.

Weather

There was always a chance of rain. We completely lucked out, because it didn't start raining until after we'd completed the main hike. Then it was pouring. Pouring rain would have made the hike far less pleasant, because of the rocks and mud, but part of the experience of hiking is taking whatever nature gives us, in all humility and gratitude. We head out in the morning not knowing exactly what to expect. Sometimes the forecast the day before a planned hike looks pretty bad, in which case Abby and I might choose to cancel, but we tend not to cancel that often.

Photos

If you're a member of the Pittsburgh meetup group, you can see photos people took.

The hike

The forecast for the day was supposed to be temperatures in the 60s and 70s F in the middle of the day. In the morning at 10 AM, however, it started out rather cool, temperature possibly in the high 30s. I was glad I packed a winter hat and gloves, just in case.

Around thirty people showed up for the group hike.

Terri had her trail map ready, accompanied by Jeff who acted as the sweep. By the way, this hike is part of an extended camping weekend that they organize, running from Friday through Sunday, so many of the hikers had already camped one night, and many planned to camp another night. Abby and I did not feel ready to do camping yet this year, so we went just for the hike.

Before we started the hike proper, we checked out the main overlook. It's beautiful. You can see Cheat River and beyond.

Heading down

The main hike was an out (mostly down, all the way to the river) and back up, roughly 7 miles. This is not very far at all, but given the terrain and significant elevation change, as well as waiting for everyone (since it was a large group), it took a while.

A lot of rhododendron around:

There were also many little wildflowers along the trails during the hike.

We took the rocky, Rattlesnake Trail winding along cliffs. By the way, using a pair of hiking poles during the entire hike made things much easier. Both Abby and I used a pair of hiking poles as well as Vibram FiveFingers KSO Trek shoes (which prompted a lot of questions).

I liked how peaceful and quiet most of the hike was. Sometimes Abby and I have gone on hikes where the hum of civilization never really goes away. Here, the main hum was of water, which was usually not too far away.

Abby spotted a huge toad!

Lunch break

We were warned about poison ivy where we stopped for lunch by the river:

Back up

I always find it strangely appealing to hike along running water. Water makes me feel like I am not alone or lost, that there is something soothing and dependable out there:

It was fun to see ferns unfurling here and there:

We went back a different way than we came, and that involved a bunch of stream crossings over bridges. Here, some of us sat on a bridge for a photo:

Henry Clay Iron Furnace

We took a detour to the historic Henry Clay Iron Furnace.

I crawled inside to take a look.

Lost?

We got "lost" on the way back to the parking lot, but not really. We missed a turn, but quickly, Terri noticed that things did not look right, and we backtracked, and turned onto the Rhododenron Trail as we should have. All good!

Back to civilization:

Missing the optional hike

There was an optional 3-mile hike planned after the main one, to reach another scenic area, but Terri and Jeff decided it was too complicated to officially reorganize a group for it, and just left it to everyone to figure out appropriate car pools to park in a lot nearer to it.

The four of us drove to the lot a bit later than some others, and unfortunately, someone pulled into the last parking space. As it was already drizzling rain anyway, and there was no parking to be found nearby, we just waved goodbye and started heading home. Maybe this was a good thing, because the rain quickly began to pour really hard!!

Conclusion

Coopers Rock State Forest is a great place to visit. The hiking is great, with varied terrain and elevation changes, lots to see. Perhaps in the future Abby and I will check out the camping.

Have you been to Coopers Rock? For hiking, cross-country skiing, camping, or rock climbing?

The Chess Improver: Black takes control of the dark squares by grabbing the Bishop pair

Thu, 01 May 2014 11:59:02 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Black takes control of the dark squares by grabbing the Bishop pair"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

In the final round of my most recent tournament, I was scheduled to play Black against a particular opponent whom I have faced several times before. Because I had lost one game so far, I had to win this game to have any chance at catching the leaders in the tournament and winning it. So I thought about a plan to play hard for a win as Black.

I knew one thing almost for certain: my opponent as White always plays a solid Torre-style opening system involving the moves d4, c3, Bg5, Nd2. Also, I knew him to happily give up his dark-squared Bishop early for the sake of quick development. Given this knowledge, inspired by a recent Chess Improver post about the art of chess, I aimed to create a personal masterpiece on the chess board, with the knowledge that "you have to willing to accept the consequences of taking a chance".

The battle of chess ideas

I decided to deliberately engage in a "battle of chess ideas" as Black for this game, investing valuable development time to gain the Bishop pair in hope of consolidating and achieving a good late middlegame or endgame, using my unopposed dark-squared Bishop to press on White's dark-squared Pawn chain.

I attacked White's Bishop with my h-Pawn on move 4, planning to eliminate it, and White obliged. On move 8, because White did not take the opportunity to maintain a Pawn center, the game was in no risk of being opened up, so I also invested valuable time in playing g6 (instead of developing immediately with Be7) in order to maximize the scope of my dark-squared Bishop.

Because of White's slightly passive development, I ended up a bit impatient at move 11. My safest course was to complete development first, and then start applying pressure to White's center, but I chose to open things up before actually completing development (of my light-squared Bishop). After some passive moves by White, I achieved a slightly advantageous position with all my main pieces developed, and my Rooks ready to be developed on the open d and e files also. I considered my opening experiment a success, although the cost of opening up the center was that the resulting symmetrical Pawn structure meant that most likely there would be a long struggle to try to win an endgame by applying more pressure on the Queen side to win a Pawn or something.

In fact, after several more moves of mutual maneuvering, my opponent blundered on move 25, resulting in forced loss of material.

A bad practical decision

Unfortunately, I made what was a bad practical decision. I was starting to get tired, but instead of playing safely, I got a bit ambitious, trying for a bigger win of material than the simple one of winning a Queen for a Rook and Bishop; if I had gone for that situation instead, I could have played effortlessly "for two results": there was no way I could lose, and defense was surely impossible. But I thought that I would "wait" for an even better moment to take advantage of White's self-pin.

It turned out that in fact, White played another blunder, allowing me to win an exchange and more on the Queen side, just as I had hoped. At this point, the game should have been nearly over.

Swindled!

Unfortunately, while on the verge of winning, just a few moves away from promoting a Pawn, while nervous about time getting a little low on the clock (but objectively, not that low: 10 minutes left of my original 120 minutes), I blundered repeatedly and ended up losing. It was arguably one of the most horrific losses in my chess life, in a very important game. But what can I say, I got swindled, and with a passed c-Pawn, ironically, the same Pawn that as White I had swindled a win in my previous round's game, so there is justice in the chess universe.

I was devastated by this loss (of course, I got over it after about twelve hours), but at least I was proud of having actually executed my pre-game plan. If I had actually taken White's Queen, then the plan of destroying White's dark-squared Pawn chain on b2 and c3 through the combined efforts of my fianchettoed Bishop, Queen, and a Pawn storm, could have created the exact "personal masterpiece" I had envisioned before the game.

The complete game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "15th William M. Byland Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2014.04.15"] [Round "6"] [White "Peter Jansen"] [Black "Franklin Chen"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "2161"] [ECO "A00"] [TimeControl "G/120d5"] [WhiteElo "2014"]

c3 Nf6 2. d4 d6 3. Bg5 Nbd7 4. Nd2 h6 $5 { I had a very ambitious plan of gaining the Bishop pair and aiming to win the endgame.} 5. Bxf6 Nxf6 6. e4 e5 7. Ngf3 exd4 8. Nxd4 $6 ( 8. cxd4 { More consistently takes the center.} ) 8... g6 { Very ambitious indeed, aiming for the most active Bishop placement.} 9. Bc4 Bg7 10. Qc2 O-O 11. O-O d5 $5 { Risky, because Black is behind in development. It was safer to finish development before opening up the position.} ( 11... Bd7 { Simple development was best.} ) 12. exd5 Nxd5 13. Rad1 Nb6 14. Bb3 $6 { Somewhat passive.} 14... c5 15. N4f3 $2 { Too passive. Black can now finish development with some advantage because of the Bishop pair.} ( 15. Nb5 ) 15... Bf5 16. Qc1 Qc7 17. Nc4 Rad8 { Deciding to try to trade the Rooks off in order to reach an endgame with a tiny advantage.} ( 17... Be4 { Most ambitious.} ) 18. Nxb6 Qxb6 19. Bc4 $2 { Trying to avoid trades while maintaining control of d3.} ( 19. Rfe1 { With the simplification, the game should really be a draw, but at least Black is the one with the chances because of the Bishop pair.} ) 19... g5 $5 ( 19... Qc6 { Putting the Queen on a better square was strongest.} ) 20. Rfe1 $2 ( 20. h4 { White could have punished the Pawn advance, equalizing or even more.} 20... g4 21. Qf4 { White now has activity on the dark squares.} ) 20... Rxd1 21. Rxd1 Rd8 22. Bd5 $2 Bf6 $5 { "Doing nothing" as a way of trying to wait for a better opportunity to play for a win.} ( 22... Rd7 { Black can make White suffer for the draw with simple play.} ) 23. h3 $2 ( 23. h4 { Was best.} ) 23... Kg7 $5 { Another waiting move.} ( 23... c4 $1 { I saw this, but did not see a win, and therefore held off on it for one move.} 24. Ne1 Qb5 { Black has a good position.} ) 24. g4 $2 { A weakening move.} ( 24. Nh2 { I was expecting a Knight maneuver instead, but was prepared with a Bishop maneuver.} 24... Be5 25. Ng4 Bf4 26. Ne3 Bg6 ) 24... Bg6 25. Qd2 $4 { A losing blunder.} 25... c4 ( 25... Qa6 { Another way to "prepare" for c4.} ) ( 25... Be4 { An obvious tactic winning the Queen for a Rook and Bishop, but I felt that White might be able to put up resistance.} 26. Bxe4 Rxd2 27. Rxd2 Qa6 { The position is obviously better for Black, and is presumably winning, but I thought I had seen a better win.} 28. a3 b5 29. Kg2 Qa4 { Black has an obvious plan of breaking through on the Queen side.} ) 26. Qe2 $4 Bd3 27. Rxd3 cxd3 28. Qxd3 Qxb2 { Black is an exchange up and has a totally won game.} 29. c4 $4 Qxa2 30. Kg2 Qb2 ( 30... a5 { Starting to push the a-Pawn immediately was the clearest win.} ) 31. Qf5 b5 $2 ( 31... a5 { The a-Pawn is the one that should be promoted!} 32. Be4 a4 33. Qh7+ Kf8 34. Qxh6+ Ke7 { White has nothing. His Queen is almost trapped, the Black is about to promote the a-Pawn.} ) 32. c5 $1 { A clever swindling attempt.} 32... Qc1 $4 { An insane blunder. I was playing too quickly, and immediately saw that it was a blunder.} ( 32... b4 { Just plain pushing wins the race.} 33. Be4 b3 34. Qh7+ Kf8 35. c6 Bd4 36. Nxd4 Qxd4 37. c7 Rc8 38. Qxh6+ Ke7 39. Qxg5+ f6 40. Qg7+ Kd6 { White has run out of checks.} ) 33. Bxf7 $1 ( 33. c6 $4 { What I had expected.} 33... Qf4 ) 33... Qf4 34. Qg6+ Kf8 35. Be6 Bg7 36. c6 { Now, the game is not yet lost for Black, actually.} 36... b4 $4 ( 36... Qc7 { Ordinary defense should save the draw.} ) 37. Qf5+ $4 ( 37. Qh7 { Wins immediately.} ) 37... Ke7 $4 ( 37... Qxf5 { This might actually draw.} 38. gxf5 b3 39. c7 Ra8 40. Nd2 b2 41. Kf3 a5 42. Ke4 a4 43. c8=Q+ Rxc8 44. Bxc8 Ke7 45. Kd3 a3 46. Be6 Kf6 $201 { A remarkable position. Bishops of opposite colors, and White's broken Pawn structure, make it seem that the position should be a draw!!} ) 38. Qxf4 gxf4 39. c7 a5 $4 ( 39... Ra8 { At least makes the task a bit harder for White.} 40. c8=Q Rxc8 41. Bxc8 a5 42. Ba6 b3 43. Nd2 b2 44. Kf3 { OK, Black has run out of tricks.} ) 40. cxd8=Q+ Kxd8 41. Bb3 Kc7 42. Nd2 Kc6 43. Ba4+ Kc5 44. Nb3+ Kb6 45. Kf3 Be5 46. Ke4 Bb8 47. Kf5 Bc7 48. h4 Kb7 49. Kg6 1-0`} />

Pittsburgh Recorder Society: Palestrina, Gombert, and Dolly Parton cookies

Sun, 27 Apr 2014 21:47:27 GMT

We had a great turnout again for the monthly meeting of the Pittsburgh Recorder Society. We even got an enthusiastic new member, Andriy. There were around fifteen of us, total; we really filled the room!

Our director Fred was inspirational again, encouraging and helping us to continue to refine our sound, our unity, our expression.

Every month, attending the Sunday recorder meeting is truly one of the things I look forward to most in life! Sometimes I feel emotionally naked and a bit anxious in our meetings, but I know that this is a safe place to grow and to contribute. Today was one of those days in which I really felt challenged to do my very best to make music together.

Kyrie of the "Missa Papae Marcelli" by Palestrina, revisited

Well over a year ago, we had begun work on a recorder ensemble arrangement of Palestrina's "Kyrie de la Missa Papae Marcelli", but had actually not picked up much on that, so I was delighted that Fred decided (especially now that we have more members) to start on this piece again.

I got a tenor 2 part and was happy to do my best to produce a rich inner voice blending it into the ensemble's tapestry of sound. Fred emphasized that the original music did not have bar lines, and that each "Kyrie" phrase can and does begin on any beat of a "measure", so we should focus on keeping the flow going. Of course, this being originally vocal music, I tried to "sing" on recorder, paying attention to entrances and breath control (I am still unable to last an entire breath in some of these phrases).

"Mille Regres" by Nicolas Gombert

We also started work on a recorder arrangement of "Mille Regres" by Nicolas Gombert, originally for voice.

Fred put me on the alto part and after we started playing, I realized I was the only one on the part, and felt anxious! There was nowhere to hide. It's very different from playing on a tenor or bass part with a bunch of other people, or even when playing a part with just one other person. On the one hand, there is much more freedom, because when a voice is doubled, you have to work with someone to sound like one. Of course, you always have to blend with the rest of the ensemble, regardless, but when you're alone, you realize that you do not have backup for your voice, that you are it. Strong entrances, making the high notes clear and rich, are totally up to you now. It's a great responsibility and opportunity, and I felt myself focusing as deep as I could into every element of the music. After today's first cut, I hope to continue to improve on bringing my part fully to life.

Here's a performance of the original music for voice:

"Mille Regretz" by Josquin des Prez

It turns out that elements of this music sounded familiar to me, because in fact it is based on the French chanson "Mille Regretz" by Josquin des Prez, which I was familiar with because in last year's Mideast early music workshop, I took a voice class in which we performed it. I really enjoyed singing it (as tenor; sorry, I don't know if anyone has a video of our performance at the final student concert).

Here's a nice performance of "Mille Regretz" with just one singer per part:

Another alto solo

There was another piece we started (but there were not enough scores, so I had to share with Kristel; I need to ask for a copy to be emailed to me, but for now I don't remember the name or composer) in which Fred again put me on a solo part, which was originally marked "soprano" but after a run through, he told me to read it on alto up an octave.

This assignment made me even more anxious because I actually start out with a full statement of the melody without any accompaniment, before everyone else starts to come in. I'm not used to be put on the spot like this. But again, it's a great opportunity to really work on refining my technique and expression, and being aware that I am setting the stage for the whole piece to succeed. Also, it's an upbeat, rhythmic piece rather than a melancholy, lyrical one, so it was great to have the opportunity to portray different moods.

Snacks

As usual, people brought in snacks to share for the mid-meeting break.

Helen not only brought in the recipe for her delicious brownies from last month's meeting, but also a new batch of what she called "Dolly Parton" cookies, incorporating a lot of apple in them.

The recipe for last month's brownies:

I ate three of this month's "Dolly Parton" squares:

Although setting a limit on three was better than no limit at all, after I got home, I did wonder whether maybe I should have limited myself to two; these were quite substantial and filling!

Conclusion

I had another intense and joyful musical afternoon with a great group of friendly and fun recorder enthusiasts.

What is your favorite role when you are on a team? Do you like being a prominent soloist, or do you prefer to blend into the background? Or do you like to switch up your roles? What do you adjust when you switch?

The Chess Improver: Is it OK to play a losing move in order to win?

Thu, 24 Apr 2014 11:45:59 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Is it OK to play a losing move in order to win?"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Over two months ago, I wrote an article here, "9 lessons to learn from Bill Gates' 9-move loss to Magnus Carlsen", which generated a lot of discussion among my friends. I was also notified of something I hadn't known when I wrote the article, which was that Magnus Carlsen only had 30 seconds for the entire game, so this was a severe constraint, and that he had explained that he does not usually play for "cheap tricks". Unfortunately, the media sources that all my friends had sent me had not mentioned these important details. With 1 minute or 2 minutes, he could have played in a "normal" way, but 30 seconds is much less time.

I had been surprised that so many of my non-chess-playing friends thought (without the extra information about the constraints) that somehow, in general, it was OK to play for cheap tricks that could backfire: playing an objectively losing move in order to win a game against someone, hoping that the opponent would not see how to counter that bad move. I promised them that I would eventually write about why I thought that in general, I don't consider it appropriate to play for cheap tricks that could backfire.

Ironically, recently I played a game in which I uncharacteristically used exactly a cheap trick in order to win a game. I will confess that I felt ashamed afterwards, and did not celebrate my victory. In fact, after the game ended, I slumped away back home feeling just as psychologically drained as after losing a game. At the same time, I would not have done what I did if I had not felt justified in what I did, even if it was not fully satisfactory. So I'll use this experience as a way to discuss the issues surrounding playing a losing move in order to win.

Objectivity vs. subjectivity in chess: science vs. sport

The argument for playing "objectively" good moves is clear, I think. If the goal is improve one's long-term playing understanding and performance, it is simply not good to play moves that you know are bad. You might succeed sometimes, against weak opponents, but against stronger opponents who can see just as well as you can, they will see your trick and punish you for the trick. I see a lot of chess play at lower levels in which trickery is attempted and often succeeds and often fails. Imagine playing tennis, and deliberately hitting a weak serve or return in hope of an unforced error. If your goal is not to just win a single game against a single opponent at a certain point in time, but to improve as an overall tennis player, I would say that it is better to try to do the "right" things.

The argument for playing "subjectively" good moves is also clear, however. In any single situation, you may have extra information that you can exploit. You might know that your tennis opponent has a poor backhand, in which you might place an objectively weak shot to your opponent's weak side. As a matter of sport, in fact, it would be stupid not to use this information about the situation. And chess too is a sport: you may notice that your opponent lacks stamina and loses focus at the end of a long game, or has trouble playing quickly when time is running low on the clock, and use this information to your advantage. Psychology is a huge and valid element of the sport of chess, and goes well beyond these coarse examples, to the point of such subtleties as knowing whether your opponent likes to use Bishops in a certain way to control certain squares. Today, top professional chess players actually try to figure out their opponents' psychology by performing data mining and statistical analyses on databases of the entire history of their opponents' previously played games! In fact, arguably, Carlsen became the new World Champion recently by avoiding Anand's preferred opening setups and types of positions, even at the expense of his own positions: in many games, he conceded objectively superior positions to Anand, as long as they were not what Anand expected to have.

So I would say that depending on whether you are treating chess as a serious discipline to continue improving at, or whether you have already practically maxed out in technical ability and/or are in a sporting situation where you evaluate the tradeoffs of taking a risk, it is justifiable to make different decisions.

But here at The Chess Improver, I try to focus on elements of chess that are objective in nature, because although psychology is always important, improving at objective fundamentals will always be most important until you reach a certain level.

The case of my game won by a cheap trick

Now it's time for me to explain my cheap trick that won a game that was otherwise unwinnable.

Out of a superior opening as White, I went astray and blundered a Rook away for a Bishop on move 15. I have no excuse; I simply got my move order confused and got skewered. At this point, I had to start thinking about how to draw the game. I had some chances, having the Bishop pair against a Rook and Knight, and a passed Pawn on c5.

But my opponent played strongly, sacrificing the exchange back immediately in order to reach a position in which he was going to win a Pawn. On move 22, about to lose a Pawn and face a very difficult fight for a draw, I had to start thinking about swindling ideas in order to try to make the draw more within my reach. The trick is always to give the opponent more choices: good ones and bad ones. Often, playing a "good" move that has only one plausible reply, which happens to also be good, is just continuing the game along a path that you don't want, and it is worth taking on some risk by playing a worse (but not yet losing) move that offers hope. Step 1: fighting back to a drawn position

By move 27, I had swindled my opponent, through back rank threats, into a position in which I was still down a Pawn but had secured a drawn position. If I threatened to Queen my passed Pawn by pushing it to c6, then my opponent would have had no choice but to perpetual check my King, accepting a draw. So I had to think: now that I have secured the draw, can I still try to swindle a win out of a position in which I was still a Pawn down?

Step 2: attempting to get winning chances

Here's when the time situation on the clock became quite relevant: my opponent was running very low on time, and was visibly anxious; he had 2 minutes left on his clock, while I had over 30 left on mine!! (It needs to be noted, however, that we were playing with a 5-second delay, which means that there is potentially enough time to play obviously moves in a simplified endgame position.) Meanwhile, my position was active enough that I didn't have to accept the perpetual check right away: I was clearly no longer losing. Most important, however, was my tournament situation: I had lost my game in the previous round, and therefore I had to win this 5th round game in order to have any chance of catching the leaders by also winning the 6th round game. So I felt justified in beginning to play for a win. My only chance to win was to somehow prevent perpetual check and prepare a later advance of my passed Pawn on c5 to try to Queen it. It was a very long shot, but I had to try.

Step 3: playing the losing move in order to win

In order to take maximal advantage of the time situation, I had to play quickly myself, which I did, and unfortunately playing not so good moves. I actually ended up in a dangerous position by move 33. Here I had to pause and think. My opponent was down to less than a minute. Objectively the best thing for me to do was to acknowledge that I was now the one who had to defend and force a draw by perpetual check. I almost did this. It was the "correct" thing to do.

However, I embarked on a rare gamble. If I played a clearly losing move that lost my Bishop by force, it would cause my opponent to have to make "long" moves, reaching across the board and completely changing the nature of the position, and possibly disorient him. Then I could push my Pawn forward to c6 and try to get it c7 and then even to Queen. It was somewhat absurd to hope that this could happen, and I will confess that if not for the tournament situation, I would not even have considered this option. But given the tournament situation, and given that my opponent's hand was trembling, it seemed that there really was some chance this swindle would work.

The swindle worked. My opponent ended up spending precious seconds, repeatedly, on a couple of moves, and then made the final blunder, which allowed me to trade Queens, resulting in a miraculous position in which his Knight and King were too far away to prevent my Pawn from Queening. In a lost position, with a few seconds left on the clock, my opponent allowed his flag to fall, and I won the game by time forfeit.

I marked my win on the posted paper sheet, quietly packed up, and went home.

Chess is a sport. I did not play well today, but I won. But sometimes, the reverse happens, and I play well, but lose.

The annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "15th William M. Byland Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2014.04.08"] [Round "5"] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black "Robert Atwell"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "2000"] [ECO "D37"] [TimeControl "G/120d5"] [WhiteElo "2161"]

d4 d5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. c4 e6 4. Nc3 Be7 5. Bf4 O-O 6. a3 c5 7. dxc5 dxc4 $2 { This gives up the center too easily. Black is also behind in development.} 8. e4 Bxc5 9. Bxc4 a6 10. O-O $6 { Hardly bad, but indicates sloppiness to come.} ( 10. e5 { Striking while ahead in development was very strong.} ) 10… b5 11. Ba2 $6 { Not a good place for the Bishop.} ( 11. Bd3 { White still has a huge advantage.} ) 11… Bb7 12. Qe2 ( 12. e5 { Still possible, but not as good as earlier.} ) 12… b4 $5 { A good psychological decision, trying to play actively.} 13. Na4 $6 ( 13. axb4 { I saw that the natural move leads to an obvious White advantage, but I started looking at strange lines.} 13… Bxb4 14. e5 ) 13… Be7 14. axb4 { My "clever" idea, which is actually not terrible, but was not necessary.} 14… Bxe4 $2 15. Nc5 $4 { Blundering away the exchange!! The game is not yet lost, thanks to the Bishop pair.} ( 15. Rfd1 { My original plan, but I got the move order wrong!!} 15… Qe8 16. Nc5 { White has a good position.} ) 15… Bxc5 16. bxc5 Bd3 { This move came as a real shock to me.} 17. Qe3 $5 { I decided to start playing actively, even though this was risky.} 17… Bxf1 18. Kxf1 $2 { In retrospect, a poor recapture.} 18… Nd5 19. Qe4 Nxf4 $1 { Giving back the exchange is actually a fine positional idea here. If White were allowed the Bishop at d6, White would almost certainly be able to draw.} 20. Qxa8 Qd3+ 21. Kg1 Qc2 $1 { Very nice. White's Queen side is totally undefended. Now I started looking for a swindling idea, based on Black's back rank.} 22. Ne1 Qxb2 $5 { Objectively OK, but invites tricks.} ( 22… Ne2+ { Grabbing the passed c Pawn was a safe way to an advantage.} 23. Kf1 Qxc5 ) 23. Rb1 $1 { The point is that White will win the Knight on b8. But actually, Black can allow this.} 23… Qc3 $2 ( 23… Qe2 { Threatening the Knight on e1 prevents White from winning anything.} ) 24. g3 $5 { First step in the swindling attempt.} ( 24. Qe4 { Bringing the Queen back for defense was a safe way to hold the draw a Pawn down.} ) 24… Ng6 $2 { Now White has an easy draw by allowing perpetual check.} ( 24… Ne2+ 25. Kf1 Nd7 { Developing was the way for Black to play for a win.} ) 25. Rxb8 Qxe1+ 26. Kg2 Qe5 27. Rxf8+ Nxf8 28. Qc6 $5 { Trying to delay the seemingly inevitable draw by perpetual check. It is critical to note that Black had only two minutes left on the clock, while White had many more minutes.} ( 28. c6 { The obvious draw by perpetual check.} 28… Qe4+ 29. Kg1 Qe1+ 30. Kg2 Qe4+ ) 28… g5 $5 { Black is also playing for a win.} 29. Bb1 $6 { A poor blitzing move.} 29… f5 $5 30. Bd3 h5 $5 { There was no need to give up the a-Pawn but Black is attempting to swindle also.} 31. Bxa6 h4 32. Bb7 $2 { Playing with fire. This Bishop does nothing on this square.} ( 32. Qd6 { The safe way to bail out into a drawn ending.} ) 32… g4 33. Qd6 $4 { A totally losing move, but a swindling attempt given that Black had less than a minute on the clock left.} ( 33. gxh4 { Now it's White's turn to try to give perpetual check.} 33… Ng6 34. Qe8+ ) ( 33. Ba6 { The safe way to simply defend the light squares around the King.} ) 33… h3+ 34. Kf1 Qa1+ 35. Ke2 Qb2+ 36. Ke3 Qxb7 { White has blundered away a whole piece.} 37. c6 Qc8 $4 { Too passive.} ( 37… Qb6+ { Being active would have prevented any Queening.} ) 38. c7 { Now White should be able to draw by perpetual check.} 38… Qb7 39. Qd8 Qb6+ $2 { A risky way to draw.} ( 39… Qe4+ { An easy perpetual check.} ) 40. Kf4 e5+ $1 { Forced.} ( 40… Qxf2+ $4 { Black saw that this move loses.} 41. Kg5 Qe3+ 42. Kh5 { White has escaped from perpetual check!} ) 41. Kxe5 { Black was down to a couple of seconds left.} 41… Qc5+ $4 ( 41… Qb2+ { Still draws. White's King has no shelter.} ) 42. Qd5+ { Black forfeited on time just before suffering from White's Queening the c-Pawn.} 1-0`} />

My progress so far on my cookie quota system

Sun, 20 Apr 2014 23:27:37 GMT

Abby and I went to an annual (secular) Easter party hosted by Lynette and Jim. In the past, I've often ended up all sleepy and sluggish at these parties. My experience this time was a bit different different. OK, we were all still quite well-fed, and I got tired, but far less so this time. I definitely believe it is because of my cookie quota system.

I limited myself to just three "cookies" (Jim repeatedly teased me for my explanation that cake counts as cookie). This meant skipping out on trying a couple of desserts, because there were far more than three options. In the past, I would try a bit of everything, and that always ended up being too much, even if I took what I considered to be a small portion.

Some kind of tart:

Birthday cake:

Tiramisu:

I also did not eat any bread rolls, and limited my potato intake at Easter dinner. And I drank no wine. All this helped me.

Maybe it's time for me to go down from three to two "cookies". I will consider this. Also, maybe I should start counting ice cream and candy as "cookies" as well. I do regret eating one Lindt "chocolate carrot" that in retrospect I did not really need to eat. (I did not eat any ice cream at this party, however.)

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://cdn.lindtusa.com/wcsstore/ExtendedSitesCatalogAssetStore/images/catalog/products/main/450x/chocolate-carrot-gift-bag_main_450x_8325-M.png" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://cdn.lindtusa.com/wcsstore/ExtendedSitesCatalogAssetStore/images/catalog/products/main/450x/chocolate-carrot-gift-bag_main_450x_8325-M.png">[image: Lindt chocolate carrot]</span>

Other than quitting something cold turkey, do you have a working system for reducing your consumption of desserts that you know are not so healthy for you? What makes your system work? Do you have an incremental reduction plan like mine, and self-punishment such as promising to post individual photos online of what you eat?

The perfect music for Good Friday: some favorite interpretations of Bach's "Erbarme dich" from the St. Matthew Passion

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 11:38:07 GMT

You might assume, since I'm talking about Good Friday, that I'm Christian, and that I'm here to talk about my faith. Actually, I'm not Christian, but I also believe that Easter is not irrelevant. Here's another non-Christian writing about <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.rsablogs.org.uk/2014/socialbrain/meaning-easter-bunnies/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.rsablogs.org.uk/2014/socialbrain/meaning-easter-bunnies/">why Easter matters</span>.

I've found it impossible to escape the fact that one of my favorite music composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, was not only Christian, but clearly imbued his music in some way or other with his deep faith. Two years ago, while listening to the opening chorus of his St. Matthew Passion, which was first performed on Good Friday in 1727, I also saw a thoughtful article by a Muslim, "Can non-Christians appreciate Bach's St. Matthew Passion". I'm not here to add to that debate, but to share one of the most moving pieces in the entire history of Western music, the aria "Erbarme dich" from the St. Matthew Passion. I hope you will check it out, whether you are Christian or not.

Erbarme dich

The aria features a prominent violin solo part as well as a sung alto solo part. It represents the disciple Peter's anguished and lonely weeping ("Have mercy, my Lord") after <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://biblehub.com/matthew/26-75.htm" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://biblehub.com/matthew/26-75.htm">he has three times denied knowing Jesus</span>, guilty of the most shameful betrayal. The way Bach depicts Peter's emotional state through music is astounding and gripping. You just have to hear it for yourself.

Sophie Gent, Damien Guillon

One performance I like features Sophie Gent on violin and Damien Guillon as countertenor. It is a very meditative, pure-sounding performance:

Unknown violinist, Andreas Scholl

However, I do prefer an edgier performance, and here is one that is more urgent and dramatic (audio only, no video of the performance) by Andreas Scholl as countertenor. Scholl really impresses here:

You can actually follow along in the score by a synchronized video score <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://musescore.com/rpbouman/scores/141997" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://musescore.com/rpbouman/scores/141997">here</span>.

Fredrik From, Anne Sofie von Otter

An even more urgent performance that might be my favorite is by Fredrik From on violin, Anne Sofie von Otter as mezzo-soprano. I have to confess that I feel that the tempo is a bit fast, but that does, in conjunction with the impeccable articulation and ensemble unity of purpose and style, give a driving force to Peter's anguish. For me, this is the most expressive of the performances I'm listing here.

A few notes on this video:

This is a video of a recording session, so it is curious to see von Otter in everyday clothing and moving and gesturing while singing for the purpose of a recording, where the audience is not meant to know what she was wearing or how she was privately swaying to the music. I find watching her both mesmerizing and distracting, but I feel that somehow her being free to express herself any way she wanted, sight unseen, might have been a good thing, because hers is truly an emotionally raw performance. How do you feel about peeking into a recording session where conditions are optimal for the performer and not meant to be seen by the outside world?
The second half of the video is an interview with von Otter about the recording project.

Unknown violinist, Nathalie Stutzmann

On the topic of visually expressive performances, here is one of Nathalie Stutzmann as contralto and also as conductor. Both she and the violinist are totally into the music, holding nothing back physically as they express it. A rather unusual setting and view, but very powerful:

Frederick Chiu on piano

The pianist Frederick created his own transcription for piano of the aria. His performance is rather restrained for my taste, but it's something different:

Conclusion

I've shared a few interesting performances of Bach's aria "Erbarme dich" from his St. Matthew Passion. There are many other performances out there, of course.

Which of the performances I linked to are your favorite, and why? Or which ones I did not link to do you prefer, and why? And do you feel you need to be a Christian to appreciate and enjoy this kind of sacred music?

Thoughts on never having read anything written by Gabriel García Márquez

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 02:01:38 GMT

So I heard that Gabriel García Márquez just died.

My immediate reaction was one of personal embarrassment.

Because I knew almost nothing about this famous writer. Now, that in itself is insignificant, since there is no shortage of famous writers or musicians or athletes or scientists whom I know nothing about.

But there's a twist.

I once bought his novel

Over a decade ago, I actually bought a copy of his famous 1967 novel, "Cien años de soledad" (translated into English as "One Hundred Years of Solitude"). It seemed to me that everyone around me had a copy of this lying around somewhere, so I figured that I was missing out on something. After taking a Spanish class, in which his name popped up only incidentally as the inventor of "magical realism" (whatever that was), I finally went and bought his novel, in English translation.

Reading

I didn't make it past the first page of the novel. It was then that I realized that my fiction-reading days were over. Actually, I hadn't voluntarily read and finished any fiction for decades, except for short stories, and even then, read only when I was taking a creative writing workshop and we were assigned stories to read: I did enjoy the readings, but never looked for more, and also, despite enjoying writing some stories for the class, I decided to stop after the class was over. Something wasn't working out for me.

This was strange because I survived high school largely through reading fiction alone in my room. But that was a different phase of my life. I almost feel like I used up my "quota" of fiction reading right then, during my years of high school. When I went to college, I did some fiction reading in my first year, but after that, did very little such reading outside of literature and philosophy classes, and by then I greatly preferred shorter forms to huge novels (for example, my discovery of ETA Hoffmann.

You can also just tell, from the content on my blog, that I don't write much about literature at all!

I am not "well-read"

I realized by the time I left college that I was not interested in being "well-read" the way some of my peers were. This was probably clear even in my first year of college. While many of my new classmates eagerly signed up for the Shakespeare course to fulfill a literature requirement, I had no interest in reading more Shakespeare, after all I was subjected to in high school (I will note that in discussion with friends, they claim that Shakespeare is not meant to be read anyway, but experienced as actual theater). I've never been one to follow a checklist of "great books" or "great music" or "great films". I find something here or there, and it might or might not be popular, but I have no bucket list to check off.

For example, now and then I get forwarded some quiz like "how many of these 100 great books have you read" and I take it and my score is not very high and reflects what I read in high school, and in particular, high school English classes! Most recently, someone posted on Facebook "BBC believes you only read 6 of these books" (yes, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is on this list), and of the 100, I scored 36, and my friends who responded seemed to score between 50 and 80.

I have not cracked open "War and Peace". Or "Moby Dick". Or "Ulysses". I might never do so. I'm actually somewhat ashamed I had copies of them in the first place. Despite "intentions", I would classify my having them around for years as indulging in "vanity reads": some people "show off" their books or CDs or DVDs, and I suppose to some extent I was not an exception, until several years ago, when I decided that was a stupid game to play, and in the name of decluttering and minimalism, I donated or sold almost all of my books and CDs and DVDs that I had no reason to keep around any more. I got tired of being embarrassed about all the books I had not yet read or had no clear intention of reading or had read years ago but never planned to revisit.

Never say never

On the other hand, I do sometimes feel like I'm "missing out" if I don't check out something that seems to be popular. I don't want to be narrow-minded. But I've learned I can't force myself to be "well-rounded". This has been true for literature as it has been for music, where, for example, I didn't really bother checking out much Baroque music for the first four decades of my life, but had a radical awakening to the beauty of it only in recent years, and it's become a cornerstone of my current musical life. If you had forced me to "endure" Baroque music in an earlier stage of my life, it might have just backfired. Similarly, when it comes to food, I have been very late in diversifying my taste. In the case of film, again, I am not a "film buff" like some of my friends; I actually very rarely watch films these days, maybe 5 a year (I'm amazed by those who watch something more like 150 a year, but apparently that's <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120906006400/en/Average-Netflix-User-Watches-5-TV-Shows" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120906006400/en/Average-Netflix-User-Watches-5-TV-Shows">average for Netflix users</span>).

So, in the same way, it appears I am not yet in any mood to read Gabriel García Márquez. "It's not him, it's me"? I gave away my copy of his novel a couple of years ago, knowing that it had sat around at home too long and that I wasn't going to read it anytime soon. It is possible that in twenty years I'll be giving it a shot again. But just not now.

Conclusion

It always feels a little odd when a lot of people around me mourn the death of someone I know little about. It was particularly odd in the case of a writer whose novel I once bought but never managed to read. Life seems short.

How did you feel upon hearing about the death of Gabriel García Márquez? How many of his books of his have you read? Did you enjoy them? Why did you read them? Do you ever experience feeling embarrassed by not having read something that many of your friends have read? If you do, how do you deal with this?

RIP Cheo Feliciano: wonderful singer of salsa and bolero

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:45:07 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140417104237-cheo-feliciano---story---restricted-story-top.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140417104237-cheo-feliciano---story---restricted-story-top.jpg">[image: Cheo Feliciano]</span>

I learned that Cheo Feliciano just died in a car accident at age 78.

Why I have been a fan of Cheo Feliciano

Born in Puerto Rico, he was one of my favorite singers of salsa and bolero when I was regularly doing Latin dancing and seeking out the best music out there. As a particular fan of bolero, I was drawn to his magnetic voice and style: rich, smooth, flexible. His singing always seemed so resonant and never harsh; in particular, as a learner of Spanish, I appreciated how easy it was to hear his words, because of his clear, conversational articulation even as he sang.

Check him out:

Some favorite musical selections

My single favorite recording of his is of the bolero (you know how I love bolero) "Delirio":

He was fantastic at uptempo salsa too, of course. Here is a video of him performing "Busca lo Tuyo". I particularly like his improvisation in salsa: he sounds so natural while inventive.

Conclusion

If you love classic salsa and bolero, take some time out to review his old albums and remember how great he was. And remember to keep dancing to his fine music!

How do you feel when you learn that a favorite musician of yours has died? Do you do anything to celebrate his or her life and contribution to yours? I like to reflect on what I found so special that touched my life, and share that so that others will remember, or learn anew.

The Chess Improver: Ten reasons my winning game turned into a loss

Thu, 17 Apr 2014 11:07:13 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Ten reasons my winning game turned into a loss"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Recently I had one of the most embarrassing losses in my chess life. Granted, I've had many losses, and many of them have been quite painful, but this one was particularly bad, because of many regrets about factors that I could have controlled but didn't. I did not fully understand this earlier in life, but more and more I have learned that my performance in a serious chess game hinges on factors completely independent of what one might think of as the core of chess play (theoretical knowledge, tactical calculation ability). The circumstances surrounding this game have much to teach about how not to go into a game. When we talk about chess improvement, we must talk about the whole context of playing chess, not just the pieces and positions on the board.

Ten faulty thoughts and actions

My first mistake was that, seeing that it was finally nice outside, after work, when I was supposed to just rest, and prepare to eat dinner after my wife came home, I instead went out for my first run in several days. I returned a bit tired. I'm not stupid: I know that it is foolhardy to waste one's glucose stores shortly before a competitive chess game, because the brain needs a lot of glucose to think clearly, especially in a four-hour time-control game ending near midnight. Abby was confused when she saw me finally come home from my run, because the timing messed with our dinner plan, because she hadn't known when to start cooking dinner. Having an unexpected change in routine caused unnecessary stress for everyone. We decided we had to eat leftovers from the refrigerator, but suddenly the power in our neighborhood went out. This caused a dispute in which I (starving after my run) wanted to get stuff out of the refrigerator, but she didn't want to open it. Don't have draining arguments before a chess game. By the time the power came back and I had to go off to my chess game, I had packed dinner to take with me but still not eaten. Do not play chess hungry. I arrived at the chess club and ate much of my dinner in the couple of minutes before the round began, but this is not optimal timing. Do not eat a lot of food right before a game. You need to be thinking, not digesting. I trash-talked before the game, saying, "We're going to see a sacrifice in this game", because in fact, I had prepared some Black gambits for the occasion. This was possibly the single worst mistake I made that evening. Do not trash-talk and trap yourself into some ego-driven mindset or pre-commitment. As White, my opponent surprised me on move 2, playing an opening that I don't fear but which I have never faced as Black and did not expect. I ended up playing slightly more passively than I normally would have. Do not get "surprised" by coming to a game with too many expectations about how a familiar opponent will play. Be ready for anything. In a good position, I moved quickly and recklessly with intention of attack, even though in my last three tournament games, I played deliberately and solidly. Do not play a certain way just to back up your pre-game trash-talking. Play the position as it is. I saw an opportunity for a sacrifice and instead of calculating it all out, just immediately played it. It was unsound, but my opponent did not find the refutation, and I suddenly had an easily winning position. But then I went crazy, unsoundly aiming for a quick win. He erred again, and I had a win in sight. But then, as I concluded that in a couple of moves I might Queen my a2-Pawn, I got up and walked to the corner of the chess club to open another chess set and return with a Black Queen in hand. Do not get up and distract yourself at a critical moment in a game. Do not engage in nonverbal trash-talking by getting a Queen before it is your move and you have actually decided to playing the Pawn promotion. In a winning position with beautiful checkmates in forced variations, I completely stopped thinking and played one bad move after another, my attack was stopped, and one piece down for nothing, I lost the game. Continue careful calculation, even in a position that looks great, especially if you have sacrificed something and need to make it count.

There are certain things I did wrong that I confessed here that I plan to never do again. I have learned a truly expensive lesson. It is possible that none of you have done as many immature, stupid things as I just did, but if any of what I have confessed rings true to you and causes you to reconsider your similar behavior, I hope my loss has not been in vain.

The annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "15th William M. Byland Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2014.04.01"] [Round "4"] [White "Kevin Carl"] [Black "Franklin Chen"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "2161"] [ECO "D00"] [TimeControl "G/120d5"] [WhiteElo "2125"]

d4 Nf6 2. Bg5 d5 3. Bxf6 exf6 4. e3 Be6 5. Bd3 Bd6 { Solid but not most aggressive.} ( 5… c5 { Accepting an isolated d-Pawn for open lines and development was reasonable.} 6. dxc5 Bxc5 ) 6. Nd2 O-O 7. Qh5 $2 { Clearly premature, but psychologically distracting.} 7… g6 8. Qh6 Re8 $6 { On the passive side.} ( 8… Nc6 { Normal quick development was strong.} ) 9. Ne2 Bf8 $2 { Again, needlessly defensive.} 10. Qf4 f5 $6 ( 10… c5 { We will continue to see that striking against White's center was good.} ) 11. h4 h5 $2 { Completely unnecessary, weakening the King side. Still, Black has a better position. There is really no way White can attack Black's King.} ( 11… Nd7 ) 12. Qf3 Nd7 ( 12… c5 ) 13. Nf4 Nf6 ( 13… c5 ) 14. O-O-O a5 $5 ( 14… c6 { More solid, maintaining an advantage while preventing White's light-squared Bishop from getting to b5.} ) 15. Qe2 $2 a4 16. a3 c5 $5 { Late but still decent.} ( 16… c6 ) 17. dxc5 Bxc5 $6 ( 17… Bd7 ) 18. Nf3 $2 ( 18. Bb5 { The best way for White to hold.} ) 18… Qd6 $5 { Played with the risky idea of sacrificing the Bishop.} ( 18… Qb6 { Black looks to have good attacking chances, building up slowly.} ) 19. Qd2 $2 Bxa3 $5 { Taking a risk, going for a sacrifice.} ( 19… Rec8 { Black could have quietly prepared for a solid attack.} ) 20. Nd4 $4 { Loses.} ( 20. Qc3 $1 { The refutation of the attempted sacrifice.} 20… Ng4 21. Qxa3 Qxa3 22. bxa3 Nxf2 23. Nd4 { White comes out of all this with an advantage, because of the strong Knights.} ) ( 20. bxa3 $4 Qxa3+ 21. Kb1 d4 { Black wins immediately. I was seduced by seeing this variation.} ) 20… Bb4 $6 ( 20… Bc5 { A simple retreat was enough to keep a winning advantage.} 21. Ndxe6 fxe6 22. Nxg6 a3 { White's King is helpless.} ) 21. c3 a3 $6 { Still fantasizing about a quick win.} ( 21… Ba5 ) 22. cxb4 $4 ( 22. Kb1 { Was necessary, although Black still has a large advantage.} 22… Bc5 ) 22… a2 $1 { A good move, but my mind became disordered and excited, and I made the mistake of getting up and fetching a Queen from a spare set in the room.} 23. Kc2 Rec8+ 24. Kb3 $201 { With one move, Black could have forced resignation.} 24… Bd7 $4 { Having distracted myself, I totally stopped calculations.} ( 24… Ne4 { The correct move order was to force White's Queen away.} 25. Qe2 ( 25. Qe1 a1=Q 26. Rxa1 Rxa1 27. Qxa1 $4 Nd2+ { A beautiful mate is coming.} 28. Ka4 Ra8+ 29. Kb5 Bd7+ ) 25… Bd7 { And now threatening Ba4+.} 26. b5 Rc3+ $1 { Leading to a nice mate.} 27. bxc3 Qa3+ 28. Kc2 Qxc3# { This would have been a brilliant mate.} ) 25. b5 { At this point, I got discouraged and played quickly. I should have tried to find a strong continuation.} 25… Ng4 $4 { The game is effectively over after this blunder, taking the Black Knight away from any action.} ( 25… Ne4 $1 26. Bxe4 dxe4 27. Qb4 Qe5 { Black still has a bind on the position, and has opened the position to allow the light-squared Bishop to participate in the attack.} 28. Ra1 Be8 29. Rxa2 f6 { With this maneuver, Black is still winning.} 30. Ra4 Bf7+ 31. Nde6 { Giving back the piece.} ( 31. Ka3 $2 Rxa4+ 32. Qxa4 Qe8 33. b3 Ra8 34. Qxa8 Qxa8+ 35. Kb2 { Perhaps White can hold this ending because of the two strong Knights.} ) 31… Bxe6+ 32. Nxe6 Qxe6+ 33. Ka3 Rxa4+ 34. Qxa4 { Material is even, but White's King is unsafe.} 34… Qd6+ 35. Ka2 Qd5+ 36. Kb1 Qd2 { It looks like White can defend a draw.} ) 26. Ra1 Ne5 27. Qb4 Qb6 28. Rxa2 Rxa2 29. Kxa2 Rc5 30. Kb1 Nxd3 31. Nxd3 Rc4 32. Qb3 Qa5 33. Rc1 Ra4 34. Rc3 Ra1+ 35. Kc2 Rf1 36. Qa3 Qb6 37. Kd2 Kg7 38. Ke2 Rg1 39. Qe7 Bxb5 40. Nxb5 Qxb5 41. Qe5+ Kh7 42. Rc8 f6 43. Qe7+ Kh6 44. Rh8# 1-0`} />

Charlie Chaplin, a daughter, a granddaughter: changing my perception of "Smile"

Thu, 17 Apr 2014 02:01:39 GMT

So today is the 125th birthday of Charlie Chaplin. I could assume that he needs no introduction, being one of the famous pioneers of film, but I have to confess that I have never myself actually watched the entirety of any of his films. I went through much of my life not knowing much about him at all, in fact, other than caricatures of his famous character "the little tramp", which to me just seemed dated and weird, and therefore not of interest. So I never looked further into his films or his life: it was all just ancient history to me.

But two years ago, by chance, I learned more about him.

The song "Smile"

Two years ago, I discovered that the music for the famous song "Smile" was actually composed by Chaplin. This intrigued me, so I learned a bit more about him.

By the way, here is a video clip from his 1936 film "Modern Times" featuring the musical theme that became the song "Smile":

Family

One thing I learned is that Chaplin had a very complicated family life, with four marriages, the last of whom was 36 years younger than him (and eventually had eight children with him). One of these children was Geraldine Chaplin. Her name rang a bell, because I vaguely remembered seeing her in the 1973 film "The Three Musketeers" way back!

It turns out that not only did his daughter Geraldine also take up acting, but her daughter, Oona Chaplin also did. Indeed, I found all this out by accident: two years ago, I had been looking for a karaoke version of "Smile" to sing along to, when by accident I found a video of Geraldine and Oona Chaplin singing "Smile" together! It was fascinating watching this performance of Charlie Chaplin's music by a daughter and granddaughter of his:

Biography

A couple of days ago, I saw this interesting review of a biography of Charlie Chaplin calling him a "monster". Of course, we know that an actor's character's persona may not match real life. Such is the complexity of humanity.

Other performances of "Smile"

There have been many famous classic performances of "Smile" since it became a song with lyrics in 1954. I'll share here one that is kind of creepy, yet compelling, maybe appropriately so given what we know of Chaplin's complicated life. Here's a video of Judy Garland singing the song. I find it utterly over the top but hard to resist; she gives the song a crazed intensity and sadness rather than a comfortable feel-good reading. Of course, her personal life was also a mess.

How I perceive "Smile" now

Before I knew about Chaplin's satirical film "Modern Times" and the man himself, I suppose I considered "Smile" something of a wishful, sentimental song, although with a lovely melody and seductive harmonic progression, but now it's completely impossible for me to think of this song without a sense of irony.

How about you? How have you perceived the song up till now? Did you know the back stories? How do you perceive the song now, after reading this post? Can you hear it or sing it again the way you did before?

A note on running in warm weather

Mon, 14 Apr 2014 01:43:14 GMT

I haven't been running much at all in recent months; actually, I barely ran all winter, in contrast to last winter.

Since it's warmer now, I no longer have an excuse. I went out for a short run in Frick Park late in the afternoon, when it was warm and sunny, probably around 80 degrees F.

I had a really tough time out there, going less than three miles before I turned around and started walking home. I know from prior experience that after not running much, I have to ramp up slowly, but in this case, the suddenly warm weather (after months of a seemingly endless winter) took a toll on me. So I'd like to remind anyone else coming out of "hibernation" not to feel discouraged if feeling unfit: just do a little bit of running at a time, hydrate (I was grateful that the water fountains in the park are operational), and be patient! If I didn't know any better, I would be feeling quite discouraged after my excursion today.

I treated myself to some cookies after my run. These are cookies I saved from an event at work last week, specifically for only after hiking or running. I would not eat these unremarkable cookies otherwise!

Hiking again in Boyce-Mayview Park three months later

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 00:58:26 GMT

For the New Year in January, Abby and I went on a brisk winter hike through the Pittsburgh hiking meetup group in Boyce-Mayview Park, which was new to us at the time. We enjoyed the experience so much that we knew that we were going to return in the spring.

So on a warm and sunny afternoon (temperature rising beyond 70 degrees F), we went (by ourselves) to Boyce-Mayview Park to do some hiking. We ended up doing maybe eight miles. Obviously, things just looked different without the snow and ice, and with some vegetation and more active life forms.

Parking

(You can download a detailed map of the park <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.twpusc.org/magazine/pdf/boyce-mayview-park_map.pdf" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.twpusc.org/magazine/pdf/boyce-mayview-park_map.pdf">here</span>.)

We originally headed to parking at the trail head right next to <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.ardolinopizza.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.ardolinopizza.com/">Ardolino's Pizza</span>, off Boyce Road, but the small parking lot was full, not unexpectedly, so we drove all the way around to the Boyce-Mayview community and recreation center entrance from Mayview Road, to park in a lot further in near the Outdoor Classroom, use the restroom building next to it, and enter the trail systems from there.

Our hike

We encountered a bit of mud on the trails that we took, but nothing too unpleasant. We both wore our Vibram FiveFingers KSO Trek shoes.

We just basically wandered around, without any map or GPS, knowing that as long as we kept Chartiers Creek in sight, we could get back to where we started. Also, with all the many elevation changes, we could often see the community and recreation center up high. So we did not have to worry about getting lost.

I very much enjoy hiking in the vicinity of water, seeing it and hearing it, so we spent a good deal time on the trails near Chartiers Creek, just following its curves.

At one point in the wetlands we got excited and thought we saw an island and so we went there and hiked a trail there all the way till we realized it wasn't really an island after all. It was fun being surrounded by water on both sides on a strip of land, but also that part of the hike involved a lot of bugs happy to try to bite us!

After about two hours, we eventually ended up at the Boyce Road trail head and I was really hungry and peeked into Ardolino's, but Abby didn't think it was a good idea for us to order pizza (we had packed our own lunch anyway), so we turned around and hiked back up, and stopped somewhere on a trail to sit and eat lunch.

Then we made our way back to our start. At one point it wasn't clear how to get to a trail connecting where we were, high up, back to the trail next to Chartiers Creek, so we just took a "shortcut" (hiking poles are very helpful for the Boyce-Mayview Park in general), scrambling down to that trail.

A few photos of stuff we saw

View from where we parked:

The Outdoor Classroom and the restroom building:

Abby spotting an interesting bird:

A view of Chartiers Creek:

A little garter snake crossed our path. You might be able spot it in this photo. At my request, Abby did not pick it up to show to me.

A sample trail winding around a hill:

Rapids! We did see someone in a canoe further upstream.

Flowers (sorry, I know very little about identifying flowers):

Crossing over to the "island":

We saw woodpeckers, geese, vultures, groundhogs, and other critters during the hike.

Without leaves on trees obstructing the view, it is fairly easy to see where one is, as far as elevation and landmarks (we knew we had to get back down to the creek level and then back upward to where we parked):

Conclusion

It was great to return to Boyce-Mayview Park in the spring. I expect that we'll go back in a couple more weeks, as more vegetation grows and even more birds hang out. I highly recommend checking out this park, located in Upper St. Clair just half an hour drive from the city of Pittsburgh.

The Chess Improver: Development: doing it and disrupting it are sides of the same coin

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 11:44:28 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Development: doing it and disrupting it are sides of the same coin"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

I've written quite a few posts on The Chess Improver that revolve around the importance of piece development in chess. Some of them have focused on developing one's own pieces, while some have focused on disrupting the opponent's development. In this post, I present a game in which both were pursued simultaneously and consistently, with good effect.

After move 4 of a slow Slav Defense, both White and Black had 2 minor pieces developed, with a fairly balanced position. Then as White, I decided to move an already developed Knight to try to gain the Bishop pair. Black allowed me to not only gain it but also to get a better Pawn structure.

On move 7, to my surprise, Black moved an already developed Knight, without any particular threat, rather than continue own development. Now I had a choice to make: either continue developing normally, or take advantage of the temporary situation to try to disrupt Black's continuing development. It turned out that the Knight move undefended Black's d5 Pawn and also did nothing to protect the b7 Pawn. After some calculation, I felt it justified to develop my Queen to b3, striking at both the b7 and d5 Pawn. This is a thematic idea in many Slav Defense lines where Black's movement of the light-squared Bishop from c8 presents tactical opportunities for White. (Note that I count the Queen move as "development" here, because the Queen plays a great role on b3 and also is not in danger of being chased away.)

Is Black positionally lost at move 8?

At this point, on move 8, Black should have likewise developed the Queen, as a defensive move, but instead made a weakening Pawn move, b6, that I think already results in a positionally lost game! Look at the tactically forced position after White's move 12.

Number of already developed pieces

White has effectively 3 developed pieces: Queen, light-squared Bishop (both attacking f7), and castled Rook on f1. I count the Rook as developed because after White plays f3, opening the f-file on the next move, it will already be attacking f7. Black has only the Queen developed, and still cannot castle. That's effectively two pieces behind in development.

Future development possibilities

Although White's dark-squared Bishop is still not developed, and is somewhat blocked in by the Pawn on e3, actually Bd2 is already possible, after which White's remaining Rook can be developed. Black will not be developing the Queen Knight anytime soon. It cannot even move to any square right now except to a6, but that just drops the piece to White's Bishop attacking the square. We see why b6 was such a terrible move, weakening the light squares in the absence of Black's light-squared Bishop. Also, Black will have to take probably four moves just to maneuver something in order to be able to develop the Knight on c6 or d7 without immediately losing material. For example, playing c5 would result in immediate loss on the light squares of Black's Queen, Rook, and/or Knight because of Bb5, and where can the Queen go in order to allow Nd7 without blocking Black's own undeveloped Bishop or dropping the f7 Pawn?

So if you do the arithmetic, you can see that in effect, Black is something like six moves behind in development. Intuitively, in an open position (as will be the case once White plays f3), it would take a miracle for Black to survive, being so far behind: one way or another, it should be possible for White to aim pieces and Pawns at Black's position to tactically force some kind of decisive win of material during an attack.

The rest of the game

After move 18, let's take stock of the situation. Black has managed to develop a Bishop and castle in the last six moves. White has the half-open f-file for the Rook, and acquired a central Pawn mass and has opened up the way for the dark-squared Bishop to come out at will. Black's Knight is still not developed, but now hopes to get to a6 or d7, which are free, but the Queen side Pawns have been weakened even further with b5 (which was however practically necessary in order to get White's Bishop off the f7 target).

It turns out that there was already a forced win here for White, without needing to develop the Queen Rook or Bishop. e6 would have won already, by winning the f7 Pawn for free. However, probably because i was in a state of mind of "winning by developing", I chose not to immediately grab material, knowing that Black was lost already and I could take my time. So I just developed my dark-squared Bishop to f4, restricting Black from developing the Knight. After the Queen moved, I again just developed, bringing my remaining undeveloped piece, the Queen Rook, to d1, defending my d4 Pawn and "preparing" d5 (which was already a winning move even without the preparation).

On move 21, let's do the arithmetic again: White has the Queen, two Rooks, and two Bishops developed (5 pieces), as well as the Pawn front of d4 and e6 ready to go, and Black has only the Queen developed; in fact, the Bishop that retreated to d8 cannot really be called "developed", although there looks like some kind of swindling attempt to get to b6 to bother White's King.

There was no longer any reason to delay, so I played d5 and e6. Black lashed out for activity (note that with the White Pawn about to come to e6, Black could only try to develop the Knight to a6 if at all, but then at the cost of losing vast amounts of material thanks to the threats on f7 and c6 and b5). I chose a simple solution based on Black's weaknesses on the dark squares, threatening simultaneously to win either a piece or the exchange, and then with a continuing raging attack while at it, and Black shortly resigned.

I thought this admittedly lopsided game was a good example of a successful thought process based on evaluating both how quickly one can develop one's pieces and how restricting an opponent's development translates effectively to having more time for one's own development.

The annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "15th William M. Byland Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2014.03.25"] [Round "3"] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black "Edward Dean"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "2136"] [ECO "D11"] [TimeControl "G/120d5"] [WhiteElo "2161"]

d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. Nbd2 Bf5 5. Nh4 e6 $5 { Not an unknown idea in the Slav: Black gives up the Bishop pair but gets to control the e4 square.} 6. Nxf5 exf5 7. e3 Ne4 $2 { Falling behind in development, for no gain.} 8. Qb3 { Trying to disrupt Black's normal development.} 8… b6 $4 { Black is really positionally lost already after this move.} ( 8… Qd7 9. Bd3 { White develops normally with an advantage, but Black is solid.} ) ( 8… Qb6 9. cxd5 Qxb3 10. Nxb3 Bb4+ 11. Ke2 cxd5 12. f3 { White has the Bishop pair and better Pawn structure and can look forward to a comfortable Queenless middlegame.} ) 9. cxd5 Qxd5 { Forced.} ( 9… cxd5 $4 10. Bb5+ { White wins.} ) 10. Bc4 Qd7 11. Nxe4 { Black's Knight has moved around just to be traded off.} 11… fxe4 12. O-O { White has two pieces developed, aimed at Black's King, is castled, and is about to open the f-file. Black only has a Queen developed, and is nowhere near castling, and the remaining Knight will not be developing anytime soon.} 12… Bd6 13. f3 ( 13. Qc2 { Even stronger.} ) 13… b5 14. Be2 Qc7 $2 ( 14… exf3 15. Rxf3 O-O 16. a4 { Black is positionally lost, unable to complete development of the Queen side, but at least this is better than what happened in the game.} ) 15. fxe4 $1 { Now White has a Pawn center mass.} ( 15. h3 { Protecting the h-Pawn was also possible but I felt that grabbing the Pawn center was stronger.} ) 15… Bxh2+ 16. Kh1 O-O $4 ( 16… Bg3 { Getting the Bishop back to safety immediately at least would have allowed Black's Queen to make it to e7 and Knight to d7.} 17. e5 Qe7 18. Bg4 ) 17. e5 Bg3 18. e4 Bh4 19. Bf4 ( 19. e6 $1 { Won immediately, but I used a slow plan of just developing to win.} 19… Qe7 20. exf7+ Kh8 { White is just a solid Pawn ahead.} ( 20… Rxf7 $4 21. Bh5 g6 22. Bg4 { And Black will lose the pinned Rook on f7 after Be6.} ) ) 19… Qd7 20. Rad1 { Again, simple development.} ( 20. d5 { Immediate Pawn action was also winning.} ) ( 20. a4 { Another win, ripping apart Black's Queen side.} ) ( 20. Qh3 { Another win, just trading the Queens into an ending. White's center Pawns are unstoppable.} ) 20… Bd8 { Loses, but there are no good moves for Black at all.} ( 20… Na6 { Trying to develop the Knight just leaves everything hanging.} 21. d5 { Black will start losing material on the Queen side.} ) 21. d5 { White has all kinds of threats, including e6 and dxc6.} 21… g5 { Last-ditch effort to gain some kind of play.} 22. e6 { Attacking the Queen and the f7 Pawn as well as opening the way for the dark-squared Bishop.} 22… Qe7 ( 22… Qe8 23. Bh5 { White will come in on f7, game over.} ) ( 22… Qb7 23. Bd6 { Black will lose the Rook on f8.} ) 23. Qg3 { Good enough.} ( 23. exf7+ { Computer loves this win.} 23… Rxf7 24. Bxb8 ) 23… cxd5 24. exd5 f5 25. Bd6 { Good enough to force resignation. Black will lose the exchange will White also continues to attack and will win more material. Black's Queen side will still not develop!} ( 25. Bxb8 { Also wins, but why bother with weird complications?} 25… Rxb8 26. Qxb8 { Black is a Rook down, but cannot mate White's King.} ) 1-0`} />

A few sights from the Iron Grate Trail in Frick Park

Sun, 06 Apr 2014 22:41:58 GMT

Abby and I did a leisurely hike in Frick Park near home, exploring a trail that I don't usually run on, the Iron Grate Trail, because it is a favorite trail for mountain bikers, and therefore tends to have muddy ruts that are not so pleasant for pedestrians, and also someone on a mountain bike could always come out of nowhere. But we were careful to keep our eyes and ears open, and share the trail, yielding to mountain bikers when perceiving them coming along.

An advantage of occasionally checking out these trails is simply that they are quieter, in terms of fewer pedestrians and dogs, and also, you get to see parts of the park that you wouldn't otherwise see.

The Iron Grate Trail briefly became infamous in the local news a year ago because of reports of a "hatchet-wielding" person attacking someone on the trail, but I think that was an isolated incident.

Photo

Here's an amusing photo I took of Abby finding a hiding place along the trail:

I didn't take any photos of the new-looking signs reading "Iron Grate Trail" that we saw, but I just found out that <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://pittsburghparks.org/PTAGworkday04052014" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://pittsburghparks.org/PTAGworkday04052014">they were put up just days ago thanks to volunteers for the Pittsburgh Trail Advocacy Group</span>. We did notice that the trail showed other evidence of having been maintained recently. Very nice work and thank you!

We also saw some chickens running around in someone's back yard, from a section of the trail behind a residential area.

Video

Here is a random video I found of someone riding into and along the Iron Grate Trail:

Review of edX 8.01x: Jazz Appreciation

Sat, 05 Apr 2014 02:13:47 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://www.edx.org/sites/default/files/course/image/banner/jazz_608x211.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.edx.org/sites/default/files/course/image/banner/jazz_608x211.jpg">[image: Course banner]</span>

By coincidence, it is now <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.smithsonianjazz.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.smithsonianjazz.org/">Jazz Appreciation Month</span>, which is observed every April. So it is fitting that I just completed the free MOOC from <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.edx.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.edx.org/">edX</span> on <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.edx.org/course/utaustinx/utaustinx-ut-8-01x-jazz-appreciation-1149" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.edx.org/course/utaustinx/utaustinx-ut-8-01x-jazz-appreciation-1149">"Jazz Appreciation", UT.8.01X</span>, through UT Austin, taught by Jeffrey Hellmer.

Intro video:

There was good and bad in this course.

A survey

This course was a low-stress way to get a little survey of jazz. I've never formally studied jazz nor systematically read up on its history, so all that I know comes purely from random personal listening, more than anything else. I don't consider myself a "true" jazz aficionado; I know a whole lot more about classical music.

I thought it was a good idea to start with 1950s hard bop rather than go in chronological order through history, and then work backwards and forwards from there, because of the accessibility and typicality of the jazz from this era.

I liked how the instructor illustrated concepts at the piano, and brought up issues of artistic differences without judgment and getting into controversies that still exist today. He basically said, you don't have to like everything you hear in this course, but know how to identify and compare the stylistic features and goals. There's a reason musicians chose to go in the directions they did.

Cerego quizzes

The Cerego quiz platform was the most annoying thing about the course. I thought it was counterproductive busywork. In fact, I can't believe I tolerated it just to complete the course; it was a waste of time to have done so.

You had to demonstrate "mastery" of isolated facts, through identifying musical snippets, classifying the eras of musicians, memorizing what instruments they played, etc. I can see some point in some mastery of some facts, but the sheer repetition and shallowness of the concept bothered me. It got to the point where I made a game of identifying a musical selection based on hearing the first quarter second of its audio.

What I learned

Overall, I didn't learn that much from the course, because I've already done my share of listening to jazz. I filled in a few gaps, but not in any deep way. Unfortunately, a course like this must be shallow. You might learn a few names, hear some musical snippets, and then it's purely up to you to go investigate more if you want to.

The drawback of a survey course

I'm not sure whether to recommend a course like this if you're interested in learning more about jazz. I believe it may be more enjoyable and instructive to simply pick a few favorite artists and listen deeply. A shallow survey simply cannot do much. I feel this way about survey courses on any subject, whether ballroom dancing, programming languages, or cooking. It's best to just go deep, and then later fill in gaps.

My followup

Actually, one thing I did do as a result of this course was that the instructor mentioned resources such as <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://tedgioia.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://tedgioia.com/">Ted Gioia</span>'s writings on jazz, and so I went and read his book from 1988, "The Imperfect Art". I loved it, and it clarified for me some things I had been thinking about regarding the nature of jazz. I may write about this later.

I don't actually read much music criticism any more, but if you want to read about jazz, Ted Gioia is definitely one guy to read. For example, check out his recent article <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/18/music-criticism-has-degenerated-into-lifestyle-reporting.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/18/music-criticism-has-degenerated-into-lifestyle-reporting.html">"Music criticism has degenerated into lifestyle reporting"</span>.

My third year of celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach's birthday: who was this guy anyway?

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 01:23:31 GMT

This is my third year of celebrating the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach. I did this in 2012 and in 2013.

The first year, I consciously chose to play some of his music rather than read about it (or about his life). The second year, I played some more of his music, on flute.

This year, I did something different.

First of all, I learned that I had gotten his birthday "wrong" in the past two years! This year I decided to celebrate the actual birthday (in terms of passing of time) rather than his birth date (which was March 21 according to the old Julian calendar). A minor detail, but symbolic of my intention.

This photo is of my Bach bobblehead next to a new book about Bach by John Eliot Gardiner that I just got out of the Carnegie Library today; I had decided that for this year, I would learn more about Bach, the man.

A brand new book about Johann Sebastian Bach

A couple of months ago, I came across an interview "Bach unwigged: the man behind the music" with John Eliot Gardiner, who had finally come out with his long-awaited book about Johann Sebastian Bach, "Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven".

(Gardiner has been one of my favorite conductors for a quarter of a century; some of the very first CDs I bought in the late 1980s and early 1990s were of his recordings of Mozart's music with the English Baroque Soloists; I still have them.)

I learned that Gardiner tried to get inside the mind of Bach, through his music as well as texts, exploring the possible contradictions within them, and what that might mean about Bach's inner thoughts and feelings about things. Obviously, this is a somewhat subjective exercise, but definitely an intriguing one. Also, Gardiner examined facts about Bach's actual life, including arguments and disputes with authorities, and his basically crazy busy existence in all his professional and personal roles.

When I saw that interview transcript, I was a little curious, but not enough to rush out and get the book. But then I kept on seeing links to reviews of the book, and most recently, last month, after reading <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/feb/20/why-bach-moves-us/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/feb/20/why-bach-moves-us/">this one</span>, I thought, hmm, maybe sensationalist, but maybe worth checking out: Bach as "reformed teenage thug"?!

I put the book on hold at the Carnegie Library and picked it up today. I haven't started reading it yet, but...

"Bach: A Passionate Life", a BBC documentary (free to watch online)

I started with a "shortcut" to the book: I found a documentary online that Gardiner was involved in. It's still quite long (an hour and a half), but at least you get to see scenery, see musical excerpts being performed, and it's not a 600-page book!

Playing his music

Of course, I had to play some of his music to celebrate also. I pulled out my flute and ran some of his flute sonatas' movements along with keyboard backing tracks.

A favorite musical selection to end the day: Chaconne from partita for violin no. 2

Maybe one day I'll write more about Bach's Chaconne, but for today all I will say is, this is my favorite music of all time of any kind, and what I would hope to leave this world with.

And here is my favorite performance, by the wonderful violinist Gidon Kremer. It's way intense:

Conclusion

I'm generally more interested in the artistic output of people rather than their life stories, but thanks to the positive and somewhat sensationalist coverage of Gardiner's new book, I took the bait!

Life: cooking, eating with friends, music jamming, dancing

Sun, 30 Mar 2014 03:38:31 GMT

Abby and I went to a French potluck dance party at Lisa's, the first one we've attended together in ten months (although I went to one without Abby half a year ago when she was out of town).

It was a wonderful experience, one that we've missed for two months, since we have not gone out to a party with friends since Abby got a new job and we've had to adapt to that big change in our lives.

Although we still had to leave early, I was reminded of what I really enjoy in life, deep down: nothing fancy, just getting together and having fun and being creative.

Music jamming

I hadn't done French music jamming in months, so when Abby and I arrived, and dinner was still being prepared, and John said "hey, let's play", I pulled out my flutes (both my standard Boehm flute and my wooden Irish flute) and went at it with him on melodeon. We hadn't played together in half a year! Susan joined in at some point, also on melodeon.

We played mazurka and Schottische and other music for about half an hour, from John's memory, as I tried to follow along by ear. I realized how much I miss French music jamming. Lisa's been hosting it again recently, but there have been schedule conflicts for me, but it looks like we'll be getting on a schedule that works for me. I'm coming back!

While I was taking a break, John played a multi-section hanter dro that Fabien and Lisa started dancing to, and I joined them in their line and picked it up. Again, something I hadn't done in a while, and almost forgotten the unique pleasure of!

Potluck

This seemed to me the biggest French potluck party yet, with almost twenty people present, I believe. We met some new people as well as old friends.

I baked a butternut squash to bring. I only very, very lightly seasoned it, to not detract from the natural flavor of the squash:

butternut squash, sliced in half, placed in roasting pan
salt
pepper
cayenne pepper
butter
extra virgin olive oil
brown sugar

Abby made a kale and mushroom dish:

The other guests all brought a lot of great homemade food, and Lisa and Alex provided tasty and filling entrees and desserts. A fantastic meal!

Yes, there were Brussels sprouts, and I enjoyed them!

Cookies (and other desserts)

In accordance with my rule:

Music-themed cookies homemade from molds:

I ate one, of a dancing couple:

A slice of yummy chocolatey thing:

A slice of chocolate cake:

(Unfortunately, I think I should have cut myself a smaller slice, instead of accepting a precut slice.)

A tiny piece of a very rich, buttery thing:

A non-homemade cookie from a box (I didn't need to eat this):

Dancing

After dinner, Lisa and Fabien started off the dancing portion of the evening, by re-teaching the "Congo de Captieux" set dance that Lisa and Lynn had taught ten months ago. It had been so long that Abby and I barely remembered it and were practically learning it from scratch again.

All of eventually got through it! I got sweaty again.

After that, there was a break, and since it was already "late" (for Abby and me on our current schedule), we had to say goodbye, just as the "regular" French dance portion of the evening was about to begin (bourrées, waltzes, mazurkas, hanter dro, more music jamming, etc.)

Some photos of dancing that I took before we left early:

Conclusion

It was a beautiful evening that filled my belly and soul. It's been such a blessing to have been brought into this world of French traditional dance and music through the enthusiasm and generosity of Lisa two years ago and many others. I feel like my life has been immeasurably enriched.

If you're in the Pittsburgh area and want to join in, we always welcome more dancers and musicians. (Or even if you're not in the Pittsburgh area, as we've had visitors from further away.)

The Chess Improver: Back to basics: mere development

Thu, 27 Mar 2014 11:25:52 GMT

I wrote "Back to basics: mere development" for The Chess Improver blog.

Unfortunately, the original article at https://chessimprover.com/back-to-basics-mere-development/ could not be recovered from the Wayback Machine or any other archive. We apologize that this content has been lost.

"Time to Taste the World": thoughts on expanding my food tastes as an adult

Sat, 22 Mar 2014 01:37:07 GMT

This evening, right after work, I attended an event called "Time to Taste the World", organized by Carnegie Mellon University's Modern Languages Student Advisory Council for the Department of Modern Languages. It was an informal event featuring some food selections followed by a German film that I opted not to watch, since I needed to go home.

There were three tables of food, one for "Asian", another for "Mediterranean", and another for "European". Obviously, only a very tiny fraction of the world was actually represented in this event, and the selections were mostly not very exciting, but it was interesting and even jarring going from one table to another.

Note that standard CMU catering cookies were also provided.

I did try a bit of everything, including stuff I less frequently encounter. Unexpectedly, the experience of hopping from one table to another, and sampling every single item, led me to reflect on how unfamiliar some of these items were to me until later in life, and how my taste in food has expanded considerably in my 30s and 40s.

Linking my history of eating to "Time to Taste the World"

Most of what I like to eat now is what I never ate or knew existed before I was 30 years old.

This probably goes against most people's eating histories, but heck, I'm a late bloomer, because for various reasons, I had very limited life experiences until my 30s and even more so, my 40s.

For fun, I decided to think back about when it was that I first ate or even encountered, each of the items I sampled in "Time to Taste the World".

Mediterranean table

Pita bread: OK, I suppose I probably encountered this first in college, when the dorm cafeteria provided it and I used it to eat with tuna fish.

Grape leaves stuffed with rice: first time encountered and eaten was as a grad student at CMU in 1997, age 27, from Sree's food truck, actually.

Hummus: also discovered in Pittsburgh upon arrival in 1997.

Baba ghanoush: also discovered in Pittsburgh upon arrival in 1997.

Today, I still love grape leaves and hummus. Baba ghanoush I still find a bit harsh and biting, but happily eat it in small quantities at a time. By the way, I should note that I discovered olive oil in 1997 also. At first its strong taste and appearance were confusing to me, but I got used to them, and have been using olive oil since as part of my everyday cooking, in fact.

Asian table

OK, my parents were immigrants from Taiwan, so these foods have never been unfamiliar to me!

Spring rolls: my mother makes them sometimes, and of course much better than the commercial frozen ones.

Chicken wings: some of my favorite childhood food memories involve my mother's chicken wings with soy sauce and ginger. Still my favorite flavor of wings!

Noodle dishes: again, my mother makes this stuff.

Note that our initial food tastes are actually formed in the womb.

European table

OK, this is the stuff that I'm least familiar with, find overall least appealing, and still encounter surprises.

There was some gorgonzola cheese appetizer thing that I've had before, and I had some here, but it's not really my thing. I don't think I ever ate something like this until my 30s. The taste and texture is interesting. Not my favorite thing to eat, but I could have a little bit now and then.

There was also prosciutto wrapped around some cheesy stuff, something I think I never tried until my 40s. Again, it still tastes weird to me, but I can eat it if I have to. It's not revolting.

The main thing is that I have historically fundamentally disliked all dairy. I emerged into the world seemingly hating milk: I don't like the taste, I don't like the smell. I was forced to drink milk as a toddler and basically accepted that I was supposed to drink it, and that it was the only thing to go with cereal, so I tolerated it all the way till I went to college. Then in freshman year in college, I came down with severe puzzling health problems, and finally found out by accident (upon missing breakfast for a couple of days) that cutting out my usual breakfast cereal with milk completely solved my problems: I was simply lactose intolerant. I cut down significantly on dairy consumption (which for me was only milk for cereal, and cheese on pizza).

At some point in my late 30s, I found that my lactose intolerance had let up, and with care I could eat some forms of dairy without having problems. Cheese on pizza is OK, if it's not "extra thick". Cheese in a serving of lasagna is typically not OK, in the quantities provided. Also, in my late 30s I began developing a taste for hard cheeses, which smell less bad to me, and happen to also have far less lactose, and so I do enjoy eating some hard cheeses occasionally: my favorite is Gruyère.

There is some food awkwardness at home, because I'm married to Abby, who comes from the dairy-loving peoples. I'm perpetually having to tolerate the odor of dairy of all kinds at home. This is quite difficult for me, but such is life.

Notes on more recent food adventures

I explored a tremendous amount of new food when I went vegetarian (for several months) at age 29, and got serious for the first time in my life, about cooking for myself. All kinds of bean, lentils, unfamiliar nuts, spices, herbs, vegetables such as kale, etc. Although I didn't stay vegetarian long, that phase of my life resulted in the biggest explosion in my food taste diversity ever.

However, I didn't even touch beets until my mid-30s, when I was "forced" to because they came in my farm subscription box. A whole bunch of other unfamiliar vegetables have come my way through my annual subscription since I began it. The latest was celeriac, which I had never even heard of until it started showing up in our farm box last year. I figured out stuff to do with it, and I like it! It's fantastic continuing to discover new stuff to cook and eat. Life is not boring.

I'm even learning to eat Brussels sprouts. My initial experiences in my 30s made me want to vomit, but there are ways to cook these to make them much more palatable, and in the past couple of years, I have enough tolerable experiences that I can see myself trying them more.

Cookies

I did eat some cookies at the event, but only three, in accordance with my recent findings about how many I should eat at a time.

Conclusion

It's never too late to try new foods. You might be surprised and enjoy something new. And if you don't like it, you don't have to keep eating it.

I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to try new foods now and then, and add to my enjoyment of life.

Many thanks to the Modern Languages Department at CMU for sponsoring this little event! I hope many of the students attending it got some exposure to new foods that they will remember for the rest of their lives.

The Chess Improver: A scrappy example of psychology and luck in an ending

Thu, 20 Mar 2014 11:05:28 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""A scrappy example of psychology and luck in an ending"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

In the sixth (and final) round of the Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship, I played one of those unfortunately scrappy games I have been playing recently. From an easily winning position, I carelessly threw away the win to reach an ending that (to me) was obviously a draw. However, I kept playing for a win, hoping for a swindle, aided by the fact that my opponent had very little time on the clock and appeared to have spent a lot of energy earlier, and now appeared to be still nervous (indicating that he was not certain, unlike me, that the ending was a dead draw). Our subsequent play was sloppy, to say the least, but I got the win (aided by my incessant blitzing that left him in fact losing on time in the final position), and ended up just catching the leader to tie for first place in the tournament, to become one of two 2014 Pittsburgh Chess Club co-champions. I am happy that I achieved this, but know full well that I got there with a lot of luck in all the rounds that I aim to replace in the future with new skill (for example, every ending that I didn't do right, I have studied after the fact).

Flaws aside, I think it's useful to see how, amidst imperfect play, having a possible swindling winning idea is useful, because with luck it might actually work out. We are human beings, not computers, so there will always be some luck involved in human chess. I'd like to think there is a little bit of skill in pursuing a swindling idea, latching onto interesting aspects of a position and trying to make use of them.

In the sport of chess you have to do what you can even after misplaying an earlier part of the game. The swindle involved making moves that were risky or had obvious (to me) defenses, but part of the art of swindling involves trying to guess that your opponent might not see what you see and setting possible traps.

The ending

We reached a position with equal material: Two Rooks and one Bishop and four Pawns on each side. As White, I had a single b-Pawn and three King side Pawns. Black had an a-Pawn and b-Pawn but a fragmented King side with an f-Pawn and h-Pawn. So I concentrated on hoping to make something of Black's weak King side before Black's Queen side majority became a factor.

So one observation I immediately made was that perhaps I could make progress by getting my f-Pawn to f6 to make Black's King inactive, and also to semi-trap it and bring my Rooks over to the half-open g-file, or even to try to win the h6 Pawn. Or try to round up the f7 Pawn. Meanwhile, having the move, I had an opportunity to block Black's a-Pawn on a7 and artificially isolate the b5 Pawn. So I played Ra6, an active-looking move attacking Black's h6 Pawn. I did this even though I knew Black could play the simple and effective …Bb6, because I had to try something. I gambled that my opponent would not want to move the centralized Bishop on d4 "backwards" as defense, but would want to keep it there to attack my undefended b2 Pawn. Yes, psychology at work.

I gambled further by not taking the offered h6 Pawn in return for my b2 Pawn, because simplification, even though objectively this was clearly the "best" move, because the "best" move doesn't mean much if it only reduces swindling opportunities in a dead draw, and again because of psychology: my opponent had not played …Bb6 in the previous move, and probably would not play it again, and therefore would be playing the passive …Kg7 instead. And that happened. And I continued with advancing my f-Pawn to f5.

There was some risk in playing these suboptimal moves: a good defense would have left me fighting on the worse end of a draw. But I needed to win this game, and had plenty of time on the clock, so I was willing to fall back on defending a draw if anything did not work out.

Then I offered to trade our opposite-colored Bishops, by unprotecting my Bishop while moving my Rook up to "threaten" to come to the g-file. There was no real threat, but as I hoped, my opponent eagerly swapped Bishops, thinking (correctly) that this would neutralize the "attack". However, objectively, the trade only benefited me. I got rid of a strong Bishop and lost my weak one.

A couple more gambles, and I made progress, losing my b-Pawn in return for his a-Pawn but now having one Rook on the g-file and one Rook on the 7th rank. Optically it looks a little scary, but that's an illusion. Nevertheless, when an opponent is short on time, creating illusions can be useful.

After more passive moves by Black, I achieved my final dream position: Pawn on f6, Rook on a7, Rook on g7, about to win the f7 Pawn. It's amazing how this fantasy position I had imagined early on actually came about. Still a draw, of course. But Black remained passive, and after a trade of Rooks, we actually ended in a Rook and Pawn ending that was winning for me. Unfortunately, at move 42, with the win in sight, I hastily made a passive move myself (Rg4) that threw away my win. I realized a few move later that the game was a truly dead draw. But I kept playing. A few seconds before his flag fell, my opponent made the only losing move, trading Rooks into a lost King and Pawn ending (two Pawns to one). Tragic, but in this tournament, where none of us were Masters, and endgame knowledge is weak, this stuff happens.

The moral of the story:

Endgame knowledge is very important. I'm not going to lie: I'm currently remedying my defects in the endgame (better late than never). I'm tired of displaying my games in which my weakness is obvious. Even if you know an ending should be a draw, press on because you might get lucky.

The annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "2014 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship"] [Site "Pittsburgh"] [Date "2014.02.25"] [Round "6"] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black "Robert Atwell"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "2008"] [ECO "D31"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "2161"]

d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7 4. cxd5 exd5 5. Bf4 Nf6 6. e3 Bd6 $2 { Wastes time.} 7. Bg5 $5 { I decided to avoid exchanges for now.} ( 7. Bxd6 { Exchanging was fine.} 7… Qxd6 ) 7… c6 8. Bd3 h6 9. Bh4 Qe7 $2 { The Queen will just remain in a pin here.} 10. Qc2 $5 Na6 $2 11. a3 $6 { I decided not to go for the Pawn-structure wrecking complications that I later did go into.} ( 11. Bxa6 bxa6 12. Bxf6 gxf6 13. Rc1 { Keeps an advantage even though White has two Knights against two Bishops, because of Black's wrecked Pawns.} ( 13. Nxd5 $2 cxd5 14. Qc6+ Qd7 15. Qxa8 Qb5 { White's Queen is mysteriously trapped!} ) ) 11… Nc7 { Now Black's Knight is very good at c7.} 12. Nge2 $6 { I should have reverted to a classical setup with Nf3.} 12… b5 $4 { A terrible weakening move.} 13. Bxf6 $5 { Not best.} ( 13. e4 { Strongest.} 13… g5 14. Bg3 Bxg3 15. Nxg3 dxe4 16. Ncxe4 Bd7 ) 13… gxf6 $4 ( 13… Qxf6 { Best even though it loses a Pawn.} 14. e4 { Both my opponent and I had assumed this was terrible for Black, but it turns out that Black could do worse.} 14… Qd8 15. exd5 cxd5 16. Nxd5 O-O { White has won a Pawn but at the expense of the Bishop pair.} ) 14. O-O $6 { I decided to castle before proceeding further, but I could have been more direct.} ( 14. e4 { Super strong.} ) ( 14. Ng3 { Most clear and strongest. Black is positionally lost.} ) 14… Be6 $2 15. e4 ( 15. Na2 { I considered this way of hitting at the c Pawn.} ) ( 15. Ng3 { I also considered this powerful move.} ) ( 15. Nf4 { I also considered this.} ) ( 15. Rfc1 { This was another obvious option. There were too many good choices, and my mind started to wander as a result of the paradox of choice.} ) 15… Qd7 16. f4 dxe4 17. Nxe4 Be7 { At this point, I knew I had a won position, but my mind totally wandered.} 18. a4 $6 { Still winning, but starting to get sloppy.} ( 18. Rac1 Bd5 19. N4c3 { Black is totally lost here.} ) 18… Nd5 19. Nc5 { Good enough to win.} ( 19. axb5 { I did look at the exchange sacrifice, but thought I didn't need to play it.} 19… Ne3 20. Qxc6 Qxc6 21. bxc6 Nxf1 22. Kxf1 { White is winning easily.} ) ( 19. f5 { I was originally going to play this tactic, but somehow mixed up my move order in my thinking and suddenly thought it didn't work!!} 19… Bxf5 20. Nxf6+ ( 20. Rxf5 $4 Ne3 ) 20… Nxf6 21. Bxf5 { Black is as good as dead.} ) 19… Ne3 20. Nxd7 $6 { Still winning, but not necessary.} ( 20. Qc1 Bxc5 21. Qxe3 Be7 22. axb5 cxb5 23. Ra5 { Black is dead.} ) 20… Nxc2 21. Nxf6+ $4 { Throwing away the win without thought.} ( 21. Bxc2 Bxd7 22. axb5 cxb5 23. Be4 Rd8 24. Rxa7 { Black is dead, not only one Pawn down but with weaknesses everywhere.} ) 21… Bxf6 22. Bxc2 O-O 23. axb5 Bc4 24. Rfe1 Bxe2 25. Rxe2 Bxd4+ 26. Kf1 cxb5 { Objectively this is obviously a drawn position, but here I started looking for swindling ideas against Black's partially exposed King.} 27. Ra6 $5 { Aggressive-looking but harmless.} 27… Rac8 $6 ( 27… Bb6 { This stops White, but I gambled that my opponent would not play this "retreating" move but try to keep the Bishop attacking my b Pawn instead.} ) 28. b3 $5 { Another gamble.} 28… Kg7 $6 { The position is still equal, but there was no need to help White.} ( 28… Bb6 ) 29. f5 $5 { The big swindling idea.} 29… Rc7 $6 ( 29… Bb6 ) 30. Re4 $5 Rxc2 $2 ( 30… Bb6 { White is the one in trouble if Black just defends properly.} ) 31. Rxd4 $5 ( 31. Rg4+ { Objectively better, but I didn't want to give away my swindling idea.} ) 31… Rb2 $2 { Falling for the swindle.} ( 31… Rfc8 ) ( 31… h5 ) 32. Rg4+ Kh7 33. Rxa7 $6 { Gambling that Black would be passive and fear losing the f Pawn.} ( 33. Rh4 { Actually strongest, collecting the h6 Pawn.} 33… Rb1+ 34. Ke2 ) 33… Rxb3 34. h4 $5 { Still gambling. Making an escape square for the King on h2.} 34… Kh8 $2 ( 34… Rc3 { Black could just come around to defend with the Rook for the draw.} ) 35. f6 $5 Rb2 $2 ( 35… Rb1+ 36. Kf2 Rg8 { White is completely stopped.} ) 36. Rg7 Rc8 $2 ( 36… b4 { Black could just get rolling with the passed b Pawn.} ) 37. Kg1 Rf8 38. Raxf7 { White has no choice now but to go into the Rook and Pawn ending.} 38… Rxf7 39. Rxf7 Rb4 $2 ( 39… Rc2 { Black should activate the Rook.} ) 40. g3 $2 ( 40. Rf8+ { Better move order.} 40… Kh7 41. g3 ) 40… Rb2 $4 { A losing move.} ( 40… Rg4 { This should be an easy draw.} ) 41. Rg7 { Locking up Black's King.} 41… Rc2 42. Rg4 $4 { Throwing away the win.} ( 42. g4 b4 43. g5 hxg5 44. hxg5 Rc6 45. Kh2 b3 46. Rb7 { Game over. Rook and two connected passed Pawns wins.} ) 42… Rc7 43. Rf4 Rf7 44. g4 Kh7 45. h5 $5 { Since the game is a draw anyway.} ( 45. g5 $4 hxg5 46. hxg5 Kg6 { Instant draw.} ) 45… b4 $2 ( 45… Kg8 ) 46. Rxb4 Rxf6 47. Rb7+ Kg8 48. Kg2 Ra6 49. Kg3 Kh8 50. Re7 Kg8 51. Kf4 Ra4+ 52. Kf5 Ra5+ 53. Re5 Rxe5+ $4 { Somehow forgetting a basic fact about King and Pawn endgames. This is a book win for White, who can win the h6 Pawn at will.} ( 53… Ra4 { Almost any move keeps the draw.} ) 54. Kxe5 Kg7 55. Ke6 { And Black's flag fell.} 1-0`} />

Steel City Ukuleles: navigating a challenging playlist

Thu, 20 Mar 2014 01:32:31 GMT

Two weeks ago, I returned to attending Steel City Ukuleles meetings after almost two months off, and I attended again tonight; my habit since starting out last summer has been to attend the regular first and third Wednesday meetings in Regent Square. Although I have been thinking of cutting back to attending once a month instead of twice a month, I was intrigued by the rather ambitious playlist Adam created for this week, so I couldn't resist going, even though it meant conflicting with a newly revived regular French dance music jam that I haven't attended in half a year.

Adam started off with some easy blues, but soon we were launching into songs with pauses or other "irregularities"; these are always tricky because many of us don't necessarily actually know the songs before we try to play and sing them and cannot guess right off the bat where they might be or follow along at the first attempt through. Also, there were songs that simply were very fast (meaning fast chord changes) or had complex chords and progressions. Very challenging, but I enjoy that.

How to handle sight reading and singing harder music

After the past half year since beginning on ukulele, I've figured out how to tackle hard music in Steel City Ukuleles readings. The thing to remember is that we always repeat a song at least once, and often more than once, and that within a song, there is usually a good deal of repetition as well.

The trick is to never get held up on anything that you can't do. Never pause. Always keep going, even if means just keeping track of where everyone is (or getting back on track) while not playing or singing for a while. Strum the easy, important chords. Also, given that many songs I simply have not heard before, I usually don't start singing until I've heard someone else do a section. And since I can never fully remember the exact pitches of a melody on first listening, I like to just go with the chords and make up a new inner (or lower, since there tend to be more women than men at meetings!) voice harmonically. That's especially fun when the chords are more complex; I've decided that singing in harmony is now actually my favorite thing to do as part of the group. This goes along with my recent focus on playing tenor and bass recorders with the Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Recorder group (rather than soprano and alto, which were my main focus during my first two years on recorder).

That said, there's a benefit to going back home to really "master" a song. I don't like operating in perpetual "sight reading" mode. That's part of why I like to sign up for performances sometimes, to really work on getting something down better. But I don't think I'll have time to perform again for a couple more months.

Nostalgia

Some of the songs triggered deep nostalgia in me. We did two songs by the great Stevie Wonder, "Isn't She Lovely?" and "For Once in My Life". I totally love these classic songs: great melodies, rhythmic clarity, harmonic movement. It's always a joy to revisit these songs. We also did "America" by Simon and Garfunkel: a much sadder, wistful song that has a special meaning to me because I listened to it in my childhood, without necessarily grasping the words and the narrative, but absorbing the story just from the harmonic changes and the tone of voice in the singing.

As we were all packing up to leave, Jack said we needed a group photo because it had been a while, so he got two in. Actually, I was sort of a de facto photographer for us since I joined last year, but I had disappeared for two months this year. (I did take photos two weeks ago when I returned, but Jack didn't make it to that meeting.) I'll continue taking photos as I attend Steel City Ukuleles events. I think it does encourage people to join when they see what a good time we're having!

After I got home, I realized my left fingertips were so sore that I could barely type at the computer. I was OK, but that was a really intense two-hour meetup! I'm still getting all my callouses back.

Pittsburgh Recorder Society: Something new recently: recording our practice sessions

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 22:39:46 GMT

I forgot to mention in my post about last month's Pittsburgh Recorder Society's meeting that Fred has started recording our sessions; he's set up a tripod and an audio recorder. I kind of didn't pay attention because it was not emphasized and nobody talked much about it.

Today was a different story.

Recording

There was more mention of recording than in the past, and Fred made jokes about checking out what we did and how it would be useful for us to listen and see how we progress. Interestingly, this seemed to have quite an effect on what we did. I definitely felt a lot more serious and alert. Although I already always do take our meetings seriously, I will confess right now that whenever Fred said, "OK, now let's do this again, and with recording", I really perked up and gave it my all, trying to play as musically as possible, paying attention to intonation, articulation, ensemble balance, and even that terrible habit many of us have of sucking our recorders after the end of a piece.

Fred is right: it doesn't really make sense, logically, to goof off during rehearsal and then expect to play well in actual performance. In practice, we should do the reverse: play it as well as we can in rehearsal, so that when we perform, which is usually in less than ideal circumstances (anxiety, unusual location or acoustics, or being hectic in getting somewhere, or any number of other unexpected glitches), our performance might be worse than what we did, but it will still be good. On the other hand, if we don't give it our all in practice, then what miracle can get us even better in performance?

In any case, the recording of our work was not at all some kind of grim task. I enjoyed the additional seriousness and care, and I think we're sounding better and better every month. Amusingly, the most noticeable thing is that when we know we are being recorded, we end pieces much better, and then dead silence. No rustling, no recorder sucking. Wow. I really enjoy that unity.

Tenor and bass

This is the first recorder meeting in my three years in which I did not play soprano or alto recorder once! I have been much preferring to play tenor and bass, to provide inner or bottom voices, and letting the newer members of the group play the soprano and alto voices.

Snacks

People brought in snacks to share, as usual, for the mid-meeting break.

And of course, this being St. Patrick's Day weekend, Helen had to bring special Irish-themed snacks to share. In addition to Irish cheese, she also brought homemade brownies that she said were from an actual Irish recipe! These were fantastic brownies: chocolate, cocoa, good stuff. I had to eat them, again and again.

In accordance with my promise about "cookies", here is a photo of each individual one I ate.

Someone brought in a box of castle cookies. I ate one:

While I was packing up to leave, I couldn't resist temptation and ate my third Helen brownie:

In retrospect, this was a big mistake. After getting home, I felt burdened by this third brownie. I would have been fine just eating the first two and the one cookie (along with some cheese and nuts that I also had).

I've noticed that I have a problem when I eat a "one more for the road" cookie at events. I've decided to consciously watch out and not do that in the future. I should only eat as much as I can handle, and leave it at that.

(Update of 2014-04-27)

The Chess Improver: Two positional Pawn sacrifices: one accidental

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 11:29:55 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Two positional Pawn sacrifices: one accidental"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

In the fifth (of six) round of the Pittsburgh Chess Championship, I had an interesting game as White in which there were bouts of material inequality.

The accidental sacrifice

Out of the opening, my opponent lost a Pawn that I went hunting for.

In retrospect, I should have chosen not to go hunting for that Pawn in the first place: it was a doubled c-Pawn on c5 that was not worth the trouble of going into contortions to win. It turns out that winning the Pawn did leave me with a large advantage, but one that required alert play to maintain.

What happened was that my opponent tried to get long-term defensive chances by forcing a trade of his Bishop for my Knight on c3 resulting in my having an isolated a-Pawn as well as isolated, doubled c-Pawns on c2 and c3, so that basically, I won a doubled c-Pawn at the cost of having my own doubled c-Pawn.

Objectively, I had a large advantage and there were many ways for me to proceed, but I faltered, became passive, and Black ended up getting huge compensation, pressuring both my a-Pawn as well as my terrible c-Pawn on c3, that made the initial Pawn loss almost feel like an accidental positional sacrifice! In fact, Black could have regained the Pawn with a great game, but also faltered, resulting in a time-scramble of a scrappy ending that led to my swindling a winning ending but then not having enough mental reserves left to finish the job (that ending may be the subject of a separate post).

The unplayed sacrifice

The interesting thing is that after the game, we both agreed that I missed a great chance to immediately sacrifice a Pawn back for a huge advantage. I had definitely considered it during the game, but in a turn of mental passivity I had thought that I might as well play more quietly (which could have sufficed, but I made further errors). It was a psychological as well as technical error.

The sacrifice c4 would have been very strong. Here's why, in terms of general principles as well as the concrete situation on the board:

Whether Black takes the Pawn with the Queen or the b5 Pawn, the result (after a Queen trade if appropriate) is that Black's retaking Pawn on b5 would have been diverted into a weak doubled c-Pawn on c4, and also give White a very strong outside passed a-Pawn. Giving up the useless c-Pawn on c3 would have opened up lines for White's dark-squared Bishop, especially important since Black no longer had any Bishops. Opening up the b-file would also have been advantageous to White, who was well ahead in development and ready to swing the King Rook over to the Queen side if appropriate. If Black did not take with the Queen, the situation is even worse for Black, because with the Queens still on the board, Black's Queen becomes tied to defending the regained c-Pawn while the Black King remains in danger, uncastled and unable to castle. Since it's just giving a Pawn back, it's not even "really" a sacrifice anyway. It's almost certain that White will regain this weak Pawn on c4 anyway that is either unprotected (in the case of a Queen trade) or barely protected (by just the Queen).

There was only up side, no down side, to this sacrifice.

It is unfortunate to report that despite knowing all this, I did not play this positional Pawn sacrifice that was crying out to be played, but chess life goes on. I hope that if you encounter a position like this in one of your own games, and consider the points made above, you will not think twice before happily giving up a terrible Pawn for a great position!

The annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "2014 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship"] [Site "Pittsburgh"] [Date "2014.02.18"] [Round "5"] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black "Edward Dean"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [BlackElo "2125"] [ECO "B31"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "2161"]

e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 g6 4. O-O Bg7 5. Re1 a6 $6 { Just forcing White to do what he wanted.} 6. Bxc6 dxc6 7. d3 Be6 $6 { Trying to get c4 in to dissolve the doubled Pawns, but this plan is faulty.} 8. Ng5 $5 { Not really necessary at this point.} ( 8. Nc3 { Ordinary development was fine.} 8… c4 $2 9. Ng5 ) 8… Qd7 $6 { Consistent with the plan, but retreating was best.} 9. Nc3 { Black's Queen side dark squares look weak: c5 Pawn and b6 square.} ( 9. Nd2 { Preventing c4 was also good.} ) 9… Bg4 $5 ( 9… c4 10. Na4 ) 10. f3 Bd4+ 11. Kh1 Be6 $2 ( 11… f6 { Best, losing a different Pawn, but with compensation.} 12. fxg4 fxg5 13. Bxg5 ) 12. Na4 $5 { In retrospect, I made a mistake by being impatient to carry out the Na4 idea.} ( 12. Ne2 { Very simple way to keep an advantage. Both of Black's Bishops are doing nothing useful and will be taken or pushed back.} ) ( 12. Qd2 { This was a good way to prepare Na4.} ) ( 12. Qe2 { Also possible and good.} ) 12… c4 13. dxc4 $6 { Wrong move order.} ( 13. Nxe6 { The correct move order.} 13… Qxe6 14. dxc4 Rd8 15. Qe2 { Transposes to the actual game.} ) 13… Rd8 $4 ( 13… Bxc4 { Black can actually survive in this move order.} 14. c3 Ba7 15. Qxd7+ Kxd7 16. b3 h6 ) 14. Qe2 $5 ( 14. Re2 { Threatening Rd2 was quite strong and probably winning.} 14… Bf6 15. Rd2 Qxd2 16. Bxd2 Bxg5 17. Bxg5 Rxd1+ 18. Rxd1 Nf6 19. Nc5 Bc8 20. Bxf6 exf6 21. a4 { White has a probably technically won game, being a Pawn up and with a good Knight versus a bad Bishop.} ) 14… b5 15. Nxe6 Qxe6 16. cxb5 axb5 17. Nc3 Bxc3 $5 { A good practical try, destroying White's Pawn structure. It worked in this game.} 18. bxc3 Ra8 19. a3 $2 { Too passive.} ( 19. c4 $1 { I missed a great chance. I did consider giving the Pawn back as a positional sacrifice, and my opponent after the game said he was afraid of this move.} 19… bxc4 $2 ( 19… Qxc4 { Black has to trade Queens.} 20. Qxc4 bxc4 21. a4 Kd7 ( 21… Nf6 22. Rd1 ) 22. a5 Nf6 23. Be3 { Black's defense looks very difficult. White will likely win the c4 Pawn to remain one Pawn up.} ) 20. a4 { Now White has an outside passed Pawn, and Black is still behind in development, with the King Rook out of play.} 20… Nf6 21. Bh6 Nd7 22. a5 f6 23. f4 { Similar to the actual game, but White at the cost of a Pawn has a won game. Note that the c4 Pawn is now a target for White.} 23… c5 24. Qf1 { Threatening f5.} 24… Kf7 { Threatening f5.} 25. a6 $1 { Now threatening f5 to win the c4 Pawn.} 25… Rxa6 $4 26. f5 { Game over.} ) 19… Nf6 20. Bh6 { Trying to prevent Black's King Rook from entering play.} 20… Nd7 21. Qe3 $6 { The point was to discourage …Ne5, but this is a defensive mind set.} ( 21. f4 { I could have immediately begun my f Pawn plan that I was late to implement in the actual game.} ) ( 21. e5 { Another option was to advance the e Pawn to cramp Black.} ) 21… f6 ( 21… Rg8 ) 22. Qd4 $4 { A nonsensical move throwing away all advantage. I just totally missed …Ra4. I had wanted to get to b4.} ( 22. f4 { This was my original intention and is good.} ) 22… Ra4 { At this point, I realized I might have to fight for the draw, because Black will almost certainly win the a3 Pawn.} 23. Qf2 Kf7 ( 23… g5 { May be best, but is risky.} 24. f4 ) 24. Be3 Rha8 { It is clear that White has to lose a Pawn back.} 25. Bd4 $6 { A feint to confuse Black, as we were both playing very quickly now on the clock.} 25… Rc4 $5 { Trying to maintain tension, a good practical decision given the time situation.} ( 25… Rxa3 { Was fine.} 26. Rxa3 Rxa3 27. f4 Kg8 { Black is fine and has a slight advantage.} ) 26. f4 $5 { I have to create complications to gain some time on the clock.} 26… Kg8 $6 { Playing safe.} ( 26… c5 { Best but results in complications.} 27. f5 Qc6 28. e5 cxd4 29. e6+ Kf8 30. exd7 Qxd7 31. fxg6 hxg6 32. Qd2 { Black is better, but the position has opened up.} ) 27. f5 Qf7 28. Qg3 $6 ( 28. Qf3 { Better, protecting the e4 Pawn.} ) 28… c5 ( 28… e5 ) 29. Bf2 ( 29. e5 { My original plan, but I chickened out and decided to play safe. Black can hold anyway.} 29… cxd4 30. e6 Qe8 31. exd7 Qxd7 32. cxd4 Qxf5 33. Rxe7 Rxd4 ) ( 29. Bg1 { Also possible.} ) 29… Ne5 30. h4 $2 { An active-looking but weakening move.} ( 30. h3 { A much better way of creating space for the King.} ) 30… Qg7 { Safe.} ( 30… Raa4 { Strong.} ) 31. Re3 $6 gxf5 ( 31… Qh6 ) 32. exf5 Qxg3 $6 { I was very happy to see this release of tension. Now I felt I had a chance to draw this game.} ( 32… Qg4 ) 33. Bxg3 Nc6 $2 { Too passive, throwing away winning chances.} ( 33… Nf7 ) 34. Re6 { White is finally getting active.} 34… Rc8 ( 34… Ra6 35. Rb1 ) 35. Re3 { Offering a draw by repetition, of course.} 35… Kf7 36. Rb1 b4 37. cxb4 $6 ( 37. axb4 { There were ways to try to keep the game alive.} 37… cxb4 38. Be1 ) 37… cxb4 38. axb4 Nxb4 39. Rbe1 Nd5 40. Rd3 Rc3 $2 { This was the last move we recorded. Less than 5 minutes left on the clock.} ( 40… R8c5 { And Black will regain the Pawn on c2 with a slightly better position because of the strong Knight and White's loose Pawn structure.} ) 41. Rxd5 Rxg3 42. Rd7 Re8 { Now White is still a Pawn up. The position is nevertheless drawn, because it is not really possible to make progress.} 43. Kh2 Rc3 44. Re2 ( 44. g4 { Trying to make progress on the King side also does not work.} 44… Rxc2+ 45. Kg3 h5 46. g5 Rc4 ) 44… Rc5 ( 44… h5 ) 45. g4 h5 46. gxh5 $6 { Trying to create complications.} 46… Rxf5 47. h6 $6 Rh5 48. Kh3 Rxh6 49. c4 { The whole point of that bizarre giving up of the f5 Pawn was to try to advance the c Pawn.} 49… f5 50. Rc7 $6 ( 50. Rd5 ) 50… Kf6 ( 50… Ra6 ) 51. c5 e5 $5 { It's worth trying to make progress even in a drawn ending.} ( 51… Rg6 ) 52. Rc6+ Re6 53. Rc8 ( 53. Rxe6+ { Obviously a draw.} 53… Kxe6 54. c6 ) 53… e4 { Trying for a win.} 54. c6 Ke5 ( 54… Kf7 { White cannot really Queen the c Pawn.} ) 55. c7 Rc6 $4 { Overlooking the check and Queening!} ( 55… Re7 56. Rc2 Rhh7 57. Rc5+ Kf4 58. Rxf5+ Ke3 59. Rc5 { A draw.} ) 56. Re8+ Rhe6 $4 { Missing the win of White's h Pawn, without which it does not look like White can win.} ( 56… Kf4 57. c8=Q Rxh4+ 58. Kg2 { Black gets rid of White's remaining Pawn.} 58… Rxc8 59. Rxc8 ) 57. c8=Q Rxc8 58. Rxc8 { Magically, White has a winning ending now.} 58… f4 { Time was so short now that I wasn't actually playing for a win any more, but just trying to finish the game with a draw.} 59. Ra8 $2 ( 59. Re1 { White can wait for Black to advance his Pawns and gradually push the h Pawn.} 59… f3 60. Rf8 { Black can make no progress.} 60… Kd5 ( 60… Kd4 $4 61. Rxf3 ) 61. Rf5+ Kd6 62. h5 { It's hopeless. White will Queen the h Pawn, after possibly sacrificing one of the Rooks.} ) 59… f3 60. Rb2 $2 ( 60. Re1 f2 61. Rea1 e3 62. Kg2 { White's King can hold off the pair of Pawns.} ) 60… Kf4 ( 60… e3 61. Kg3 f2 62. Rb5+ Ke4 63. Kg2 ) 61. Ra5 $2 ( 61. Rf8+ Ke3 62. Kg4 Rg6+ 63. Kf5 { White will win the e4 Pawn.} ) 61… Rg6 62. h5 Rg3+ 63. Kh4 $4 ( 63. Kh2 { Stops the checks.} 63… Rg4 64. Rb7 { Black cannot manage to Queen.} 64… Rh4+ 65. Kg1 Rh3 66. Re7 Rg3+ 67. Kh2 Rg2+ 68. Kh1 Rb2 69. h6 f2 70. Rf7+ Ke3 71. Kg2 { It's over: Black cannot hold the Pawns.} ) 63… Rg4+ $4 ( 63… Rg1 { Actually draws.} 64. Kh3 Rh1+ 65. Rh2 Rg1 66. h6 Rg6 ) 64. Kh3 Rg3+ 65. Kh4 Rg4+ 66. Kh3 Rg3+ 67. Kh4 1/2-1/2`} />

Thoughts on attending the Duquesne Young Artist Performance Awards Winners Showcase

Sat, 08 Mar 2014 22:01:35 GMT

It turns out that a ten-year-old boy I currently give private chess lessons to is also passionate about music, and his piano teacher had him submit a recording for the annual <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.cmcpgh.org/competitions/performanceAwards.aspx" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.cmcpgh.org/competitions/performanceAwards.aspx">Duquesne Young Artist Performance Awards</span> competition, and his entry happened to be one of the around thirty chosen, ranging from ages 7-16, so he gave a performance at the Winners Showcase at the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.duq.edu/academics/schools/music/facilities/pnc-recital-hall" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.duq.edu/academics/schools/music/facilities/pnc-recital-hall">PNC Recital Hall</span> of the Mary Papper School of Music of Duquesne University.

I'd seen him perform informally before, but was curious to see him on stage, and also to see other kids and where they were in their musical development and personal style, so I told his parents that I was going to attend to watch.

I'd never been to an event like this before, a gathering of kids who had proven at least some level of ability by winning an award. I'm a latecomer to classical music, not having had much to do with it until I went to college. My younger sister did take up violin in junior high school and I went one or two of her performances with my parents, but to be frank, I was not very interested in or understanding of classical music then, so I remember almost nothing of what happened and must have snored through; all I really remember is "Please let this be over".

The young performers collectively actually played a decent variety of music of different eras and styles. The selections were mostly quite short, as they had to be of course because there were about thirty performers to go through in the space of less than two hours. One came up after another, with no break. It was pretty intense, actually.

I enjoyed getting a taste of what all these different kids had to offer musically, and I hope it was a positive experience for all of them. There was a lot of nervousness on display, but also some really touching resolve and mature calmness as well. I was happy to see my chess student get up there and play that grand piano with flair.

Reception

Afterwards, cookies at a reception. I was hungry. I could not resist.

Happy 300th birthday, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: still underappreciated after all these years!

Sat, 08 Mar 2014 17:00:49 GMT

So, today is the 300th birthday of CPE Bach, one of the sons of the much more famous Johann Sebastian Bach.

Unless you're a Western art music history buff, or are specifically interested in the Baroque and Classical eras, you may not even have heard of CPE Bach, which is somewhat ironic because he was actually more well-known and respected in his day than his father.

Why is this composer so little recognized today? What is fascinating is that he so much influenced other composers who respected him, such as Mozart and Beethoven, but himself has kind of faded in public awareness.

There is such a huge difference between Johann Sebastian Bach's music, which is so well-known now, and that of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel. The son's music was radical at the time, going completely against his father's style. He privileged bizarreness, extremes of emotion, restlessness. You get the feeling that it was experimental, and it still feels that way today. I think that history does not know what to do with someone whose life work was so relentlessly experimental.

Sonata in A minor for solo flute

To celebrate CPE Bach's birthday, I made another attempt at reading through his sonata in A minor for solo flute, the second movement of which I performed almost two years ago at a party. At the time, I was uncomfortable with how to interpret the first, slow movement, not knowing what to do with this very free music, but now, I feel liberated and happy to play this first movement, the way that I feel it in the moment. I'd like to think that CPE Bach would have approved the evolution of my emotional openness.

I also rewatched a fine video performance of the final Allegro movement of this sonata, by Emmanuel Pahud:

I have no clip to share of the first movement because I don't like any of the performances I've been able to find online.

How I originally discovered CPE Bach: Freie Fantasie in F-sharp minor

I have to confess how I originally discovered CPE Bach in the first place. It happened in college, when I would regularly browse the "new recordings" section of one of the campus libraries. One day I spotted on the shelf a CD by Andreas Staier of selected CPE Bach sonatas and fantasies. I didn't know the first thing about CPE Bach at that point, other than that he was a son of Johann Sebastian. But I noticed that the CD advertised that not only a harpsichord, but also a fortepiano was used in the recording. I wanted to hear some fortepiano playing, so I checked out the CD. Up till then, I had only seen and heard the fortepiano once before, played by my <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.workspacestrategies.com/bio.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.workspacestrategies.com/bio.html">music TA</span> during a section meeting of a music appreciation course I took freshman year, "Piano Music of the 19th Century", when she played sections of a Brahms intermezzo on the instrument.

It turned out the fortepiano was used for a particular piece on the album that caught my fancy, the Freie Fantasie (free fantasy) in F-sharp minor, which he himself titled "CPE Bachs Empfindungen", or "CPE Bach's feelings". As you might expect, this is a really personal, expressive piece, and I still remember finding it bewildering and bewitching in its strange harmonic changes and emotional gestures.

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you can actually listen to the exact recording that I first discovered a quarter of century ago by Andreas Staier, right here. I've set it to start playing at the beginning of this piece, since the entire video is actually the whole album (which is quite worth listening to, because of the brilliant harpsichord playing of the other pieces). The piece lasts from 38:35 to 49:15, just over ten minutes.

I have heard other performances of this piece but I still think Staier's is the best, in his really getting into the improvisational and free spirit of the fantasy. By the way, I recommend Staier's recordings of all kinds of keyboard works before and after CPE Bach: I love everything I have heard from him, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Schubert. For example, here he is live, playing Schubert on a fortepiano. Check out the fantastical outburst that is part of this sonata movement (starting around 3:04).

Conclusion

If you haven't explored the music of CPE Bach, please take advantage of the "publicity" of his 300th birthday to check out some of his work. It still sounds daring and bold today.

The Chess Improver: A fantasy game, move by move: White opens with fifteen pawn moves in a row!

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 12:29:14 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""A fantasy game, move by move: White opens with fifteen pawn moves in a row!"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

The 18th century chess pioneer Philidor famously said, "The Pawns are the soul of chess". I love my Pawns and admit to a fondness for pushing them, although the balance between aggression and overextension can be tricky.

Recently, I was daydreaming when an imaginary chess game started forming in my mind, in which White started off by playing six Pawn moves in a row. Intrigued, I came up with the best plausible fantasy game I could invent that featured as many Pawn moves in a row by White as possible that were not complete garbage leading to a terrible position. I made it to fifteen moves. I thought it would be fun to share this fantasy game here. Here is a blow-by-blow summary, with the full annotated game following. I've provided two narratives: one is move by move but the other is Pawn by Pawn, telling the story from each Pawn's perspective.

Reminder: this game fragment is for entertainment purposes. Don't go out and start all your games by playing fifteen Pawn moves in a row!

Move by move

1 d4

A good opening move, gaining space and controlling the central e5 square as well as the c5 square, and enabling developing of the dark Bishop.

2 c4

A logical followup to d4, controlling the central square d5.

3 f3

An aggressive way to prepare to play e4 with a lock on the entire center because of the double control of d5.

4 d5

Invading Black's territory, gaining space.

5 e4

Completing the large center. White has made only Pawn moves but stands better in this Benoni formation.

6 cxd5

The standard aggressive recapture. exd5 was also possible.

7 g4!?

White should have started developing pieces here, to maintain a clear advantage. The threat to push back Black's Knight is not dangerous to Black.

Black's Pawn move …h5 was poor and justified White's play.

8 g5

Attacking the Knight as planned.

9 h4?!

There was no reason for White to enter defensive mode and doubly protect the g5 Pawn, which was not under threat. White should have begun developing pieces.

10 a4

A standard defensive move to prevent Black's …b5 in the Benoni.

11 f4?!

White is out of control, continuing to try to attack, now aiming to go to f5 and f6.

I gave Black a dubious move …a5 in order to illustrate what can happen if Pawn advances are not dealt with.

12 f5!

White continues, planning to push back Black's Bishop with f6.

Black should already start thinking about possibly sacrificing a piece for two Pawns in order to forge further ahead in development as compensation.

13 exf5

Recapture.

I made Black play poorly with …Na6 to give White more Pawn moves. The interesting thing is that even if Black played well at this point, White is not actually lost despite the extravagant play.

14 f6

Attacking Black's Bishop on g7. If the Bishop retreats to f8, White has a totally won game already.

15 gxf6

And after having won a Knight for two Pawns, White has run out of reasonable Pawn moves. The only Pawn that can move is the b Pawn, but it is obviously not going anywhere.

Miraculously, White has a slight advantage after playing nothing but Pawn moves for fifteen moves in a row. This is not typical, but I hope Philidor would have been amused.

The lives of the eight White Pawns

a-Pawn

I advanced to a4 to discourage Black's b-Pawn from advancing to b5.

b-Pawn

I stayed home and did nothing.

c-Pawn

I advanced to c4 to control the d5 center square, and I protected my neighboring d-Pawn who advanced to d5.

d-Pawn

I advanced to d4 to control the e5 center square, and I advanced to d5 to attack more squares in enemy territory (c6 and e6).

e-Pawn

I advanced to e4 to control the d5 center square, and further protect my neighboring d-Pawn when it advanced to d5. I helped my neighboring f-Pawn advance to f5.

f-Pawn

I advanced all the way to f5, then with the help of my neighboring g-Pawn, made it to f6, attacking Black's Bishop on g7 and getting very close to Black's King.

g-Pawn

I advanced all the way to g5 to attack Black's Knight on f6, then helped my neighboring e-Pawn get to f6.

h-Pawn

I provided extra support to my neighboring g-Pawn on g5.

The annotated fantasy game fragment

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Franklin's imagination"] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White "Invented"] [Black "Invented"] [Result "*"] [ECO "E60"]

d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. f3 c5 4. d5 e6 ( 4... d6 ) 5. e4 exd5 ( 5... Nxe4 $2 6. fxe4 Qh4+ 7. Ke2 Qxe4+ 8. Kf2 { White is winning. Black got two Pawns for the Knight but that's not enough here.} ) 6. cxd5 d6 7. g4 $5 ( 7. Ne2 { Could transpose into Anand-Gelfand.} ) 7... h5 $2 ( 7... Bg7 { Normal development is reasonable for Black but allows White a good game.} ) ( 7... Nfd7 $1 { Most disruptive to White, because of the threat of Qh4+.} 8. h4 ( 8. Nh3 Qh4+ 9. Nf2 Bg7 10. Na3 { A totally bizarre position. Both sides have chances.} ) 8... h5 { Tranposes into the actual game.} ) 8. g5 Nfd7 9. h4 $6 { Unnecessary waste of time here.} ( 9. Nc3 { White has a solid advantage, I'd say.} ) 9... a6 ( 9... Bg7 { Black could reserve the a6 square for a Nac6, Nc7 maneuver to truly support b5.} ) 10. a4 Bg7 11. f4 $6 ( 11. Nh3 { White should develop, with a loose but still decent position.} ) 11... a5 $6 { Trying to get the Knight to a6 and then perhaps to b4.} ( 11... O-O { Develop! Natural and good.} ) 12. f5 $1 { Aiming for f6.} ( 12. Nc3 { Develop!} ) 12... gxf5 ( 12... O-O $6 { Black could just develop and sacrifice a piece for two Pawns. Miraculously, it looks like White may be able to hold.} 13. f6 Nxf6 14. gxf6 Bxf6 15. Nf3 Bg4 16. Nbd2 Na6 17. Ra3 ) 13. exf5 { A critical position.} 13... Na6 $2 { Hey, this is a fantasy game, so I made Black play poorly.} ( 13... Qe7+ 14. Qe2 f6 15. Nf3 { White looks very overextended, but miraculously, may be able to hold.} ) 14. f6 Nxf6 { Black has to sacrifice a piece.} ( 14... Bf8 $4 15. Bb5 Qc7 16. Nf3 { Black is completely paralyzed and lost.} 16... Nb4 17. g6 $1 { Cute clearance sacrifice.} 17... fxg6 18. Ng5 { And f7+ and it's all over.} ) 15. gxf6 Bxf6 16. Nf3 { White has no more reasonable Pawn moves and starts developing, but has only a small advantage because Black has compensation for the lost Knight.} *`} />

Thoughts on returning to ukulele after almost two months off: returning to piano was the reason

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 02:32:59 GMT

I finally made it again to the latest Steel City Ukuleles meetup, after an absence of almost two months! What happened?

Part of what happened was that after the last meeting in mid-January, I had some battles with illness and fatigue and also got very busy. For whatever reason, I just plain lost interest in playing ukulele. It was like a switch flipped off. And each time a meetup came, I kind of intended to attend anyway, in hope of rekindling my interest, but it always turned out that something came up that was more important and so I missed two meetings in February that I otherwise did sign up for but canceled at the last minute.

Piano

But on a deeper level, what happened was that in mid-January, right before the last meetup I attended, I learned that a boy I have been giving private chess lessons to was progressing rapidly in piano; his mother had sent me some video clips, and he played various pieces that were dear to me. This really shook my world, because I had "given up" on piano many times in my life, and never studied or practiced it seriously. Over two years ago, I wrote a little about this.

In particular, seeing a kid playing pieces that I never mastered made me feel deep regret that I had not stuck to teaching myself piano or getting professional instruction at some point in my life. So almost immediately upon learning about what he was up to, I decided to give piano a shot again. As a result, I completely dropped ukulele and flute, and focused my limited music time on recorder (in maintenance mode mostly) and piano.

I got from the library not only the Alfred adult piano course again, but also the fantastic <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.carlhumphries.com/piano-books.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.carlhumphries.com/piano-books.html">Carl Humphries "Piano Handbook" as well as "Piano Workbook"</span>. They are really good. I wish this kind of self-teaching material had existed two or three decades ago. I would have snapped it up.

Anyway, I have been making more progress on piano than I ever did twenty years ago when I last really tried. This has been exciting.

Ukulele influence on piano playing

The interesting thing is that even before I started practice, I was already instantly better than ever before. I was initially surprised, but then realized that everything I've done on ukulele has magically helped me at piano even without my touching the instrument. In particular:

left hand strength and coordination came simply from playing ukulele
awareness of harmonic changes and coordination with melody came from the multitasking and partial improvisation of singing and strumming simultaneously

So I've been delighted that once again, improving at one musical instrument is helping me with other instruments as well.

Piano influence on ukulele playing

All through February, I wasn't in the mood to play ukulele at all. But by March, I suddenly felt the itch to pick up the instrument again, and I did, and magically found that I was playing much better than I had ever before. Again, I was initially surprised. But maybe I should not have been:

left hand precision and flexibility was considerably improved, leading to better chord changes (with less sight) as well as much better barring and also finally nailing certain hard chords such as the basic E chord
spatial awareness of moving up the fret board was improved
singing and sight-reading chord changes simultaneously became much easier

Returning to the meetup

I was having so much fun working on some songs for myself on ukulele while singing much better than ever, that I was happy to return to the Steel City Ukuleles meetup to do this with others. (Also, during the winter I confess to feeling somewhat antisocial and not excited about driving through cold, snow, and ice to meetups, frankly.)

I had a great time! I especially enjoyed, in the final minutes of the session, when it was request time, that I requested "My Favorite Things" and we went through it. I love that song (and this was also when I noticed that I could play an E chord without much effort, actually).

Cookies

Someone told me that in February, she had brought in Chinese cookies from Hong Kong that her son had given her, to share with me for Chinese New Year, but I had not showed up. It was touching that I was missed.

Apparently the New Year party featuring wine and snacks was so popular that every meeting since then has involved wine and snacks (including this time a bottle of wine brought by a guy whose father makes wine)!

I was really hungry and ate some cookies, so here are photos according to my rule:

The following turned out not to really be a cookie, but was some kind of bread with cheese or something. It was not my thing, and if I had known, I would not have taken it, but once I bit into it, I had to finish it:

Conclusion

It's still going to hard to juggle practicing all the instruments I have, but it's encouraging that working intensively on one seems to transfer benefits to playing another. So I'm going to keep working on piano while also maintaining ukulele. I have to confess it's hard to do much with recorder or flute at the moment though. They've been put on the back burner.

The Chess Improver: The human problem of not mentally switching gears during a long game

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 12:04:31 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""The human problem of not mentally switching gears during a long game"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

On a dark Tuesday evening, in the fourth round of the ongoing Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship, I played and won a four-hour game that I have to confess to being more embarrassed about than many of my losses.

Unfortunately, sometimes that happens, to all of us. I could write it off fatalistically as "it happens", but this is supposed to be The Chess Improver, and I believe that all of us can in fact continue to improve our play, myself included!

Sometimes we fool ourselves and don't want to take responsibility for our poor play. Yes, there is such a thing as fatigue or a random brain glitch, but what about if we are systematically falling short? I think that as in marathon running, the late stages of a chess game, precisely when we are most tired, our true weaknesses reveal themselves. When we are feeling strong, our weaknesses may be masked. So I am taking a particular interest in correcting problems that occur in a long game.

Outline of the game

The game started out with my playing reasonably well, achieving what seemed to be a slight advantage as Black, defending an attack on my King in an Open Sicilian. At move 18, I had three choices to consider to begin a counterattack. I spent considerable energy looking at the options. One of the real drawbacks of playing the Sicilian as Black, I have found, is that to avoid getting killed you really have to do a lot of calculations, and unfortunately, as in this game, that left me with diminished mental reserves later in the game.

My 18th move was actually fine, but at move 19, I panicked and decided I had enough of defending and wanted to bail out with a Queen trade. To my surprise, my opponent did not enter what would have been a favorable Queen trade for him, but tried to continue the attack! He lashed out with a series of sacrifices that were all unsound and the result was a dead lost position an exchange and Pawn down.

Here's when I started playing really strangely. I was unable to switch gears into "winning mode". At the very moment at which I knew I had a won game, after 29 moves, I let down my guard and somehow stayed in "defensive mode". I started worrying about various things, like defending my unimportant f7 Pawn, and my time starting to run low on the clock. I played totally aimlessly and horribly, and quickly found myself in a lost position after move 33.

Then in a freak stroke of luck, as I kept playing anyway, my opponent walked straight into a position in which I had an obvious perpetual check if I wanted it (and I would have taken it): except he then refused to allow the perpetual check and deviated into a horrific blunder, losing the game instantly. (I should also note that my opponent had really bad luck, as at the moment when he was drifting mentally and seemed to be taking a strange amount of time on his clock, he received a phone call, being the tournament director in charge of the chess club phone, which rang at the critical moment, distracting him for a couple of seconds as he buzzed someone into the entrance of the building!)

The main lesson

Based on my observations, we human beings have a problem with switching gears when the nature of a position changes. These are the moments when we must collect ourselves and deal with the new reality (whether it is knowing that one is now winning, or one is now losing). My belated playing on even when dead lost somehow did pay off, after all. But we must strive for better. I have thought hard about ways to improve my play and will experiment with them and share my progress (or lack of it) here in the future.

Chess engines don't have this problem: give them a won position and they will easily convert. But we humans need special discipline in order to be able to stay focused during a long game.

The annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "2014 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship"] [Site "Pittsburgh"] [Date "2014.02.11"] [Round "4"] [White "Kurt Wallnau"] [Black "Franklin Chen"] [Result "0-1"] [BlackElo "2161"] [ECO "B33"] [EventDate "2014.02.11"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "2076"]

e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Qb6 5. Nb3 Nf6 6. Nc3 e6 7. Bd3 Be7 8. O-O d6 9. Kh1 a6 10. f4 O-O 11. Qe1 Qc7 12. a4 $6 { Weakens the b4 square as well as the Knight on b3. Later in the game we see why this is important.} 12… b6 $5 ( 12… Nb4 { Jumping into b4 immediately is more accurate.} ) 13. Qg3 { With a standard threat of f5 and Bh6.} 13… Kh8 14. Be3 Bb7 15. Rae1 Nd7 { Fighting for the e5 square and preparing Bf6 taking control of the dark diagonal.} 16. Qh3 { Threatening e5, but this can be parried.} 16… Nb4 17. f5 e5 ( 17… Ne5 { I considered giving up the e6 Pawn in return for picking up White's c Pawn. But I saw that it led to massive simplification and allows White to equalize.} 18. fxe6 Nbxd3 19. cxd3 Nxd3 20. Rb1 fxe6 21. Qxe6 Rfe8 ) 18. Rf3 $201 { White has a primitive but very annoying threat of possibly eventually getting the Rook to h3 to threaten mate. This is a critical position where Black has to decide how to press for an advantage.} 18… Nf6 { Aiming for a fully prepared d5 break.} ( 18… d5 { Thematic d5 break, but opens things up too soon to retain an advantage.} 19. Nxd5 Bxd5 20. exd5 Nxd3 21. cxd3 Nf6 { Black has survived the attack so far, and stands well, but there has been a lot of simplification.} ) ( 18… b5 { The other Pawn break was another attempt at advantage.} 19. axb5 $2 ( 19. Rg3 { Trying to continue some kind of King side attack.} 19… Nxd3 ( 19… Nf6 20. Bg5 $1 { Idea as in the actual game: remove the defender of h7.} 20… Nxd3 21. cxd3 Ne8 22. Bxe7 Qxe7 23. Na5 { Black should be able to hold, but the position is a bit scary-looking.} ) 20. cxd3 b4 ( 20… Nf6 21. Bg5 ) 21. Ne2 Qd8 { Black has to defend accurately, but it appears that he should be able to keep a small advantage because he can hold on the King side while continuing operations on the Queen side.} ) 19… Nxd3 20. cxd3 axb5 { And the b5 Pawn cannot be taken, because of White's undefended Knight on b3.} 21. Nxb5 $2 Qc2 { Black has invaded the Queen side successfully.} ) 19. Bg5 { WIth a threat of Qhf4, Rh3, Bxf6, Rxh7 mate.} 19… Qd8 $2 { I panicked and decided I wanted to bail out with a Queen trade.} ( 19… Ng8 20. Bxe7 Qxe7 { This was the obvious way to deal with the threat while retaining some advantage.} ) 20. Qh4 Ng8 21. f6 $2 { A completely unsound sacrifice.} ( 21. Bxe7 Qxe7 22. Qxe7 Nxe7 23. f6 Ng6 { White has an advantage after the Queens are off.} ) 21… Bxf6 22. Bxf6 Nxf6 23. Ref1 $2 ( 23. g4 { At least this would not continue to lose material.} ) 23… Bc8 { Preventing White's Rook from getting to h3. White's attack is over and Black has a won position.} 24. Rxf6 $4 { Going crazy in an already lost position.} 24… gxf6 { Now Black is an exchange and Pawn up.} 25. Rxf6 Be6 26. Nd5 Bxd5 $6 { Unnecessarily giving White chances. But I did not mentally switch gears, and simply reflexively traded while ahead.} ( 26… Rg8 { Taking advantage of the pin to try to remove White's Rook was the easy to way to win.} 27. Qh5 Rg7 { And then after this trade everything off.} ) 27. exd5 Nxd3 28. cxd3 Rg8 29. Qf2 { OK, Black has a totally won position. Unfortunately, at this point I breathed a sigh of relief at having weathered the King side attack, and ran out of mental energy and focus, and began to play bizarrely.} 29… Rg7 $6 { Good enough to win, but reflected a deteriorating mindset.} ( 29… Rc8 { It was best to just start active counterplay, rather than defend the useless f7 Pawn.} 30. Rxf7 $2 Rf8 { Forces a trade and easy win.} ) 30. h3 Ra7 $4 { Makes no sense to continue to defend the f7 Pawn. The Pawn means nothing, and in fact opening lines by giving it up actually benefits Black.} ( 30… Rc8 { Still wins easily with a threat of Rc2.} ) 31. Nd2 { This Knight is going to be crazy strong at e4. All of a sudden I realized the win was probably already gone.} 31… Rd7 $6 { Passive defense.} ( 31… Rg6 { Defend the d6 Pawn another way.} 32. Ne4 Rc7 { White has good drawing chances here.} ) 32. Ne4 Qa8 $4 { Not even calculating or thinking any more. Embarrassing.} ( 32… b5 ) 33. Qf5 $5 { Playing for the win.} ( 33. Nxd6 Qxd5 34. Ne8 { Dropping the d5 Pawn was playable and equal.} 34… Rg8 35. Rxb6 Rxe8 36. Qf6+ Kg8 37. Qg5+ { Draw by perpetual check.} ) 33… Rc7 $4 { Suddenly changing mind about defense and wanting to attack.} ( 33… Qd8 { Black could still defend.} ) 34. Rxd6 { A free Pawn.} 34… Re7 $4 { Random nonsense move because the original plan was obviously losing.} ( 34… Rc1+ 35. Kh2 { And there is no sensible continuation for Black.} ) 35. Rxb6 $2 ( 35. Rc6 { Game over. The Knight will come to d6 and win.} ) 35… Rc7 { Random garbage, with little time left on the clock.} 36. Qxe5 ( 36. Qf6 { More decisive.} ) 36… Qd8 37. Rd6 $4 ( 37. Rxa6 { Black doesn't actually have any threats.} ) 37… Rc1+ $4 { Pure swindling attempt.} ( 37… Qh4 { Was actually a way to possibly hold the game, with a threat of sacrificing the Queen for perpetual check with the Rook!} ) 38. Kh2 Qb8 { Hoping to make something of the pin. Now, at this point, White, the tournament director, got a phone call for the chess club. He still had ten minutes on the clock ( Black was down to about two minutes and was no longer keeping score ) , but was distracted for about ten seconds to answer the call to buzz someone into the building.} 39. h4 $6 ( 39. Ng3 { Breaking the pin won instantly.} ) 39… Rc2 40. Qf6 $4 { Apparently thinking the position warranted trying to bail out with a Queen trade with Qd8+.} 40… Rxg2+ 41. Kh3 $4 { Avoiding the perpetual check.} ( 41. Kh1 Rg1+ 42. Kh2 { Being short of time, as Black I would have taken the perpetual check here for a draw.} 42… Rg6 { I was not even going to try a winning continuation.} 43. Qd8+ Rg8 44. Qxb8 Rxb8 ) 41… Qc8+ { White looked at the board with utter disgust.} 42. Re6 fxe6 43. dxe6 Rg6 44. Qe5 Qxe6+ { Even with almost no time left on the clock this is a trivial win for Black using the 5 second time delay.} 0-1`} />

OpenHack Pittsburgh: working on a private project

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 23:46:39 GMT

Last month at OpenHack Pittsburgh, I had a rather social time.

This month, I kept entirely to myself. I didn't even speak up to say what I was working on. I was in a somber mood, and didn't really want to talk. I worked on a private project that I will share when I am ready.

It did feel consoling to be around other people, even while keeping to myself. Sometimes I just need to know that I am not alone.

Cake is the same as cookie in my book so here is a photo of birthday cake

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 01:44:59 GMT

Since I consider cake to be in the same category as cookies for my rule, I had to take a photo of this slice of birthday cake.

It was difficult for me to say no to a bit of cake mainly because Abby's parents had us over for dinner and this cake was for a delayed joint celebration of Abby's birthday and her father's birthday.

Based on how I felt when we got home, I still think that it's best for me to avoid cake in general.

The Chess Improver: Your mission, should you choose to accept it: total restriction of activity

Thu, 20 Feb 2014 12:28:41 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Your mission, should you choose to accept it: total restriction of activity"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

In round 3 of the Pittsburgh Chess Club championship, I won a game in which the theme was total restriction of opponent activity. I have rarely played a game in which activity was so squashed, and thought it would be instructive to point out places where my opponent could have played more actively.

The opening struggle could have been sharper

The opening was a Trompowsky in which I as White got in an early d5 in response to c5, preparing for a Benoni Pawn structure bind against Black. The thematic mission for White against a Black Benoni structure: restrict all activity on all wings, and eventually launch a decisive King side attack.

A Benoni Pawn structure

Black made the mistake of passively agreeing to enter the Benoni Pawn structure, rather than taking advantage of White's nonexistent piece development at move 9 by rapidly developing his Bishop to d6, which would have created a sharp struggle. White's Pawn at d5 could have been treated as a target in this line.

Black's Qb4+ and b5 idea

At move 11, I made an inaccurate move, but consistent with the theme of trying to restrict Black's piece activity: I played Bd3 preventing Black's light-squared Bishop from reaching f5. But I should have allowed that possibility, because that Bishop would have been a target for kicking around anyway. Instead, developing my own Bishop out early made it a potential target: Black could have immediately aimed to place a Knight on e5. I would have prevented this with f4, but at the cost of allowing Black to play Qb4+ making way for a b5 break attacking the still-fragile White c4 and d5 Pawn targets. In that case, I would have chosen to forfeit castling in order to keep the bind.

Note that if Black had played Qb4+ at move 11, not move 12 after the time-wasting f4, I would have allowed the b5 break and given up the d5 Pawn in exchange for superior development while Black wastes time with the Queen. It's very interesting how tradeoffs change depending on the deletion of a pair of moves (White playing f4 and Black developing an additional piece with Nd7).

At move 13, I played f4, despite still lagging behind in development, because of the value of restricting Black from getting a Knight to e5. Again, Black could have played the Qb4+ idea, and again, forfeiting castling seems best, to neutralize the b5 threat.

Tactical oversight

I made an embarrassing tactical oversight on move 14, when I castled into a discovered check tactic with Black's Nxd5! that would have left me with a worse position. But my opponent did not see it, and on the next pair of moves, we both missed it again.

My explanation is that I was in a hurry to castle. Recently, I have been punished for mindlessly developing and mindlessly castling rather than playing precisely in the face of concrete situations.

As for h3, there my idea was again to prevent Black's light-squared Bishop from developing, to g4, but as mentioned before, it is not actually to Black's benefit to develop this Bishop only to have it be traded off anyway. In fact, in this particular kind of position, the Bishop is doing fine on c8 as a defensive piece.

Beginning the attack, risking losing the bind?

After the opening phase, as I finally developed the Knight to c3, it was clear that Black had a very difficult game. I shut down Black's Queen side play with a4 and a5.

On move 20, the question was, how to proceed? The problem in chess is that when you attack, invading your opponent's territory, you risk two things:

Overextending with Pawn advances, creating holes that allow your opponent's pieces to come back to life. Allowing piece exchanges that are freeing and reduce your forces.

I calculated that immediate invasion with Nf5 was tactically justified. This freed Black a little bit, but it looked accurate to strike immediately rather than attempt to "prepare" further with invasion, because Black always had the option of seeking counterplay on the Queen side with b6 or b5. The tactical justification for the invasion was that the most natural way for Black to try freeing his position with Nd7 and Nh4 led to a forced sequence in which the temporary Pawn sacrifice f5 gave White a favorable position.

Was Nf5 the best idea, however? I don't know exactly. But my perception was that to prepare more forces for the initial invasion required me to activate the undeveloped dark-squared Bishop and the Queen Rook, but trying to use these would allow Black to proceed with b6 or b5. Then again, the resulting position would also have been favorable to me on the half-open a-file and the game would have shifted to the Queen side. I chose to fight it out immediately on the King side instead.

I made a slip, and the bind could have disappeared!

By move 25, the win was in sight, but instead of maintaining the winning bind with the nice h4 sacrifice (which cannot be accepted), I played a "preparatory" move Qg4.

Timing is critical during an attack. Once in, you have to go all in. After having advanced my Pawn to g5, I risked having my f4 Pawn bind on e5 diverted, and in fact, Qg4 allowed Black the possibility of breaking free from the bind and establishing a Knight on e5. The resulting position would have been still difficult for Black, but the forced win would have been gone for White.

The final bind

Look at the position after 30 Nd5. I've rarely played a game that resulted in a position like this. Black's pieces and Pawns can hardly move at all. Black's Bishop on e7 cannot move, period. In the game, Black blundered in one move, but supposing Black just marked time and waited, you can see that White can just calmly play Bd2, Bc3, Qh5, Qf7, and pick off Black's Pawn on f6 for victory. There is nothing Black can do to stop this plan, because of the total bind on the Queen side, center, and King side.

Mission accomplished (but not without cooperation from Black)!

Conclusion

Chess being a dynamic game, it is instructive to find the critical points during a game that seemingly features total domination. There was a tactical blunder by White in the opening, and also very interesting forcing lines, and at one point in the game, a slip by White could have let Black regroup with a difficult defense, rather than lose immediately.

The annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "2014 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship"] [Site "Pittsburgh"] [Date "2014.01.28"] [Round "3"] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black "Vassil Prokhov"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "1873"] [ECO "A45"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "2161"]

d4 Nf6 2. Bg5 Ne4 3. Bf4 c5 4. f3 Qa5+ 5. c3 Nf6 6. d5 Qb6 7. Bc1 e6 8. e4 $1 ( 8. c4 $5 { Allows Black an interesting sacrifice.} 8... exd5 9. cxd5 c4 ) 8... exd5 9. exd5 d6 $2 ( 9... Bd6 { Black's best try to remain active.} ) 10. c4 { White is behind in development but potentially has a restricting bind.} 10... Be7 11. Bd3 $5 { I was obsessed with preventing Black development, so I stopped Bf5.} ( 11. Nc3 { Getting the Knight out already was most precise.} 11... Bf5 $2 { Developing the Bishop was not actually so good for Black anyway.} ( 11... Nbd7 $2 12. f4 { This time there are no Qb4+/b5 possibilities for Black.} ) ( 11... O-O 12. Bd3 { Black is still in a bind.} ) 12. Nge2 { While will kick back Black's Bishop anyway.} ) 11... O-O $2 { Castling is a reflex that can be dangerous when more forceful measures are called for.} ( 11... Nbd7 { Aiming straight for e5.} 12. f4 Qb4+ $1 { Aiming for a b5 break.} 13. Kf1 { Forfeiting castling was possible, neutralizing the b5 break.} ( 13. Bd2 { Possible was sacrificing the b2 Pawn for development, as in some other variations of the Trompowsky.} 13... Qxb2 14. Nc3 ) ( 13. Nc3 $2 b5 { White's center is crumbling.} ) 13... b5 14. Bd2 Qa4 15. Qxa4 bxa4 16. Nc3 { White is better.} ) ( 11... Qb4+ { An immediate b5 break does not benefit Black.} 12. Nc3 b5 13. a3 Qa5 14. cxb5 Nxd5 15. Ne2 ) 12. Ne2 Nbd7 ( 12... Qb4+ 13. Nbc3 ) 13. f4 { Preventing Ne5.} 13... Re8 $2 { Unchallenging.} ( 13... Qb4+ $1 14. Kf2 $5 { It may well be worth forfeiting castling to avoid the b5 break, because eventually Black will have to retreat the Queen anyway and White can "castle by hand".} ( 14. Nbc3 b5 15. a3 Qa5 16. b3 { Black can try stuff here, but White may be able to retain a bind.} ) 14... b5 $2 15. Bd2 ) 14. O-O $2 { Sloppy move order mistake.} ( 14. Nbc3 Bf8 { Black's only real chance, I think, is to redevelop the dark Bishop.} 15. O-O g6 16. h3 Bg7 17. g4 Qd8 { Black is not lost yet.} ) 14... Nf8 $2 ( 14... Nxd5 ) 15. h3 $2 { Still missing the Nxd5 tactic, and also too much of a rush to prepare for a future g4.} ( 15. Nbc3 ) 15... Qd8 $2 ( 15... Nxd5 ) 16. Nbc3 { White's development is almost complete. Black has a very difficult game ahead.} 16... a6 17. a4 Rb8 { Queen side counterplay is going to be too slow, but it's hard to suggest something else.} 18. Ng3 { Beginning the attack on Black's King.} 18... Bd7 19. a5 { Not necessary right away, but a prophylactic move immediately restricting Black's activity seemed a good idea. Black does not have good moves. I avoid committing to a particular plan for my dark Bishop. Also, ideas of a possible Bd2 and Na4, or Bc2 and Ba4.} 19... Ng6 20. Nf5 { Getting underway quickly on the King side.} ( 20. Bd2 { I considered completing development before proceeding further, but had some concerns about wasting time weakening the b2 square and letting Black take the half-open b file.} 20... b5 21. axb6 Qxb6 ) 20... Bxf5 21. Bxf5 Nh4 $2 { A total waste of time. Black already has a lost game here!} ( 21... Nd7 { Aiming to activate the Bishop to f6.} 22. Ne4 $1 { Maintaining a bind on Black's position.} 22... Nh4 23. Bxd7 Qxd7 24. f5 $1 Nxf5 25. Qg4 g6 26. Ng3 h5 27. Nxh5 { Black's King side is falling apart.} 27... Rbd8 28. Bg5 Ng7 29. Bxe7 gxh5 30. Qxd7 Rxd7 31. Bf6 { Looks strong for White.} ) 22. Bc2 Ng6 { Else f5 will lock out the Knight.} 23. g4 Nd7 24. g5 { Locking Black out of f6.} 24... f6 25. Qg4 $2 { One slip and the bind should have disappeared.} ( 25. h4 $1 { Maintains the bind.} 25... Nxh4 $4 ( 25... Ngf8 26. Qg4 { White can complete preparing the final Pawn attack and go for it. Black can do nothing.} ) 26. Qg4 Ng6 27. Bxg6 hxg6 28. Qe6+ Kf8 29. Kg2 { With an unstoppable threat of swing the Rook over to h1 and mating on h8.} ) 25... Ndf8 $4 { Now the game is over.} ( 25... fxg5 26. Ba4 Ngf8 27. fxg5 Ne5 28. Qe4 Nfd7 29. h4 { Black is surviving for now.} ) 26. h4 Nd7 27. Bf5 Ngf8 28. Be6+ Nxe6 $2 ( 28... Kh8 29. Bf7 { White wins the exchange and the game anyway.} ) 29. dxe6 Nf8 30. Nd5 { Black is paralyzed now.} 30... Qc8 $4 ( 30... Kh8 { Suppose Black just marks time.} 31. f5 Kg8 32. Bd2 { Finally developing the Bishop!} 32... Kh8 33. Bc3 Ra8 34. Qh5 Rb8 35. Qf7 { Black's f6 Pawn is falling. Game over.} ) 31. gxf6 1-0`} />

Pittsburgh Recorder Society: 7-part Gabrieli and coconut chocolate cookies

Sun, 16 Feb 2014 22:41:04 GMT

Because so many people are now regularly attending the Pittsburgh Recorder Society monthly meetings, we have enough critical mass to work on larger ensemble pieces. Fred pulled out a 7-part Gabrieli piece for us from the 16th century. Fun! I look forward to continuing working on this in March.

We also continued work on other pieces we started earlier in the season. Fred's guidance is as inspiring as ever. I feel that every meeting of our group is a wonderful opportunity to grow as a musician.

After going home I found a trumpet ensemble performance of the Gabrieli online:

Snacks

People brought in snacks to share, as usual, for break time.

Helen made super-tasty-looking "cookies" (I asked if they counted as cookies, and she said yes). Coconut plus coconut plus homemade equals difficult to resist!!

According to my new rule, here are the three cookies I ate.

I stopped at three, which was a good thing, because after I went home, I did feel a little bloated. I should really have eaten only two, I think. I did take one home for Abby to enjoy.

Pittsburgh Scala Meetup: Implicits

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 02:45:59 GMT

The Pittsburgh Scala Meetup met with Justin presenting on "Implicits".

Implicits

Implicits are a novel and fantastically important feature of Scala. I wish there were a comprehensive and concise single resource about them out there, but I don't actually know of one.

I've been doing stuff with implicits lately. Not long ago, I wrote a blog post that involved using Scala implicits to avoid relying on the inherited Java toString method. More recently, for this meetup I posted some code that I hoped someone would comment on, in which I used implicits to try to simplify a DSL. I'm not sure this is the right design choice, but it was an experiment.

Presentation

Around 7 of us showed up.

Justin did some live coding using the Scala Worksheet to demonstrate various uses of implicits.

One use is to define an "implicit function" that can convert of a value of one type to another. This can be overused badly, unfortunately.

Another is to define an "implicit parameter" for a function so that you don't have to explicitly pass a parameter to the function, if there is an implicit value in scope.

Scala 2.10 greatly improved implicits by encapsulating the "conversion" pattern by means of an "implicit class". Strangely, Scala Worksheet seemed to get confused when we played around and defined an implicit class that also had an implicit parameter. This led to some interesting detective work as we examined the generated JVM byte code to figure out what was going on! I thought it was useful for us to dig into this level; often it is useful to understand what something compiles to in order to better understand and appreciate a high-level language construct.

Finally, we briefly discussed the type class pattern, which is arguably the most important use of implicits. This was too big a topic to get into here though.

Resources

I posted some good resources that have popped up on my radar on Scala implicits:

A fine tutorial on type classes in Scala.
Scary stuff with implicits that I don't understand (yet).

Conclusion

Justin gave a nice introduction to implicits. I think the live coding and experimentation is a great way to involve people in code suggestions and discussion of what things mean and do. It was a fun time.

The Chess Improver: A tale of three discovered attacks: a Zwischenzug feast!

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 12:12:39 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""A tale of three discovered attacks: a Zwischenzug feast!"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

This is a tale of three discovered attacks in a short game of mine: two that might have happened but didn't, and one that did. The two that did not occur are most interesting; the one that did was trivial. Often, the most interesting and critical moments of the game are when an idea is seen but rejected after thought. Looking at only the moves played or only the final result misses the true beauty of chess. So don't be fooled by mismatched miniatures: there could still be something deep to learn from positions in these games!

Discovery 1: the fianchettoed Bishop discovery trick

Recently I wrote an article about the fianchettoed Bishop, a very important way of developing the Bishop that can be surprisingly powerful.

Interestingly, I found myself playing a game as Black in the Dragon Sicilian in which at move 8, I had the opportunity to play the fianchetto discovery trick of attempting to win a Pawn by sacrificing a Knight at White's Pawn on e4, to win a White Knight back on d4 because of the discovered attack from the Bishop.

To my surprise, I ended up spending an unusual amount of time looking at the position, and I decided that it was not worth playing this trick. I chose not to go into the complications I saw. I didn't actually need to spent so much time on a decision, from a practical point of view, but I was enjoying the moment of exploration, since this was a game I knew I would win anyway: indeed, the actual game result was an anticlimactic and quick win, because I was playing against an opponent rated almost 700 ELO points lower than me, this being the second round of a tournament after a big first round upset in which I was held to a draw because I didn't use my Bishops properly.

The trick doesn't always win a Pawn

Sometimes the discovery trick wins a Pawn, when the only choice is to capture the suicidal Knight and lose the piece on the discovered-attacked piece in return, or retreat the Queen from the discovery and just lose that captured Pawn without a fight.

But in some cases, such as this one, a Zwischenzug can cause a cascade of rampant suicidal captures by both sides on opposite ends of the board. In particular, White has the resource 9 Nxc6 moving the attacked Knight and capturing the Black Knight on c6, attacking Black's Queen. Now Black has to go all in or lose a piece, and both sides capture the other's Queen, and finally Black's suicidal Knight has to keep going and capture a piece (White's Bishop on f1), White's suicidal Knight captures a random Pawn (Black's f7 Pawn), and then both Knights are captured. The result is that material is then even. Black has a slightly better position at the end, but nothing exciting. (Note that if not for Black's f7 Pawn, this continuation would indeed have won Black a Pawn.)

Obviously, in a game against someone of equal or higher strength, if this continuation were forced, I would have gone for it, obviously. I saw this sequence in just a matter of seconds. So why did I spend half an hour thinking?

The Pawn may not be worth the loss of time and King protection

Because there was another option, clearly the one I would have played if I were White. This involved deliberately giving up the Pawn, in exchange for clear compensation, by following up with Bh6, preventing Black from castling King side. I was fascinated by this continuation and studied it even though I knew I was not going to enter it.

Discovery 2: the Queen trade Knight discovery trick

The second discovery that did not happen was one that White could conceivably used, if I as Black had walked into it. This is the Queen trade Knight discovery trick, in which White has a Queen on d2 and Black has a Queen on a5, and White plays Nd5 discovering an attack on Black's Queen and therefore forces either a trade or a Queen retreat back to d8. The discovery trick is actually usually strongest when White's King is on b1, because then a Queen trade happens without check and allows White in some cases a Zwischenzug of either Nxe7+ winning a Pawn (when Black does not have Kf8 attacking the Knight) or Nxf6+, which in some cases may be advantageous.

Here, the discovery trick simply allows White to equalize. So I didn't play 10…Qa5.

Discovery 3: on the Queen

11…Nd5 won the game, as White had not removed his Queen from the potential discovered attack earlier. The forced Queen retreat allowed Black to destroy White's King protection by removing the Knight on c3 and also destroying the Pawn structure.

Note that sometimes a discovery like this does not actually win. It is a question of the exact Zwischenzug opportunities and concrete position on the board. In this case, careful calculation was required before playing the discovery, in order to make sure that it won!!

Look at what happens if White had played the best move, ignoring the attack on the Queen. 12 Nxd5 picks up a Black Knight. Then Black takes the Queen. But then the Zwischenzug Nxe7+ is interesting.

Black could lose!

If Black sacrifices the Queen back to regain the lost Knight, the problem is that White ends up with a double attack on Black's Bishop on d4 as well as Rook on f8, and Black is the one who is losing!! Black can save the Bishop with a Zwischenzug check …Be3+, but then White just ends up two Pawns up anyway with a won game.

But White loses

But Black can force White to win the Queen back, by calmly playing …Kg7. Then White has to do the suicidal discovery Nf5+ in order to win the Black Queen. The result is that Blacks regains the Knight, then loses back the Queen. All even, right? Wrong! Black unleashes the Zwischenzug check …Be3+ and ends up saving the Bishop while taking White's Bishop on d8.

Annotated game

In the actual game, none of the interesting discovery-generated Zwischenzug exchanges actually happened. But I had to calculate each possible sequence in order to play correctly in case they did happen. All the real action in this game happened in variations that never happened: in the first two cases, I chose not to enter a situation because it was not going to be favorable to me, and in the final case, I had to calculate that it was really going to win.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "2014 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship"] [Site "Pittsburgh"] [Date "2014.01.21"] [Round "2"] [White "Kevin Kennedy"] [Black "Franklin Chen"] [Result "0-1"] [BlackElo "2161"] [ECO "B70"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "1500"]

e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 Nf6 4. Nc3 cxd4 5. Nxd4 g6 6. Bg5 Bg7 7. Qd2 Nc6 8. O-O-O $2 Nxd4 { Black is already better.} ( 8… Nxe4 $6 9. Nxe4 { White gives up the Pawn.} ( 9. Nxc6 { Alternatively, White can regain the Pawn.} 9… Nxd2 10. Nxd8 Nxf1 11. Nxf7 Kxf7 12. Rhxf1 { Black is obviously a bit better, but after the simplification, White can play for the draw. Black's Pawns are split over three islands, and the King is somewhat exposed, while White's Rooks can easily become active.} ) 9… Bxd4 ( 9… Nxd4 10. Bh6 Bxh6 11. Qxh6 Ne6 { Black will not be castling King side. White has full compensation for the Pawn down.} ) 10. Bh6 { Black is not castling King side.} ) ( 8… O-O { Perfectly reasonable.} 9. Nxc6 bxc6 10. e5 $2 Nd5 $1 { White is in serious trouble, his castled King being very unsafe.} ) 9. Qxd4 O-O 10. f3 $2 ( 10. e5 Qa5 11. f4 dxe5 12. Qxe5 Qxe5 13. fxe5 Ng4 14. Bxe7 Re8 { And Black will regain the Pawn while keeping the Bishop pair.} ) 10… Be6 ( 10… Qa5 $6 { Playable, but allows White Nd5 tricks.} 11. Qd2 Be6 12. a3 Rfc8 13. Nd5 { A classic Knight discovery trick that takes the wind out of Black's attack.} 13… Qd8 ( 13… Qxd2+ ) 14. Nxf6+ exf6 { Black will lose the d Pawn for compensation.} ) 11. h4 $4 { Loses instantly.} ( 11. Qb4 { Keeping the Queen active while leaving the diagonal was best.} ) ( 11. Qd2 Rc8 { Black has a fine position and already has a Queen side attack coming.} ) 11… Nd5 { Finally a discovered attack on White's Queen.} 12. Qd2 $4 ( 12. Nxd5 Bxd4 13. Nxe7+ Kg7 ( 13… Qxe7 $4 14. Bxe7 Be3+ 15. Kb1 Rfe8 16. Bxd6 { Black is lost, two Pawns down.} ) 14. Nf5+ { White gets the Queen back!} 14… gxf5 15. Bxd8 Be3+ 16. Kb1 Rfxd8 { The dust has cleared and Black is up a Bishop for a Pawn.} ) 12… Nxc3 13. bxc3 Qa5 14. Bxe7 Qa3+ { It's mate in 2.} 0-1`} />

Many faces of the bolero "Dos Gardenias"

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 02:43:12 GMT

I encountered an intriguing article "Brazil's Maria Rita Rediscovers Her Mother Through Music".

Maria Rita

The name "Maria Rita" was familiar to me for only one reason: exactly one year ago, by coincidence, right after attending a music performance, I was looking up performances of the bolero "Dos Gardenias" on YouTube, in order to see what was out there, and also to find a "karaoke" version I could use to practice singing to and playing the flute to (I ended up playing the piece on flute a month later at a party), and one of the performances that struck me as notable and unusual was hers.

It turns out that in this NPR program, when asked to choose a musical selection to end the program with, Maria Rita chose her recording of "Dos Gardenias". You can watch a video of a live performance of hers here (sorry, the provider did not allow it to be embeddable). Do watch it: I found it strangely mesmerizing. It is understated compared to "normal" bolero style, yet expressive in its own way. Also, this video has her moving to the music while singing, eyes closed.

Anyway, it turns out that Maria Rita's mother was the famous Brazilian singer Elis Regina, who died at 36. The interview was interesting because it brought up the issue of what it's like being the child of a famous musician, because if you're a musician also, then there are always comparisons and questions.

But what I want to return to my real topic, which is the bolero "Dos Gardenias", one of my favorite boleros ever.

Love on first listen: Ibrahim Ferrer, 1999

I first encountered "Dos Gardenias" through Ibrahim Ferrer's performance in Buena Vista Social Club, the film and the CD, which I came across in 2000, shortly after it came out.

I still love this live performance by Ibrahim Ferrer:

Here he is from the CD:

Why I love this song

The lyrics are singable and comprehensible.

The harmonic structure is distinctive, because it uses both the natural minor and the altered harmonic minor (raised 7th). This gives the song both an exotic and unstable feeling, corresponding to the emotional content of the lyrics. Check out when the 7th is raised and when it is not. In addition, the 4th is augmented. All this chromaticism drives well the song's emotional content, implying various different modal regions coinciding with changes in the narrative.

The melody has a good dramatic range, and has varying intervals in motion.

Antonio Machin, 1947

I'm always interested in alternate performances of songs, both new and old. So I went back to the source, the great Antonio Machin:

This is faster than Ferrer's rendition. If you examine the history of bolero performance in general, you will find that things have gotten slower and more sentimental over the years.

I find that there are pluses and minuses to different styles and speeds. I rather like the clarity and drama of the older faster tempo and style, but also like the room for more emotional expressiveness and freedom when slower.

Omara Portuondo, 2010

It turns out that Abby and I went to a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://trustarts.culturaldistrict.org/production/25334" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://trustarts.culturaldistrict.org/production/25334">concert by Omara Portuondo here in Pittsburgh on November 7, 2010</span>, in which she performed "Dos Gardenias". And someone captured that:

This was an interesting, very free rendition, without the usual full rhythmic backup, but instead featuring some subtle guitar accompaniment. It was different, but I did not like it so much. I think the regular structure of the song, the way the lyrics fit into the movement, makes it work better when the original motoric bolero rhythm is maintained, with the harmonic motion driving the narrative.

Lucrecia, 1996

Here's a random other performance I found. I didn't like it at all. The phrasing seems all weird and distorted, and the song's been reharmonized strangely also.

Sertab Erener, 2007

I liked the performance of this Turkish pop singer Sertab Erener. She includes some distinctive middle Eastern styling that are unusual for this Cuban music, but her musicality cannot be denied. (Unfortunately, the "dance" sequences in this video are not at all bolero. Ignore the video.)

Conclusion

What can I say, I'm obsessed with this beautiful bolero. However you like this song interpreted, it's a must-listen.

I haven't sung it outside my home yet, but I guess I should get around to it, maybe at a party in the near future.

Postscript on Elis Regina

Check out Maria Rita's mother, Elis Regina, singing the famous bossa nova song "Triste" in 1976:

The Chess Improver: How not to play with the Bishop pair

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 12:04:58 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""How not to play with the Bishop pair"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

In the first round of the annual Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship, I played a game as White in which my aim out of the opening was to acquire the Bishop pair against the Nimzo-Indian and nurse it to victory, as I have done many times successfully before. Unfortunately, I played carelessly and ended up drawing against an opponent 500 ELO points lower than me! (Rounds 2 and 3 have been played, and featured higher-quality chess, thankfully.)

On the principle that poorly played games can be instructive, I decided to write about how not to play with the Bishop pair. More accurately, I'll show that although White had a clear advantage during much of the game, White missed many chances to increase or maintain the advantage, for various reasons.

I've also included the game score for a very recent interesting game from the Gibraltar Masters 2014 featuring the use of the Bishop pair, so that you can look at it and make comparisons, point by point, with the themes in question. This was a game in which White got the Bishop pair and built up an overwhelming position but also lost the thread.

Falling behind in development

One important theme when deliberately playing for the Bishop pair is that of falling behind in development. Nothing comes for free in chess; everything is a matter of tradeoffs. The Qc2 variation of the Nimzo-Indian is particularly extreme, in that White chooses to spend three moves to get the Bishop pair without getting a weakened Pawn structure: Qc2 protects the Knight on c3, a3 causes the Black Bishop to capture the Knight, and then Qxc3 recaptures with the Queen. Three moves is a lot to invest for obtaining a long-term advantage of the Bishop pair.

Close or open the position?

There is a principle that is often taught, that open positions favor the Bishop pair, and closed positions favor Knights. However, this assumes that one's King is safe. If one's King is not safe, then an open position may well be "good" for a Bishop but bad for the King! Often, the correct thing to do when one has the Bishop pair but is behind in development is to keep the Pawn structure semi-closed, to buy time to complete development and King safety before then proceeding to open up the way for the Bishops.

Unfortunately, in this game I played carelessly and on autopilot to hasten to complete development and castle, rather than attend to the immediate situation on the board. After Black's slow b6 development, not only was there a tactical shot I missed against c7, but even beside that, there were opportunities to fix Black's Pawn structure with cxd5 in order to close off the activity of Black's remaining Bishop, before proceeding with King side development. This would have guaranteed a very solid advantage.

Being pushed back to save the Bishop pair

After all the inaccuracies, the position after 17 Be1 is still instructive, because this type of position actually does occur frequently when one side does what it takes to keep the Bishop pair. Often it is correct to retreat, even as far back as the back rank, with a Bishop, to save it. Part of playing with the Bishop pair means being patient, temporarily losing the initiative and becoming defensive, in order to wait until your opponent's activity runs out, and then spring back out.

Loss of patience

Unfortunately, in this game, I lost patience at move 21, when I decided on a plan to "free" my position by opening it up with e4. This was a mistake that resulted in a prematurely open position where Black already had more active pieces. It doesn't matter whether you have the Bishop pair or not if your own pieces are not all active and coordinated.

Accuracy

Inaccuracies by both sides after the position opened up show how potentially powerful even a Bishop against Knight can be in the late stages of a game. 29 Qe4 for White would have protected vulnerable squares and really showcased the latent power of White's remaining Bishop against Black's Knight.

In conclusion, although this was quite an uneven game, I think it is instructive to look at the turning points in order to consolidate lessons on how not to squander the advantage of the Bishop pair.

Two complete games

My game

My complete game is below (and also features some egregious errors in the time scramble at the end, which luckily still led to a Rook vs. Queen fortress draw).

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "2014 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship"] [Site "Pittsburgh"] [Date "2014.01.14"] [Round "1"] [White "Franklin Chen"] [Black "Finn Overlie"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [BlackElo "1637"] [ECO "E32"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "2161"]

d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. Qc2 O-O 5. a3 Bxc3+ 6. Qxc3 d5 7. Bg5 h6 8. Bh4 Nbd7 $6 { Passive.} 9. e3 { Maintaining the center tension.} ( 9. cxd5 { Fixing the Pawn structure immediately was possible but did not seem to offer much.} ) 9… b6 $2 { This loses a Pawn.} 10. Nf3 $2 { Allows Black a reasonable game.} ( 10. cxd5 { I saw this move, but for some reason, missed Bg3.} 10… exd5 11. Qc6 Rb8 12. Bg3 ( 12. Rc1 $2 { This was the move I looked at, and it seemed not to win, so I abandoned the whole cxd5 idea.} 12… Bb7 13. Qxc7 $4 Rc8 14. Qxd8 Rxc1+ 15. Kd2 Rxf1 { And Black wins!} ) ) 10… Bb7 11. Be2 $6 { Too passive.} ( 11. cxd5 { This was the last chance to try to achieve something out of the opening by fixing the Pawns.} ) 11… Qe8 $6 12. O-O $6 { White was in a hurry to simply complete development. This has been achieved but was not the best plan.} ( 12. cxd5 ) 12… c5 $6 ( 12… Ne4 { Activating the Knight first was best.} ) 13. dxc5 $2 ( 13. Nd2 { Preventing Black's Ne4 would have saved a lot of trouble.} ) 13… Ne4 14. Qc2 bxc5 $2 { There was no need to create a weak c5 Pawn and a weak a7 Pawn.} ( 14… Ndxc5 15. b4 Na4 { Black is active and fine.} ) 15. Nd2 $201 { After a lot of inaccuracies by both sides, White is finally better and consolidating the Bishop pair advantage.} 15… f5 $6 { Maintaining the Knight on e4 for now, but creating some serious positional weaknesses.} 16. f3 { Ambitious and good but not best.} ( 16. Nxe4 { Removing the Knight was possible and fine.} ) 16… Qh5 $5 { Totally unexpected.} 17. Be1 { Preserving the Bishop pair.} ( 17. fxe4 { It was possible to simply enter the complications and win a Pawn, but I did not feel like that.} 17… Qxe2 18. cxd5 exd5 19. Rae1 ) 17… Nxd2 18. Bxd2 Rf7 $201 { White has a clearly better position, with the Bishop pair. This is a dream position for the White side of the Nimzo-Indian.} 19. b4 Rc8 20. cxd5 cxb4 { Where to move the Queen?} 21. Qd1 $6 { Too passive. The idea was to play e4, but that only opened up weakness in White's dark squares.} ( 21. Qb2 Bxd5 22. axb4 Nb6 23. Rfc1 { White dominates. Black's Knight activity has been contained, and eventually White's dark-squared Bishop will become very important, possibly going to c3, or possibly to b4 after b5, or even Be1 then Bg3.} ) ( 21. Qa4 Bxd5 22. Qxb4 Nb6 ) 21… Bxd5 22. axb4 Nb6 23. e4 { The whole idea behind Qd1.} 23… Bc4 24. exf5 Qxf5 $201 { White's advantage is slipping.} 25. Ra5 $2 { Slipping into an even but dangerous position.} ( 25. Rf2 Nd5 ) 25… Bxe2 $6 ( 25… Qf6 ) 26. Qxe2 Qf6 27. Be3 Nd5 $201 { A critical moment in the game. The right thing to do was allow the Queen side Pawns to drop, and retain some advantage with the Bishop versus the Knight, but winning chances were looking slim.} 28. Bc5 $2 { I totally missed the d4 tactic here.} ( 28. Bxa7 Nxb4 29. Bf2 Nd5 30. Bg3 Qd4+ 31. Kh1 Qc4 { I did not see winning chances here.} ) 28… Rfc7 $2 ( 28… Nxb4 ) 29. Re1 $2 ( 29. Qe4 { White could have covered the d4 square with a large advantage.} ) 29… Nxb4 { Oops, Black saw the tactic. Now it's clearly a draw.} 30. Bxb4 Qd4+ 31. Kf1 Qxb4 $2 $201 ( 31… Rc2 32. Bd2 Qxd2 33. Rxa7 { This is clearly a draw.} ) 32. Rxa7 $2 { Wrong move order.} ( 32. Qxe6+ Kh7 33. Rxa7 Qb5+ 34. Re2 $201 { I was aiming for this position, with at least some winning chances being a Pawn up ( but it really is a draw anyway ) .} ) 32… Rc1 $5 { Refusing the draw.} ( 32… Qxe1+ 33. Qxe1 Rc1 34. Qxc1 Rxc1+ 35. Kf2 $201 { Draw.} ) 33. Qxe6+ Kh8 34. Re7 $2 ( 34. Ra1 { Protects everything, for the draw.} ) 34… Qb5+ 35. Qe2 $4 { Crazy blunder hanging the Queen.} ( 35. Kf2 R8c2+ 36. Re2 Qc5+ 37. Kg3 Rxe2 38. Re8+ Kh7 39. Qxe2 Qg5+ 40. Kh3 { Draw.} ) 35… Rxe1+ 36. Kxe1 Qb1+ 37. Kf2 Rc2 38. Qxc2 { I offered a draw with this move.} ( 38. h3 { There was no need to take the Rook.} ) 38… Qxc2+ 39. Re2 Qc5+ 40. Kg3 $4 { Careless.} ( 40. Kf1 ) 40… g5 ( 40… Qd6+ { This causes White a lot more trouble.} 41. Kh3 g5 42. g4 ) 41. h3 { Now the fortress is easy.} 41… Kg7 42. Re4 { Fortress established.} 42… h5 43. Kh2 Kf6 44. Kh1 Kf5 45. Kh2 Qd6+ 46. Kg1 g4 $4 47. hxg4+ hxg4 48. Rxg4 { I offered a draw again.} 48… Qd1+ 49. Kf2 Qd2+ 50. Kg1 Qe1+ 51. Kh2 Qf2 52. Kh1 Qf1+ 53. Kh2 Kf6 54. Kg3 Qh1 55. Kf2 Qh2 56. Ke3 { Black offered a draw, accepted.} 1/2-1/2`} />

Agdestein vs. Tan Zhongyi, Gibraltar Masters 2014

In this game, White fell behind in development upon acquiring the Bishop pair but kept the position closed, until Black riskily opened it, after which White caught up, starting with 23 Ne3, rapidly mobilized the last developed piece, the dark-squared Bishop, and then had a win in sight but blew it.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Gibraltar Masters 2014"] [Site "Caleta ENG"] [Date "2014.01.30"] [Round "3.13"] [White "Agdestein,S"] [Black "Tan Zhongyi"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [WhiteElo "2627"] [BlackElo "2483"] [ECO "B30"] [EventDate "2014.01.28"]

e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 d6 4. O-O Bd7 5. Re1 Nf6 6. c3 a6 7. Bf1 Bg4 8. h3 Bxf3 9. Qxf3 e6 10. Qg3 Nh5 11. Qe3 Be7 12. Na3 O-O 13. Nc2 Bg5 14. Qe2 Nf6 15. g3 d5 16. h4 Bh6 17. e5 Nd7 18. f4 c4 19. d4 cxd3 20. Qxd3 Nc5 21. Qf3 f6 22. exf6 Qxf6 23. Ne3 Ne5 24. Qh5 Nf7 25. Ng4 Qd8 26. Bg2 Kh8 27. Be3 Nd3 28. Bd4 Bxf4 29. Rxe6 Bxg3 30. Nf6 Nh6 31. Rf1 Bf4 32. Rxf4?? (32. Nxh7! { Wins with unstoppable threats against the Knight on h6. }) Nxf4 33. Qxh6 Rxf6 34. Bxf6 Nxe6 35. Bxd8 gxh6 36. Bf6+ Kg8 37. Bxd5 Kf7 38. Be5 Rg8+ 39. Kf2 b5 1/2-1/2`} />

Celebrating the Lunar New Year at Tram's Kitchen

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 04:34:15 GMT

Welcome to the year of the horse!

Although Abby and I don't regularly celebrate Lunar New Year (most prominently called Chinese New Year), I figured that we might as well do something this time around, by going out to eat Asian food.

Lawrenceville

Since it was warm out (over 40 degrees Fahrenheit!), I decided we should go out for an urban hike and end with a meal. We drove to Lawrenceville, where I planned for us to check out a Thai place we hadn't been to before, Pusadee's Garden.

We walked around a bit, and saw a strange amount of abandoned footwear. Some samples:

Food

When we went to Pusadee's Garden, we found that the place was closed for vacation (I think it's time to remember to call a restaurant before going out to it)! So we came up with an alternate plan and went to Tram's Kitchen, which I've gone to periodically since moving to Pittsburgh over fifteen years ago, when it was the only Vietnamese place in town (there are more now, some of which we've sampled). It's a hole-in-the-wall place that still doesn't have its own Web site!

We shared a pho (noodle soup) and a large vegetable/meat appetizer. Filling and pretty good.

First time in my life not eating cookies or cake at a party

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 04:11:21 GMT

I was at a birthday party. There were cookies of various varieties around. Also, there was a birthday cake. I did not eat the cookies or the cake.

I have to say this was a first for me. Usually, my rule at parties is "anything goes". But it was time to admit that this rule caused many problems. If I load up on junk food at a party, I end up feeling crappy afterwards: maybe bloated, maybe sleepy, but in any case, I end up being a worse guest to be around. And after going home I don't feel well either.

This is exactly what happened to me just two days ago at a party where I ate two cookies unnecessarily.

Good food to drive out the bad

There was plenty of good, healthy food at the party: the hosts provided great appetizers and entrees, and guests made and brought in delicious contributions also. There was no reason to pig out on the junk.

For example, a salad Abby assembled when we arrived at the party:

Future

My job is not yet done. It turns out that at the party, although I mostly ate healthy food, I also ate pita chips and similar bready items along with hummus that left me not feeling optimal.

So I'm extending my rule to these bready chip things also. Note that I have not yet banned potato chips or corn tortilla chips!

The Chess Improver: 9 lessons to learn from Bill Gates' 9 move loss to Magnus Carlsen

Thu, 30 Jan 2014 12:15:35 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""9 lessons to learn from Bill Gates' 9 move loss to Magnus Carlsen"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Recently a video went viral online of Bill Gates losing a blitz chess game in nine moves to the new World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen, getting checkmated quickly:

The truth is deeper than it seems

Non-chess-playing friends of mine enjoyed forwarding me links to this. Their general impression was, ha, of course the nine-move checkmate makes sense given the gross mismatch in strength between Bill Gates and the world champion! You can also look at the YouTube video's comments to get an idea of what a lot of people thought of the video.

I watched the game and noticed some very interesting features, on multiple levels, and came up with the idea of "9 lessons for 9 moves", because it is hard to get an accurate picture of what serious chess is like through typical media portrayal that shows moves being made, and maybe plays up drama, but does not explain what happened, or what could have happened instead, or what players were thinking: all this is left invisible. This Gates-Carlsen encounter is no exception. The comments from non-chess-playing friends made me feel the need to give a deeper picture. The main misconception that bothered me was that a world champion should be able to win a game against someone in nine moves. But it's not so simple. In fact, I found amazing depths in the truth of what happened.

This article will actually be directed at three different audiences, simultaneously, through a separation of levels of observation:

Those who do not play chess or vaguely know the rules but do not play regularly Those who do play regularly and have chess tournament experience, but are below an expert level Those who are at expert or master level

The entire game, along with supporting variations, is embedded here so that you can click through what happened as well as what could have happened but didn't. My detailed explanations follow after this embedded interactive board.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "?"] [Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White "Bill Gates"] [Black "Magnus Carlsen"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "B00"]

e4 Nc6 { An unusual reply for Black, the Nimzovich Defense, usually considered not very good, and not played often.} 2. Nf3 { OK, but not most challenging.} ( 2. d4 { Grabbing the center is the most challenging reply.} ) 2… d5 { Entering a type of Scandinavian Defense.} 3. Bd3 $2 { A poor move that defends the attacked e4 Pawn but blocks the d Pawn and also makes the Bishop a target for attack.} 3… Nf6 $6 ( 3… Nb4 { The best reply for Black is to immediately take advantage of White's poorly placed Bishop, not only winning the Bishop pair by force, but also ruining White's Pawn structure.} ) 4. exd5 ( 4. e5 Nd7 5. Bb5 a6 6. Bxc6 bxc6 7. d4 e6 ) 4… Qxd5 { Actually the best recapture in this particular situation.} ( 4… Nxd5 { Also reasonable.} ) 5. Nc3 Qh5 $1 { This is trappy move, hoping White will castle King side and allow an attack there.} ( 5… Qd6 { A safer retreat square, resulting in a more normal middle game typical of the Scandinavian Defense.} ) 6. O-O ( 6. Nb5 { White could have tried to punish Black for the Queen being away from defense of the c7 Pawn.} 6… Nd5 $1 ( 6… Kd8 $2 { Black gives up castling.} ) 7. c4 Nf4 8. Bf1 Bg4 9. d4 e5 { With huge complications in which Black seems fine and has winning chances.} ( 9… O-O-O { A safer option in which Black looks OK but I think I'd rather be White.} 10. Bxf4 e5 11. Be2 exf4 12. O-O ) 10. Nxc7+ Kd8 11. Nb5 ( 11. Nxa8 $2 { Snatching the Rook is bad.} 11… e4 ) 11… Bb4+ 12. Nc3 Bxf3 13. Qxf3 Qxf3 14. gxf3 exd4 15. Bxf4 dxc3 16. O-O-O+ Ke7 ) ( 6. Be2 { Immediately unblocking the d Pawn to continue development was probably best.} ) 6… Bg4 { Black clearly has a good game now, with smooth development, pressure on White's King side, and Queen side castling to come.} 7. h3 $2 ( 7. Be2 { Best, to prevent doubled f Pawns and break the pin of the Knight.} ) 7… Ne5 $4 { A losing move that an aggressive beginner might play.} ( 7… Bxf3 { Doubling White's f Pawns gave Black a clear advantage.} 8. Qxf3 Qxf3 9. gxf3 O-O-O ) 8. hxg4 ( 8. Be4 Nxf3+ 9. Bxf3 Bxf3 10. Qxf3 ) 8… Nfxg4 { White has won a Bishop for a Pawn. Black's only hope is to remove White's Knight from defending the mating square on h2.} 9. Nxe5 $4 { White falls for the trap.} ( 9. Re1 { There is no mate for Black on h2, because White's King can escape to f1 and then e2. With a piece up, White has a won game.} 9… Nxf3+ 10. Qxf3 Qh2+ 11. Kf1 Qh1+ 12. Ke2 { Oops, White's King has escaped! Black is completely dead. I show a complete plausible continuation for the sake of those of you who are not so familiar with chess and want to see how a won game is won.} 12… Qh5 { Protecting the Knight on g4.} 13. Bb5+ c6 ( 13… Kd8 $4 { Loses instantly to forced mate.} 14. Qd3+ Kc8 15. Qd7+ Kb8 16. Qd8# ) 14. Bxc6+ { A combination that wins a Rook and three Pawns for one Bishop.} 14… bxc6 15. Qxc6+ Kd8 16. Qxa8+ Kd7 17. Qxa7+ Kd8 18. Qa8+ Kd7 19. f3 { Preventing a discovered check and attacking Black's Knight.} 19… Nf6 20. Qb7+ Kd8 21. Nb5 { Threatening mate in 2 with Qc7+ and Qc8#.} 21… Qc5 { Protecting the c7 square to avoid mate.} 22. Na7 { Threatening a mate with Nc6+ and if …Ke8, then Qc8#.} 22… Qc7 { Giving the Black King an escape square d7.} 23. Nc6+ Kd7 24. Ne5+ Kd8 25. Nxf7+ { Forking the King and the Rook on h8.} 25… Kd7 26. Qxc7+ Kxc7 27. Nxh8 { And White is up by two Rooks and three Pawns. The game is effectively over. It may take 20 more moves to force checkmate, but it is inevitable.} ) 9… Qh2# 0-1`} />

Lesson 1: Why Carlsen played a bad chess opening

The first observation to make is that Bill Gates probably knows how to play a basic chess opening as White. Very popular, for example, is to play 1 e4, as Gates in fact did (the late Bobby Fischer's favorite), and then if Black symmetrically plays 1…e5, White plays 2 Nf3 attacking Black's Pawn, then Black usually defends with 2…Nc6, and then White plays 3 Bb5 attacking that Knight. This would be the famous Spanish Opening, also known as the "Ruy Lopez", after the Spanish priest of the 16th century (yes, chess wisdom goes way back!) who made a systematic study of this opening.

Carlsen plays both colors of this opening: in the recent World Championship match against Anand, for example, he played the Black side repeatedly with success in three games, drawing two and winning one.

But in this game against Gates, he did not play this opening. Instead, he played an opening that is usually considered unusual and not so good, the Nimzovich Defense. Why?

The short answer: because by playing the best moves, Carlsen would have risked taking much longer to win a game against Gates. If you are a seasoned chess player, especially if you play blitz, you understand this. If you are not a chess player, or do not know much beyond the rules, this may puzzle you: how could playing better lead to winning much more slowly? The answer is that games are not won so much as lost.

Here's an analogy. Suppose you find yourself being attacked by someone and you need to defend yourself. Do you put up your best blocks, and attack back with proper form, making sure to stay safe? Or do you do one of those risky roundhouse kicks you see in the movies, where you could get in a lot of trouble if you failed? Doing the "right" thing does not make for entertaining and short action movie scenes. So that's what happened in this game: Carlsen gambled that Gates would not know how to play properly, and played an opening with an intention of possibly unleashing that roundhouse kick.

Lesson 2: Chess is psychological warfare

Gates seemed confused by the Nimzovich Defense. On move 2, he makes a perfectly good move, but the move Carlsen clearly had wanted to see. Gates was on autopilot, playing the Knight out to f3 as though Carlsen had played 1…e5 instead. There were other options. 2 d4 would also have allowed Carlsen to continue his game plan of advancing with 2…d5, but 2 Nc3 would have stopped that plan and made the game probably much, much longer.

Contrary to the popular misconception of chess as pure logic, it is actually primarily a psychological sport, in which knowing how the opponent might react is a valuable part of being competitive. This is true at the highest levels as well as in casual blitz chess. Carlsen won his world title last year largely on the basis of thwarting Anand psychologically, refusing to play "good" openings that he knew Anand would be prepared for, and playing bland openings instead. Here, in a flashy game against Gates, he took the opposite approach, deliberately playing a "bad" opening that expected Gates not to be prepared for.

Lesson 3: Refusing to play the best move because it may win too slowly

Gates played a poor move 3, being defensive in a position in which he could have seized an advantage aggressively by capturing Black's Pawn on d5.

However, Carlsen refused to punish this poor move. The obvious punishing move, that most club players would see and play, is 3…Nb4, attacking the White Bishop, and in fact winning it in exchange for the Knight, because if the Bishop moves, then White loses the Pawn on e4 that the Bishop is defending.

Again, this goes back to psychology. If Carlsen had played the obvious and best move, the game could have taken much longer to win. It would have been a matter of gaining a permanent advantage by winning the Bishop pair and ruining White's Pawn structure on the d file, and then pressing further until victory.

If you look back at the video, you can see Carlsen hesitating before playing the "worse" move. In a real game against a real opponent, there is no doubt he would have instantly whipped out the strong 3…Nb4, no hesitation.

Lesson 4: The appeal of open vs. closed games

The gamble worked, because Gates took the Pawn on d5 on move 4, and Carlsen brought out his Queen, as he had intended from the very moment he played his very first opening move!

Note that Gates could have played e5 closing the position, to reach a perfectly decent game for White. In fact, I believe many club players would have instinctively played e5, in analogy with fundamental positions in the French Defense. Click through the embedded game board for a logical continuation of the game if Gates had played e5. Note that after White gets in d4 and Black gets in e6, the resulting French Defense setup is very closed and it will take a very long time for Black to win the game.

Closed games may not be as flashy and media-friendly as open games, but they are very strategically rich and beautiful to play and watch. It would have been interesting if Gates had gone into this French Defense setup and Carlsen had to patiently attack White's center with f6, get the half-open f file, swing the dark Bishop against White's King side, free the light-squared Bishop also, and bring the Queen around to the King side via Qe8, etc. There might even have been a thematic exchange sacrifice on f3 to break up White's King side.

But this would not have been a nine-move media spectacle.

Lesson 5: The unexpected complexity of chess

On move 5, Gates correctly attacked Carlsen's Queen with his Knight, and Carlsen played the Queen over to the King side. Although a thematic plan in this opening, under circumstances where Black has already played the light-squared Bishop out to g4 and is preparing to castle Queen side, this move actually looked to me like a blunder! But upon looking at it more, with the help of the computer, I saw that it was not.

(The following discussion is mainly for those of expert or master strength.)

The reason Qh5 looked like a blunder was because it seemed that White could play the very strong-looking Nb5, threatening to win the Pawn on c7 with check and also pick up Black's Rook. Black could defend by Kd8, but that forfeits castling and guarantees White an advantage. Nd5 to defend instead looks possible, but then c4 chasing the Knight looks strong. After Black's Nf4, White retreats the Bishop to defend, but renews the threat. However, after Black plays Bg4, the position then becomes a bit crazy, with Black having huge threats against White's Knight on f3 and offering to give up both castling and the Rook on a8 for a big attack against White. After White plays d4, attacking Black's Knight on f4, things look bad for Black.

It turns out that Black can castle Queen side, abandoning the Knight but then creating threats with e5 in order to regain the piece. So far, so good: an expert or master player could see all this because of the forced nature of the calculations.

But when I ran the position through a chess engine, the computer spit out a completely different approach, having Black not castle Queen side, but instead play e5 immediately, still offering to give up the the Pawn on c7, castling rights, and the Rook on a8. I did not see this possibility. Nor have I analyzed the full ramifications. All I know is that yet again, chess engines reveal the surprising complexity of chess, one that the top world human players grapple with regularly. As an amateur, I am still repeatedly surprised by how intricate chess positions can be. If you are curious, you may wish to work out the possible continuations after the crazy-looking 9…e5.

It would have been fascinating if Gates had seen Nb5 and played it, forcing Carlsen to enter into these wild complications.

Lesson 6: Playing a good move can lead to losing quickly, but it's not the fault of the good move

On move 6, Gates castled King side. This was a good move. A general principle that chess novices often neglect is King safety. Many games in chess are lost because one side did not protect the King by castling in time. Beginners are taught to castle as early as possible, as a rule of thumb. It is usually a great principle to follow, and it was in this game.

Yet, it was because Gates castled King side that he lost so quickly. Paradox? Yes. What happened was that he lost because of things that he did wrong after castling. If he had played a worse plan, bringing the Bishop back to e2, then developing the Queen side with d3, and castling Queen side, the game would have been considerably longer for sure.

Sometimes it is tempting for a less experienced chess player to attribute a loss of a game to a move that was actually a good move, instead of noticing the true blunder that happened well after the good move. In particular, it would be very tempting to reason, "Black's Queen is already aiming at my King side, so I shouldn't have castled there into the attack."

This happens in real life all the time: it is the logical fallacy of post hoc, propter hoc, or "after this, therefore because of this". For example, someone might hear about a runner dying of a heart attack and wrongly conclude that running is bad for your health, or someone else might hear about a runner losing weight and recovering from diabetes and wrongly conclude that running lots of marathons is the key to health.

Chess is a game in which, in the long run, you cannot succeed if you fall into the trap of logical fallacies: all psychology aside, it is still a game of logic, in which if someone plays a trick on you, you can learn the truth from it for the next time you face that same opponent or a different one, and perform better. That is the beauty of the game.

Lesson 7: The appalling practice of playing a terrible move in hope that your opponent doesn't see how bad it is

On move 7, Gates played h3, attacking Black's Bishop on g4. The obvious and good move is to exchange the attacked Bishop with White's Knight on f3, trading Queens after White retakes with the Queen, and wrecking White's King side Pawn structure to obtain a clear advantage. The average club player would play this continuation without hesitation since it is obviously good and best.

Unfortunately, with the Queens off the board, it would then have taken probably another thirty moves for Black to win the game.

Instead, Carlsen played a shockingly bad, losing move: he ignored the threat to his Bishop on g4 and simply offered a sacrifice, while making an unjustified aggressive gesture with his Knight to d5 against White's pinned Knight on f3.

I was not happy to see him do this, because I believe many people believed this was an authentically and well-played chess game, rather than media fluff, and because many chess players actually deliberately engage in this practice in serious games, and I would like to discourage it. I wrote this article largely because of this howlingly bad move. I wrote this article for my friends who were wowed by this "daring" attack but need to know the truth.

The truth is that this was not a serious game in which Carlsen played well. It was one of those games you might see played in urban parks by hustlers (I have played with such hustlers before; they typically let you win one and then try to get you to play them for more money and then start playing more and more for real). Carlsen played like a hustler in this game. Granted, it's fun to do this sometimes, as long as everyone is in on the joke and knows what is going on. But this game has been forwarded around with no disclaimer that it was for entertainment purposes only.

Lesson 8: The right plan is more important than the right move; but what about the importance of failure?

Gates accepted the sacrifice. Again, it is important to emphasize that even though he got checkmated just one move later, it wasn't because he was foolhardy in doing the right thing by accepting the sacrifice to achieve a winning position.

He played the right move. But he didn't play the right followup move. He clearly had not calculated the implications of his move, however right the move was. If you do the right thing, but without really understanding why it was right, you can get into trouble. This is as true in chess as it is in regular life. It is important to make a move not in isolation, but in full context of what might happen afterwards.

For example, if you are stuck in the wilderness, and you know which direction the main road is, the right thing to do may well be to start moving in that direction. But this assumes that you have already seen that you are not walking toward a deep rift, or that you have seen a barrier but know you have the resources to overcome it. If you have not at least figured out some kind of plan, it may be safer not to head to the main road, but to head in a different direction toward terrain that looks less unpredictable, even if the route will take longer to traverse.

Should Gates have taken another path, instead of accepting the sacrifice? This is a hard question to answer. An improving player should always at least experiment with trying to play the best move possible, even if not perfectly equipped for the followup; you learn by failing while doing the right thing. But as a practical matter, there are good reasons to argue that failing too drastically may not help learning, and that playing more safely is a more incremental way of learning. I think it's a hard judgment call sometimes.

For example, here, Gates could have done some meta-thinking, "Hmm, Carlsen wouldn't be offering this free piece to me if he didn't have some trick to play on me, so I should play it safe and decline to accept it, and instead play safely with 8 Be4 to simply defend my attacked Knight on f3." If he had in fact done that, Carlsen's trick would have been halted, because there are no more pieces he can bring in against the Knight on f3. Again, objectively the best for Black would be to trade everything down on f3, giving White doubled, isolated f Pawns, but this is the route to a very long game.

Unfortunately, I see this kind of meta-reasoning happen too often in club level chess, where a weaker player is afraid that the stronger opponent must have had a reason when playing a seemingly bad move, and therefore does not play the correct continuation against it. I think there is a fuzzy line between being pragmatic about one's limitations and being too timid to dare to question a poor move and try to prove it wrong. This psychological tension is definitely an important part of the game, and can be a vehicle for developing self-awareness, trust in one's own mind (rather than trust in the authority of those better than you), and continuous learning in case of making the wrong call.

I advocate erring on the side of learning from one's mistakes by going out on a limb at least sometimes.

Lesson 9: Carlsen was really lost; life and death can depend on only one detail

In the final move of the game, Gates played a move that would be very good except for one flaw: it allowed instant checkmate.

But we cannot entirely blame him. Ignoring the checkmate oversight, the move was actually a fantastic one. White takes the Knight on e5:

If Black recaptures with the Knight, White wins the Queen on h5. If Black recaptures with the Queen, White capture the Knight on g4, left unguarded because of the deflection of the Queen that had protected it on h5.

So it looks like a brilliant move, forcing the win of a piece. With Black two pieces down, victory would be in sight for White.

Unfortunately, there's that checkmate.

In chess, you can do everything right, have everything figured out but one detail, and lose horribly. In fact, many high-level games actually go this way. What are analogies in real life? There are many.

In warfare, missing one vital piece of information could mean losing an entire battle. The Challenger tragedy. Mission-critical computer software. Professions such as surgery, race car driving hinge on detail. Competitive sprinting and hurdling.

Carlsen was really lost

Gates could have maintained a winning advantage by playing 9 Re1. This provides an escape route for his King in case Black came down to h2 with the Queen by first trading off White's defensive Knight on f3. White's King can escape to f1, e2, and then d1 as needed. Retaining a piece advantage, objectively White should win the game.

Of course, in practice, even if Gates had played correctly, I doubt he would have won. Carlsen would probably have castled Queen side and continued playing tricky moves while waiting for blunders, likely because of the blitz time format. It would have definitely been entertaining hustler-style blitz chess by Carlsen in any case.

For the benefit of those who want to see how quickly White can win, after Re1, if Black insists on trying to check White's King to oblivion (which Carlsen would not have done), I have provided a sample forcing continuation by White.

Conclusion

That was an entertaining game.

But I felt I needed to point out to the wider public that in fact this was the diametric opposite of the brutally logical play that won him the World Champion title just months ago! He won here in nine moves not because he played the logical, correct moves, but because he resorted to every element of hustler psychology to try to create a quick decisive outcome. I hope that this article helps explain what happened.

My no-cookie rule: a photo update

Thu, 30 Jan 2014 02:50:22 GMT

Two weeks ago I vowed never to eat a cookie again, unless I took a photo of it and posted it.

I was at a party tonight, and originally saw no cookies, so I thought I was safe.

I was wrong. After hours of eating a lot of pretty good food, I saw that cookies were brought out and place next to the coffee in back. I paused, remembering my promise, but then thought, "what the heck", and "carefully" chose just two cookies, photographed them, and ate them.

Consequences

My first observation was that it was actually not so easy to choose two cookies to take. Visually, on close inspection, I did not actually believe that any of the cookies were really going to be so tasty. In fact, the more deliberate I was, the more I visualized that these things as assembled sugar, fat, and wheat bombs serving no useful purpose for my body.

I could have just stopped there, and chosen not to take any cookies, but habit or curiosity caused me to take two anyway.

It turned out that I didn't really enjoy the cookies. They weren't so good. Also, they seemed much bigger when I started eating them, in that I had enough and wanted to stop but felt like I should finish what I started.

Then I proceeded to feel bloated and sleepy. I went home really thinking about the stupid thing that I did, and the fact that I was going to have to write about my experience.

Future

I suspect that I will eventually break my habit of eating cookies at social occasions where they present themselves. I had a really bad experience tonight. Because I documented it, I will remember it.

(Update of 2014-01-31)

Check out what happened two days later.

OpenHack Pittsburgh: a great place to share and learn

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 03:38:48 GMT

Another month, another meeting of OpenHack Pittsburgh!

The project I worked on was writing a blog post on the controversial subject of unit testing private methods. I ended up not finishing the post, not only because there's a lot to say, but also because I got sidetracked (in a good way) because of discussions with people while at OpenHack!

There were many good points that were made and so I had to reconsider some of my arguments. My overall viewpoint is still that the distinction between "public" and "private" is fluid, and that anything that seems significant enough that it feels like it should be tested should in fact be tested, ignoring the artifacts of how it is currently classified. One of the main counterpoints was that if you need to test it, then it should be factored out and made its own unit so that in essence, the rule against testing the private is maintained.

Anyway, I will put up my post once I actually collect all my thoughts together and finish it.

My first time at an English country dance music jam

Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:39:03 GMT

Relatively recently, a new English country dance music jam in the Pittsburgh area has been organized by <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.amarillismusic.com/aboutus.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.amarillismusic.com/aboutus.html">Maro Avakian</span>, whom I first met through joining in playing for the Holiday Ball two years ago. I was unable to make it to the first couple of meetings, but finally, on a nasty snowy Saturday, my schedule happened to be open, so I went.

I'm not completely new to English country dance music. It was almost two years ago when I first encountered it, as a dancer. As has happened several times now in my life, becoming familiar with the dance got me interested in the music and in the idea of actually playing the music.

It turns out that I'd already played some of this kind of music for myself as a result of my study of the Baroque flute, because method books I have for the instrument include a good amount of dance music from the era. In any case, the book we use for many tunes is the volume by <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.canispublishing.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.canispublishing.com/">Peter Barnes</span>, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://mysite.verizon.net/peterabarnes/books.htm" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://mysite.verizon.net/peterabarnes/books.htm">"The Barnes Book of English Country Dance Tunes"</span>, a fine anthology. Actually, I ordered my copy only last week and was lucky it arrived in the mail just in time!

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://mysite.verizon.net/peterabarnes/Book1.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://mysite.verizon.net/peterabarnes/Book1.jpg">[image defunct]</span>

Instruments

We had a pretty good turnout given the weather. Apart from Maro on piano, we had people playing flute, Baroque flute, recorders, ukulele, mandolin, percussion.

I'd brought my flute, Baroque flute, and soprano, alto, tenor recorders, but since there were already two others on modern flute and soprano recorder, I ended up playing just the Baroque flute, alto recorder, and tenor recorder. The Baroque flute is pretty hard to play in some of the keys, and also is kind of soft, so I mostly played the alto and tenor recorders. I gradually gravitated toward improvising inner voices with the tenor recorder. I think I will do that in the future also. In addition, I should bring my bass recorder, to add a yet lower instrument to our group.

Improvisation

We had great discussions about tips and tricks for improvising lines and filling out chords. Needless to say, I was botching up a lot of stuff as I experimented, but you can't learn if you don't try!

Conclusion

It looks like I have a new musical outlet, English country dance music. I hope to continue participating in it. As with French traditional dance music, I like the improvisational nature of working with a tune with repetition.

How Pittsburgh meetups changed my life

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 02:15:30 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://img2.meetupstatic.com/9602342981488429316/img/header/logo.png" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://img2.meetupstatic.com/9602342981488429316/img/header/logo.png">[image: Meetup logo]</span>

Recently, I was informed by the message board of the Pittsburgh hiking meetup group that there was a recent <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://triblive.com/lifestyles/morelifestyles/5356571-74/meetup-group-internet" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://triblive.com/lifestyles/morelifestyles/5356571-74/meetup-group-internet">local article about Pittsburgh meetups</span>, and it quoted one of the organizers of the hiking meetup, Jennifer Braun (who happens to be one of us participating in a beautiful New Year hike led by Gary Byrdman that Abby and I went on):

People should try new things, because it can change their life," she says. "It sounds kind of happy sunshine, but hiking changed my life. And I never knew until someone told me to try it. Find the thing that you love -- hiking, biking, quilting -- it's just everything you could think of. Once you're in one group and start looking around, you can really meet new people and do new things and get more out of life.

</blockquote>

I was really moved by what she said, because my own immediate thought also when thinking about Meetup is that it changed my life. How so?

Life before Meetup

Yes, there was life before Meetup, which I joined over six years ago, on December 28, 2007.

I did manage to find out about things to do, people to meet, etc., through friends who were already involved in various activities.

I also did this by myself through Web searches, such as finding out about the Pittsburgh Chess Club in 2005 by discovering its own Web site, and finding out about the Pittsburgh Recorder Society also through its own Web site.

Transitions to Meetup

Some activities I participated in before Meetup existed became more popular and drew more people as a result. For example, I had been hiking with many of the people in the Pittsburgh hiking meetup group for a couple of years, through the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://alleghenysc.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://alleghenysc.org/">Sierra Club Allegheny Group</span> <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://alleghenysc.org/?cat=13" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://alleghenysc.org/?cat=13">outing listings</span>, before Meetup existed and before these wonderful volunteers joined Meetup and started advertising hikes there as organizers. Also, I personally witnessed the explosion in popularity of the Pittsburgh Ruby and Pittsburgh Python groups when they joined Meetup.

I think this illustrates the power of there being a common platform that everyone uses and therefore can get "suggestions" (based on what you put down as areas of interest in your profile) and notifications that one's friends has joined a newly created meetup group. I have definitely joined many meetup groups that were not on my radar until I got notified through the Meetup platform.

My Meetup life

I just checked and it looks like I'm currently a member of forty (!) meetup groups. This is a pretty extreme number, but in reality, of course, many of these groups are groups I've never actually attended an event of, and some groups I participate in much more than others. On average, however, I'd say I attend an average of one Meetup event a week. For example, this month of January so far, I've already attended four Meetup events, and am already scheduled to attend another one next week, still this month, and there may be others I will attend in addition as well (for example, I'm currently considering attending an event on Sunday).

Multiply that by six years and that's probably around three hundred Meetup events I've been to, apparently, since joining. Meetup is clearly a pretty substantial part of my life.

One benefit of Meetup is that even if I'm not interested in or as devoted to something right now, I know that if I wanted to, there is a community out there for it. The sense of not being alone is really reassuring, in a world in which I had found it difficult, as an introvert, to stay up to date with what's going on locally that I might find of interest. For example, if I ever wanted to learn Japanese or explore Japanese culture more (to pick a random topic), I am pretty sure that I could find a Japanese meetup group and join and find out what they're doing, and basically be encouraged to show up at an event and start meeting people. The Meetup platform allows me to check something out without investing a lot into it up front; and because the events are publicized, and signing up puts a name and profile to your face, there is a sense in which the situation just feels far less anxious than if you were to show up somewhere and not have any idea how many people were going or even exactly where to meet. The Meetup platform provides so much information that really decreases the risks or anxieties I've sometimes had before Meetup.

Before Meetup, it took a lot of time and energy just to maintain connections with particular communities of interests and activities, and therefore I think one had to be much more limited. Now, I can explore a much wider set of interests, if I choose to. (It turns out, ironically, that I explored extremely widely in the past two or three years, but have deliberately been pruning back considerably in favor of more depth and also more personal time at home.)

Abby and I have also done things on our own that were inspired by official Meetup events that we could not or did not attend. Basically, you can find out about places to visit, restaurants to eat at, concerts to attend, and all kinds of other stuff, just by watching what goes on through Meetup.

Conclusion

Meetup has been a permanent part of my life since I joined in 2007. It is a fantastic concept whose success is totally deserved. I tell all my friends, when they relocate, or even think about moving somewhere, to check out local Meetup groups and join them. There's no better way to quickly get started in meeting new people who share your interests or values, or explore outside your current circle. I am grateful to founders of Meetup for helping to socially connect people in a world that often seems too big and fragmented.

You are not alone.

Don't believe the hype about not believing the hype

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:09:04 GMT

An article came my way with the title, "Don't believe the hype about behavioral economics".

I don't have any comments on the article itself. Instead, I have a comment about the article title.

I don't like it when people tell me "don't believe the hype about X". I find this way of speaking to be problematic on many levels:

It is often a disguised way of saying "believe this other thing Y", and in fact very often is a disguised way of saying "believe what I consider to be the correct, the status quo before this new kid on the block arrived".
It is patronizing, assuming that the reader should "believe" or "not believe" something, rather than, maybe, actually reason about pros and cons of some idea.
I don't actually care whether there is "hype" or not about something. I only care whether it's true or useful. Sometimes something "hyped" is in fact correct; sometimes it is incorrect. I don't care about the "hype" part, only about the truth part. So don't drag in irrelevant matters such as whether someone out there is promoting something, and whether you're promoting it or opposing the promoting of it. I don't want to see articles with titles like "Don't believe the hype about the earth going around the sun" or "Don't believe the hype about the sun going around the earth". If you have something substantial to say, choose a more informative title.

Conclusion

I don't care whether something is new or old, a fad or hyped. Don't try to appeal to me on that debased emotional level when trying to sell me something. Show me whether something works or doesn't, and I'll pay attention. Not all old ideas are bad, not all new ideas are bad. But hype about hype is more annoying than hype itself.

The Chess Improver: Giving up a fianchettoed bishop to win a pawn may not be worthwhile

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 12:50:24 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Giving up a fianchettoed bishop to win a pawn may not be worthwhile"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

I've been having a student study the classic game collection anthology by Irving Chernev, "Logical Chess: Move by Move". Although there are flaws in this anthology, I still believe it is very instructive, if supplemented with close discussion and correction where appropriate: in fact, many times my student has asked good questions that provide an opportunity to refine or correct what is explained in the book. Here is one of the games in the book where questions were raised: game 12, Pitschak-Flohr, Liebwerda 1934, featuring a Reverse Dragon in which Chernev made it seem as though Black had the upper hand the whole way, when in fact, in some critical positions, White could have played better, illustrating the power of the fianchettoed Bishop.

The first missed opportunity

The first poor choice for White was when he failed to open up the center and unleash the power of the fianchettoed Bishop on g2 at no risk. This was after Black's 11…Qd7, when White could have played g4 and then d4, resulting in both Bishops aiming at Black's Queen side. Chernev did not mention this possible continuation for White.

The second missed opportunity

The second poor choice was subtle, occurring after White had given Black an opportunity to win the h3 Pawn with 13…Qxh3. White immediately regained a Pawn by giving up the fianchettoed Bishop by exchanging it for a Knight on c6 and then taking the c6 Pawn. Chernev does correctly indicate that White should have retained the Bishop, but suggested a defensive move Bg2, giving the impression that White needed to be in defensive mode.

But the reality is that by giving up his light-squared Bishop for the sake of winning a Pawn, Black was actually giving White good chances for an attack on Black's Queen side. White could have played actively with 14 Nc5 Bxc5 15 Rxc5, securing the Bishop pair while retaining pressure against Black's Queen side as well as the e5 Pawn, and plan to regain the Pawn only under advantageous conditions. In fact, Black has to play accurately or else face grave danger. Passive play will allow White to launch a ferocious attack against Black's Knights and Pawns on the Queen side with ideas such as a4 or b4 aiming for a5 or b5, along with bringing the Queen over and doubling the Rooks on the c file, for example. Regaining the Pawn immediately was not as important as generating active piece play.

Granted, Chernev's point in this game was to illustrate Black's King side attack, but the instructive nature of this game was diminished by its not being as thoroughly one-sided as most of the other games in the anthology.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Liebwerda"] [Site ""] [Date "1934"] [Round "?"] [White "Pitschak, Rudolf"] [Black "Flohr, Salomon"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "A29"]

c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. g3 d5 4. cxd5 Nxd5 5. Bg2 Nb6 6. Nf3 Nc6 7. O-O Be7 8. d3 O-O 9. Be3 Bg4 10. h3 $2 Bh5 11. Rc1 Qd7 $2 12. Na4 $2 ( 12. g4 $1 Bg6 13. d4 exd4 14. Nxd4 Nxd4 15. Bxd4 $201 ) 12… Bxf3 $6 { Grabbing the Pawn.} ( 12… f6 ) 13. Bxf3 Qxh3 14. Bxc6 $2 ( 14. Nc5 Bxc5 15. Rxc5 ) 14… bxc6 15. Rxc6 $2 Nd5 16. Qe1 $4 f5 17. Bc5 f4 18. Bxe7 fxg3 19. fxg3 Ne3 0-1`} />

Cold but pretty winter hike in Wingfield Pines

Sun, 19 Jan 2014 01:10:22 GMT

Less than three weeks ago, Abby and I went on a great hike in Boyce-Mayview Park in Upper St. Clair, led by Gary Byrdman.

Today we went on another hike with Gary, very close to the Boyce-Mayview Park, but in a neighboring park, the Wingfield Pines.

Cold!

It was a beautiful day, clear sky.

But it was pretty freaking cold, hovering around 10F, I think, maybe a bit higher. I was slightly underdressed, and paid the price. I should have worn my thicker gloves and also long underwear. After getting home, it took a long time for my body to return to normal. The problem is that in previous winters of my life, I have not gone out hiking when the temperature is below 20F, so this was a first for me. Now I know better what I need to wear.

About the park

We parked across the street from the park entrance because the parking area at the entrance is pretty small. Across the street is a large parking lot for the community center.

There were just six of us braving the cold for this hike. Gary and others being locals, told us a lot about the history of the park. It was really fascinating. The land has undergone many changes of ownership and restoration over the years. I looked online after the hike and found useful information.

The land is currently owned by the Allegheny Land Trust and here is the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.alleghenylandtrust.org/properties/wingfield/overview/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.alleghenylandtrust.org/properties/wingfield/overview/">official site of the area</span>.

We had a leisurely hike, going about five miles in two and a half hours, stopping often to check out the sights. One of us brought her dog along. She lives nearby and walks her dog twice a day here! What she really loves is that it's officially a legal off-leash area for dogs. So this place is great for dog lovers who want their dogs to truly get their exercise! We bumped into some happy-looking dogs and their owners during the hike.

The water treatment system is pretty interesting.

Photos

I didn't take many photos because every time I took off my gloves to be able to use my phone camera, my fingers got super cold, so I gave up.

But photos some others of us took are available here. Julie took particularly detailed and beautiful photos of cardinals, bluebirds, woodpeckers, and ducks that we saw.

Coming back in spring and summer

Abby and I will definitely come back in spring and summer. The park is lovely in winter, but it will be even more gorgeous in spring and summer, quite obviously.

To get an idea of what the place is like when it's not winter, here is a sample link I found to local coverage.

A video:

Conclusion

Check out Wingfield Pines, in Upper St. Clair. It's less than a half-hour drive from Pittsburgh. It's beautiful.

Hiroo Onoda and the Six Million Dollar man: what does it mean to know how to die or live?

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 03:50:24 GMT

A news article just came my way that fascinated me: <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/hiroo-onoda-japanese-soldier-who-hid-in-philippine-jungle-for-29-years-dies-at-91/2014/01/17/7016d806-7f8b-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/hiroo-onoda-japanese-soldier-who-hid-in-philippine-jungle-for-29-years-dies-at-91/2014/01/17/7016d806-7f8b-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html">"Hiroo Onoda, Japanese soldier who hid in Philippine jungle for 29 years, dies at 91"</span>.

Of course, I had long heard of "stragglers" who did not realize that a war or persecution was over and kept fighting or fleeing, away from "civilization", unaware of how the rest of the world was changing. The most recent case of that I read about was a really moving story, astonishing and sad, about an Old Believer Russian family that hid out for forty years.

But in the case of this Japanese soldier, although I had not earlier read about his particular story, I instantly remembered an old TV episode I watched as a young child that was an astoundingly memorable episode, whose details are etched in my mind. This was "The Last Kamikaze", an episode of "The Six Million Dollar Man" TV series that I watched religiously back in the day. This episode was about a Japanese straggler from World War II. It changed my life forever.

The Last Kamikaze

Amazingly, I found the whole episode online. You may want to watch this episode before reading my spoilers below.

Discussion, with spoilers

It made a profound impact on me when I watched it over 30 years ago. First, there was the exciting action aspect, of course (all the booby traps in the jungle). But mostly, it was in some sense my first exposure to something from Japanese culture, in particular regarding notions of "honor".

OK, it was just TV, and American 1970s TV at a time when there weren't a lot of Asians even being portrayed at all, but in retrospect, it wasn't bad at all. I was confused by the attempted seppuku, and my parents had to explain what that was about (not being Japanese, but actually living during World War II in Taiwan under Japanese rule and remembering the Allies defeating Japan).

Death and life

But the real climax of the episode was when Steve Austin intervenes in the attempt and saves the character Kuroda, saying "You have shown that you know how to die. Now for the sake of your enemies, show me that you know how to live." I reflected on what it might mean to "know how to die" or to "know how to live". In that moment of the TV episode, my life was changed forever. I was around seven years old at the time. I suppose you could say I lost my "innocence" at that exact moment in time; I became a philosopher then.

I thought a lot about life and death after that episode. What is the meaning of life, or of death? And most of all, what do we choose, and why do we choose? What is honor?

My questioning may have begun at seven, but it has not yet ended. I do not have the final answer.

But that one TV episode got me started on a lifelong philosophical journey. When I was older, I studied the Christian Bible, which is all about exploring what it means to live and die: Jesus dying and living again, and the command to be dead to sin but alive in Christ.

Of course, there is also the controversial choice of Socrates to commit suicide, which I read various conflicting opinions about: when I had just finished high school, the book "The Trial of Socrates" by I.F. Stone came out that was very provocative and turned me against Socrates, whom I had earlier considered a hero, from reading Plato's dialogues about him.

I was also bothered but fascinated by the lore that Gautama Buddha deliberately ate rotting food in order not to offend his host, and died as a result.

And what of the controversial mass suicide by Jews at Masada? Or that of self-immolating Buddhist monks in Vietnam?

In college, I took a philosophy course by Frederick Neuhouser and studied Nietzsche, who had his character Zarathustra say, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/21" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/21">"Die at the right time"</span>. I was profoundly affected by the challenges that Nietzsche threw at his readers. That course changed my life.

Very recently, Stoicism has become popularized as a living philosophy for today, with proponents such as <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-william-irvine-stoic-life" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-william-irvine-stoic-life">William Irvine</span>, who talks about "contemplation of death". I very much enjoyed his book <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-guide-to-the-good-life-9780195374612" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-guide-to-the-good-life-9780195374612">"A Guide to the Good Life: the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy"</span> not long after it came out; reading it in early 2011, I changed the course of my life. (Don't forget that Seneca was also forced to commit suicide.)

I am fascinated by deliberate, reasoned decisions about life and death.

A system for quitting eating cookies?

Fri, 17 Jan 2014 01:29:33 GMT

I decided last night, after eating too many cookies at the Steel City Ukuleles meetup, that I have to stop eating cookies. I cannot justify them on the grounds of health (and how crappy I sometimes feel after eating them).

My "creative" idea that I shared with Abby: I will never eat a cookie again in my life unless I take a photo of it.

In other words, the cookie has somehow appeal to me so much that I bother to pause, deliberately take a photo, and risk social embarrassment (and better yet, explain my system to people so they know I'm not supposed to eat cookies).

Also, I must post publicly any cookie that I eat.

We'll see how well this system works. I can sense cookie opportunities coming up already!

(Update of 2014-01-29)

Check out what happened two days later.

(Update of 2014-01-31)

Check out what happened four days later.

(Current updates)

For current updates, just check out the cookies category to find out when I last mentioned cookies.

The Chess Improver: What if your opponent just gives you twelve free moves?

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 12:20:43 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""What if your opponent just gives you twelve free moves?"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Not long ago, I wrote a post about imagining that you can play ten moves in a row from the initial opening position. I never thought I would be writing about this same theme from the point of view of starting from a non-opening position.

But I just saw an astounding game fragment in the January 2014 issue of "Chess Life", in the column by GM Andy Soltis. He gave a position in the game between GM Ulf Andersson and IM Michael Basman in Hastings, 1974-75, in which after many moves, Basman (Black) had his pieces exactly where they were at the beginning of the sequence. And Soltis indicated that Basman won this game, without adding more details.

Upon seeing this game fragment, of course I had to see the rest of the game, so I looked it up. It turned out that Black's pieces after his move 23 were exactly where they were after his move 11!!

So how could White, with twelve free moves, actually worsen rather than improve his position? How did he lose, when all intuition would suggest that he must have had a forced win?

Returning to the theme of "imagining you have ten moves in a row"

Before reading my analysis of what happened and what could have happened, you might want to take a look at the critical position after move 11, and come up with a plan (or multiple possible plans) for White:

Finding a suitable plan

Here are some thoughts on this position. First, it is a classical fixed Pawn structure arising often from a Queen's Gambit Declined or Queen's Indian Defense, in which White has exchanged the c Pawn for Black's e Pawn. Black has a natural plan of possibly playing for Queen side counterplay c5, which might lead to a hanging Pawn structure. White has a natural plan of possibly playing for e4.

In any case, in order to break through Black's position, it is clear that White has to get a Pawn storm in somehow, to further restrict Black's pieces and to open lines.

e4 then e5

Now, there are subtleties concerning an e4 break by White. First of all, if White plays e4 without the support of f3, he might end up with an isolated d Pawn and get blocked up. Also, if White does play e4 without f3 support, it might be that the position is open enough to justify the isolated d Pawn. And playing a preparatory f3 has its drawbacks: White's Bishop is temporarily locked in, pressure on d5 temporarily drops, and Black might strike back with c5.

Finally, it is almost certainly bad for Black in the long run to allow White to play e4 and then e5, because then f4 and f5 will follow, with a strong King side attack.

b4 then b5

As mentioned, White needs to restrain Black from playing a possibly freeing c5. Often in these kinds of positions (especially in the Tartakower Defense of the Queen's Gambit Declined), White may play the minority-attack b4 to try to restrain c5, and also have idea of playing a4 and b5 against Black's c6 square (or Pawn if Black moved there). But sometimes this plan, which weakens c4, might give Black the possibility of playing c6, b5, a Knight to b6 and c4 for counterplay.

The other thematic restraining idea by White is to play Qb3 and Rfd1.

g4 then g5

Finally, another possible plan for White is a flank plan, aiming for g4 and g5 to pry apart Black's King side.

What actually happened

What actually happened was that White began the restraining process against Black's Queen side, and so Black decided to simply shuffle pieces around, having nothing better to do than to wait.

Then White switched to the other wing and embarked on the g4 plan. This in itself was not actually terrible. In fact, at some points White had a won game with an eventual threat of g5 dislodging Black's Knight defending d5.

Unfortunately, White made the mistake of instead overextending on the King side while exposing his own King. As a result, Black actually ended up freeing himself. Then after a number of errors, White further exposed his King and got into more danger.

Nevertheless, it took one final blunder before White lost the game by force, as a result of an exposed King combined with invasion by Black's Queen and Rook.

It took quite a few errors in judgment for White to end up losing this game, but all of us have lost games in which we had a huge advantage and lost the thread, first losing the advantage and then losing the drawable endgame!

Looking for a breakthrough myself

While analyzing this position, I came to the conclusion that a combination of playing on the Queen side and center and King side was a good way to go. My plan, with some variations, is in the annotations below. First, make sure that to watch d5 square, and make sure that c5 and c6 are always bad for Black. Second, tie Black down on the Queen side and get control of the critical c6 square, by a3, b4, a4, b5. Third, advance on the King side (I chose h4) to restrain Black there. Finally, I believe White can then, after acquiring so much space, gang up on black's c7 Pawn and d5 Pawn.

I invite you to work out other plans of winning, whether variations of Andersson's g5 idea or an f3/e4 idea. I think it's instructive to try out these different plans.

Unseen tactics

Black's shuffling around actually left open some tactics both player missed, such as a decisive 21 g5 breaking through on d5 as well as on g6 and the g file. This illustrates that even in a position in which seemingly quiet maneuvers are being performed, there could be moves that completely change the nature of the position.

The full game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Hastings 7475"] [Site "Hastings"] [Date "1974"] [Round "11"] [White "Ulf Andersson"] [Black "Michael John Basman"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "E18"]

Nf3 b6 2. g3 Bb7 3. Bg2 e6 4. O-O d5 5. c4 Nf6 6. d4 Be7 7. Nc3 O-O 8. Ne5 h6 9. Bf4 { Here's where Basman started just waiting around.} 9… a6 $5 { The beginning of an unusual purely defensive plan.} 10. Rc1 Ra7 { Protecting the Bishop on b7 and forcing White to do something about the c4 Pawn.} 11. cxd5 { Fixing the Pawn structure.} 11… exd5 $201 12. Qb3 { A thematic move to restrain Black by applying pressure to the Pawn on d5, and prepare for even more pressure with Rfd1 and then think about the e4 break.} 12… Ba8 $5 { Starting to shuffle around waiting.} ( 12… c5 $2 13. dxc5 bxc5 $2 14. Rfd1 { And Black will lose one of the weak hanging Pawns. This was the point of Qb3.} ) 13. Rfd1 Kh7 $5 { Very provocative, asking for e4.} ( 13… Bb7 ) 14. h3 { The beginning of an ambitious plan to play g4, Kg3, and h4, to prepare for g6.} ( 14. e4 { The thematic center break has to be looked at. Andersson must have thought it was not good enough for a win.} 14… c6 ( 14… dxe4 $2 15. Nxf7 ) 15. Nd3 ( 15. Na4 b5 16. Nc5 ) 15… dxe4 ( 15… Kg8 16. e5 { Allowing e5 is surely a mistake.} ) 16. Ne5 Kg8 17. Nxe4 Nd5 18. Bd2 $201 { The position looks fine for White, but Black has a fantastic Knight on d5 and it is not clear how White can make progress.} ) ( 14. f3 { Aiming for e4 supported by f3 is perfectly reasonable.} 14… c5 { Black can try for counterplay with c5. White is OK but why let this happen?} ) ( 14. a3 { Let's say White fortified the Queen side with a3 and b4, shutting down c5 and preparing a minority attack in case Black ever plays c6.} 14… Kg8 15. Qa2 Kh7 16. b4 Kg8 17. Qb3 Bb7 ( 17… Kh7 $2 $201 18. e4 c6 19. b5 { White breaks through.} ) 18. a4 Ba8 ( 18… c6 $201 19. b5 { Black's center and Queen side are about to be shattered.} ) 19. b5 a5 20. h4 { Restraining Black on both wings, and then building up against the c7 Pawn and d5 Pawn, looks effective to me.} ) 14… Kg8 15. Kh2 { In retrospect, it seems that bringing the King into the action was a mistaken plan.} 15… Kh7 16. g4 Kg8 17. Bg3 Bb7 18. e3 Ba8 19. a3 Bb7 $201 20. f4 Ba8 $4 $201 { Missing the power of g5.} 21. Rd2 $2 ( 21. g5 hxg5 22. fxg5 Nh5 23. g6 fxg6 24. Nxd5 Bxd5 25. Bxd5+ { Black is lost.} 25… Kh7 26. Rg1 ) 21… Qd6 $2 ( 21… c6 ) 22. f5 $2 ( 22. Bf3 { White could have maintained control of e5 and g5 by leaving the Pawn on f4. g5 is coming soon and Black is lost.} ) 22… Qd8 23. Bf4 Bb7 $201 { Black's pieces are back where they were 12 moves ago!! But White's position is actually a bit looser now than it was 12 moves ago.} 24. Rg1 $2 { Still going for g5.} 24… c6 25. Bf3 $2 ( 25. e4 ) 25… Nh7 { So much for White's g5.} ( 25… Nfd7 ) 26. Rc1 Bd6 27. Na4 $2 ( 27. e4 { White always had this possibility, which always was at least advantageous even if not winning.} ) 27… Bc7 28. Kg3 $2 { Not seeing the danger of King exposure.} ( 28. e4 ) 28… Nf6 29. h4 $2 Nfd7 30. Nxd7 $2 ( 30. Qc3 ) 30… Nxd7 31. Re2 Re8 $201 { What a remarkable turn of events. White is defending now.} 32. Kh3 Bxf4 33. exf4 Rxe2 34. Bxe2 Qe7 35. Bf3 b5 36. Nc5 $201 Bc8 $2 ( 36… Nxc5 37. Rxc5 { All of a sudden Black's King side is falling apart.} 37… h5 { White is still OK if holding onto the e5 outpost.} ) 37. Qd3 $2 ( 37. Nd3 { Rerouting the Knight to e5 was strong.} ) 37… h5 38. gxh5 $2 { Not seeing the danger to the King.} ( 38. Nxd7 hxg4+ 39. Bxg4 Bxd7 ) 38… Qf6 $2 ( 38… Nxc5 39. Rxc5 { Looks defensible by White despite the isolated and doubled f Pawns. The Rook on c1 is ready to defend as needed.} 39… Qf6 40. Kg4 ( 40. Bg4 $2 Re7 { White is under pressure.} ) 40… g6 ) 39. Kg3 $2 { It's a mistake letting Black's Bishop become active.} ( 39. Nxd7 Bxd7 40. Bg4 ) 39… Nxc5 40. Rxc5 Bxf5 41. Qc3 Bd7 42. Qd3 Ra8 ( 42… Qe6 ) 43. Rc1 Re8 44. Qc3 $201 { Now it looks like Black cannot break through for a win.} 44… c5 $5 { A pure swindling move.} 45. Qxc5 $4 { The big losing move in the game.} ( 45. dxc5 d4 { White is easily OK.} 46. Qd2 Re3 47. Re1 ) 45… Qf5 { Black's Queen is coming in on h3, and Black's Rook is coming down the e file.} 46. Qxd5 Qh3+ 47. Kf2 Qh2+ 48. Bg2 Qxf4+ 49. Bf3 Bg4 { Black's Bishop, which had been passive for so much of the game, is now critically useful.} 50. Rc3 Qh2+ 51. Bg2 Qxh4+ 52. Kg1 Re1+ 53. Bf1 Bh3 0-1`} />

Pittsburgh Scala Meetup: Introduction to Reactive

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 02:29:20 GMT

The Pittsburgh Scala Meetup met with Josh presenting an "Introduction to Reactive".

It was great.

Pre-meetup dinner

A couple of us (Justin, Josh, Chris, me) had an early dinner at Everyday Noodles before the meetup. Very filling!

Turnout

Ten of us showed up for this meeting.

Presentation

What is "reactive" anyway?

In case you didn't hear about it in the media, the term "reactive" has been popularized in recent months, and I reviewed the free Coursera course "Principles of Reactive Programming" that some of us in the Pittsburgh Scala group just completed, so check out my post for more on "reactive".

Futures

Josh did a live SBT session reviewing futures and promises.

He noted that futures have limitations as a component of reactive systems. (This had become apparent when I started using futures last year in my personal projects and then for work.) By themselves, futures do not support cancellation or back pressure. Futures are a low-level, limited mechanism that are the right tool only if you have a pipeline all the way through forward, no back channel.

An alternative to futures, of course, is to go all out and use Akka actors. But the drawback I've found with that is that this is a heavyweight mechanism for problems that don't need the full power of actors. I've wanted something more structured and lightweight than using actors directly. I find it tricky to program using actors, because it is very easy to start writing spaghetti code that is spread out everywhere (which is what happened to me in the final project for the Coursera course).

It turns out, according to Josh, that Typesafe is working on precisely this problem! Nice. He'll tell us more when it comes out.

(Update of 2014-07-10)

Half a year later, the promise was realized, as the Pittsburgh Scala Meetup had Josh gave a talk on the new API called Reactive Streams!

Play

Josh demonstrated Typesafe Activator, the cool new Web browser-based platform for using Scala. He showed an app using Play that looks at blogs simultaneously and uses recoverWith.

Random other questions and discussions

What I like about the Pittsburgh Scala Meetup is that even when we have a presentation, discussion often wanders off to related topics (or unrelated topics). Anything goes, and I usually learn a lot.

Someone asked about support for channels as in Go or Clojure's core.async. Josh said they're working on this sort of thing with support for back pressure.

Someone asked about how to connect <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.0/Iteratees" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.0/Iteratees">iteratees</span> with actors. Josh said, you can feed from an iteratee to an actor, and then just let the actor do stuff. However, there is some controversy about the whole iteratee thing in Play.

Conclusion

This was a great Pittsburgh Scala Meetup session. I felt that a lot of questions that had built up in my mind after having gotten into reactive programming are being addressed with continuing work.

The Chess Improver: The subtleties of time-consuming knight maneuvers

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 12:18:45 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""The subtleties of time-consuming knight maneuvers"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

The Knight must be the most fascinating piece in the game of chess. It moves and attacks in a funny direction at a short distance. Recently The Chess Improver published a post <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://chessimprover.com/knight-moves/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://chessimprover.com/knight-moves/">"Knight moves"</span> discussing the special issues that the Knight raises when it comes to visualizing what it can do and how it can do it. Today, I expand on the theme of Knight moves, by beginning a discussion of subtleties in planning and in the flow of a chess game that arise because of the special way that Knights move.

Because of the fixed and odd (vs. even) parity of its movement, a Knight often has to make at least two moves to radically reorient itself to protect or attack particular squares. The time-consuming nature of such maneuvers means that deciding to redeploy a Knight involves considering the tradeoffs of the loss of time:

In a closed position, there may be enough time to redeploy without falling victim to a sustained attack that may prevent the successful completion of the maneuver. In a more open position, the loss of time may be just enough to allow the opposing side to force a radical and advantageous reconfiguration of the position (often on the area of the board where the Knight has vacated control).

This sounds abstract, so I'll give some examples of both situations.

Closed Positions

In the position below, taken from Jeremy Silman's book "The Amateur's Mind" (p. 66), the position is rather closed. Black is obviously very passive and surely must be lost. The interesting thing is, if you give this position to a chess engine, it may take a while to figure out a way to actually win for White, because its evaluation function may simply have White just shuffle pieces around aimlessly rather than aim for a breakthrough sacrifice. As humans, I believe that we can more naturally generate an entire plan to win, and then calculate it out to determine that in fact it works.

I give a sample winning continuation (there are clearly many other ways to win, including breaking through on b6 instead) in which White calmly takes the time to maneuver a Knight backward from d3 to e1, then forward to f3, and then sacrifice the heroic Knight for two Pawns enabling White's Bishop get to g5, and then with White's major pieces coming in on the open h file, the game is basically over.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Result "1-0"] [FEN "rnb2qr1/2p1nkb1/ppPp1p1p/3PpPp1/PP2P1PP/2NN2Q1/4BK1R/2B4R w - - 0 1"] [Setup "1"]

Ne1 Ke8 2. Nf3 Qf7 3. hxg5 hxg5 4. Rh7 Rf8 5. Qh2 Kd8 6. Nxg5 fxg5 7. Bxg5 *`} />

Open Positions

The tricky thing in an open position is that temporarily redeploying your Knight by having it go backward or sideways is that your opponent does not have to stand still and do nothing in return while you improve your position. Very often, a Knight maneuver temporarily worsens your position, in some sense. I believe that this is what makes chess so fascinating. Pawns never move backward. Queens, Rooks, and Bishops can move "backward", but the kind of backward that they move is such that they still keep their eye on what was forward (or diagonal or sideways): a Queen retreating from d4 to d1 still aims all the way down the d file, but a Knight that retreats from d3 to e1 relinquishes control of c5 and e5.

In some previous posts, I already gave examples of slow Knight maneuvers that took time away from development and allowed the other side to come up with disruptive threats.

A post about a Knight maneuver in the opening showed how an early redeployment by Black of a Knight from c6 to e7 to g6 resulted in tactical disaster, but required White to be aggressive in punishing the maneuver: if White played "normally", then Black got a quite decent position.

Both Sides Manoeuvering Knights, Maintaining A Rough Balance

In the recent Anand-Carlsen FIDE World Chess Championship match, we saw examples of Knight maneuvers that did not lead to much. This does not necessarily mean that they should not have been tried: in chess, when the position may well be balanced, one has opportunities to try something. And often, one tries to improve a Knight's position. But sometimes, an idea is just too slow.

For example, in round 6, Anand tried to reposition both of his Knight to point to Black's King side (Black's Knight on f6 as well as the d5 and f5 light squares) with Nh2 to Nhg4, and Ndf1 to Ne3, but this took so much time that Carlsen easily neutralized the plan, by doing a Queen maneuver to e7 and then to e6.

The interesting thing is that in this game, Carlsen also played a time-consuming Knight maneuver, a thematic Nb8 to Nbd7, which is a solid defensive setup. Anand could have taken advantage of the time to play b4, for example, instead of also engaging in Knight maneuvers. So the question of whether a Knight maneuver is good is subtle, and I think is one of the most interesting aspects of human chess. It's not that b4 is a winning plan or a great one; it's just that Knight maneuvers often allow a possible transofrmation of a position (in this case, the Knight no longer being on c6 led to weakening a5, for example).

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "WCh 2013"] [Site "Chennai IND"] [Date "2013.11.16"] [Round "6"] [White "Anand, Viswanathan"] [Black "Carlsen, Magnus"] [Result "0-1"] [WhiteTitle "GM"] [BlackTitle "GM"] [WhiteElo "2775"] [BlackElo "2870"] [ECO "C65"] [Opening "Ruy Lopez"] [Variation "Berlin defence"] [WhiteFideId "5000017"] [BlackFideId "1503014"] [EventDate "2013.11.09"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6 4. d3 Bc5 5. c3 O-O 6. O-O Re8 7. Re1 a6 8. Ba4 b5 9. Bb3 d6 10. Bg5 Be6 11. Nbd2 h6 12. Bh4 Bxb3 13. axb3 Nb8 14. h3 ( 14. b4 { Aiming at Queen side play looks completely natural and good, but Anand must have thought there were no immediate prospects there.} ) 14… Nbd7 15. Nh2 Qe7 16. Ndf1 Bb6 17. Ne3 Qe6 18. b4 a5 19. bxa5 Bxa5 20. Nhg4 Bb6 21. Bxf6 Nxf6 22. Nxf6+ Qxf6 23. Qg4 Bxe3 24. fxe3 Qe7 25. Rf1 c5 26. Kh2 c4 27. d4 Rxa1 28. Rxa1 Qb7 29. Rd1 Qc6 30. Qf5 exd4 31. Rxd4 Re5 32. Qf3 Qc7 33. Kh1 Qe7 34. Qg4 Kh7 35. Qf4 g6 36. Kh2 Kg7 37. Qf3 Re6 38. Qg3 Rxe4 39. Qxd6 Rxe3 40. Qxe7 Rxe7 41. Rd5 Rb7 42. Rd6 f6 43. h4 Kf7 44. h5 gxh5 45. Rd5 Kg6 46. Kg3 Rb6 47. Rc5 f5 48. Kh4 Re6 49. Rxb5 Re4+ 50. Kh3 Kg5 51. Rb8 h4 52. Rg8+ Kh5 53. Rf8 Rf4 54. Rc8 Rg4 55. Rf8 Rg3+ 56. Kh2 Kg5 57. Rg8+ Kf4 58. Rc8 Ke3 59. Rxc4 f4 60. Ra4 h3 61. gxh3 Rg6 62. c4 f3 63. Ra3+ Ke2 64. b4 f2 65. Ra2+ Kf3 66. Ra3+ Kf4 67. Ra8 Rg1 0-1`} />

A Bad Knight Manoeuver

Finally, an example of Knight maneuvers that have to be classified as strange and unwarranted. This is from round 4 of Anand-Carlsen. Anand wasted a lot of time moving Knights around and was in danger in this game. Ne1 "undefended" e5, and then after Nd3 that Knight didn't do much and ended ignominiously on c1. The other Knight also did not fare well, after going to e2 and allowing the a2 Pawn to be lost. It was not a good game for the knight pair.

(But, in case this post gives the wrong impression, Anand has historically been one of the great players of the two Knights. Future posts may explore examples.)

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "WCh 2013"] [Site "Chennai IND"] [Date "2013.11.13"] [Round "4"] [White "Anand, Viswanathan"] [Black "Carlsen, Magnus"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [WhiteTitle "GM"] [BlackTitle "GM"] [WhiteElo "2775"] [BlackElo "2870"] [ECO "C67"] [Opening "Ruy Lopez"] [Variation "Berlin defence, open variation"] [WhiteFideId "5000017"] [BlackFideId "1503014"] [EventDate "2013.11.09"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6 4. O-O Nxe4 5. d4 Nd6 6. Bxc6 dxc6 7. dxe5 Nf5 8. Qxd8+ Kxd8 9. h3 Bd7 10. Rd1 Be7 11. Nc3 Kc8 12. Bg5 h6 13. Bxe7 Nxe7 14. Rd2 c5 15. Rad1 Be6 16. Ne1 Ng6 17. Nd3 b6 18. Ne2 Bxa2 19. b3 c4 20. Ndc1 cxb3 21. cxb3 Bb1 22. f4 Kb7 23. Nc3 Bf5 24. g4 Bc8 25. Nd3 h5 26. f5 Ne7 27. Nb5 hxg4 28. hxg4 Rh4 29. Nf2 Nc6 30. Rc2 a5 31. Rc4 g6 32. Rdc1 Bd7 33. e6 fxe6 34. fxe6 Be8 35. Ne4 Rxg4+ 36. Kf2 Rf4+ 37. Ke3 Rf8 38. Nd4 Nxd4 39. Rxc7+ Ka6 40. Kxd4 Rd8+ 41. Kc3 Rf3+ 42. Kb2 Re3 43. Rc8 Rdd3 44. Ra8+ Kb7 45. Rxe8 Rxe4 46. e7 Rg3 47. Rc3 Re2+ 48. Rc2 Ree3 49. Ka2 g5 50. Rd2 Re5 51. Rd7+ Kc6 52. Red8 Rge3 53. Rd6+ Kb7 54. R8d7+ Ka6 55. Rd5 Re2+ 56. Ka3 Re6 57. Rd8 g4 58. Rg5 Rxe7 59. Ra8+ Kb7 60. Rag8 a4 61. Rxg4 axb3 62. R8g7 Ka6 63. Rxe7 Rxe7 64. Kxb3 1/2-1/2`} />

Conclusion

Using the Knights effectively is tricky in chess. I really enjoy trying to make my Knights work together, and seeing how other players do it. What is most interesting is that most of the time, a Knight maneuver involves a lot of interesting tradeoffs that must be weighed, in terms of use of time and control of important squares.

Happy New Year with a Boyce-Mayview Park hike: wetlands, creeks, beavers, woodpeckers, waterfalls...

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:57:07 GMT

Happy New Year 2014!

Abby and I started off this new year with a lovely hike with the Pittsburgh hiking meetup group, led by Gary Byrdman. It was in Boyce-Mayview Park, a park we'd never been to before in Upper St. Clair.

It was a beautiful day, not too cold (over 20F), and mostly not too muddy or icy either, thankfully. Abby and I did each use a pair of hiking poles, and many of us used MICROSpikes or Yaktrax also during the hike, but it turned out that the spikes were actually something of a hassle because snow accumulated under them for people. If it had been more icy out, I would have used spikes, however.

I was originally hoping to wear my relatively new minimalist New Balance Minimus Zero trail running shoes for this hike, but quickly decided that this would be a bad idea mainly because of the risk of getting my feet cold and wet, so I wrote my old Montrail Rockridge trail running shoes, which I haven't worn in years because they have gotten a bit small for me, requiring me to wear very thin socks (which I did on this hike). Far from minimalist, but in the winter in the face of water dangers (and indeed, we had a couple of stream crossings in which I got a little wet), I don't have a true minimalist shoe yet.

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://s7d5.scene7.com/is/image/ColumbiaSportswear/S11_GM2098_654_f?$MTR_pdp_lg$" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://s7d5.scene7.com/is/image/ColumbiaSportswear/S11_GM2098_654_f?$MTR_pdp_lg$">[image: Montrail Rockridge]</span>

The hike lasted about two and a half hours.

We had a great group of people, and Gary even brought breakfast to share with us. After the hike, I eagerly sampled his treats. What a guy! During the hike, he pointed out interesting features, such as beaver dams, woodpecker holes (and we heard woodpeckers too), places that are great for birding in the spring, and a nice waterfall that was partially iced but running.

Photos

If you're a member of the Pittsburgh hiking meetup group, you have access to the event page and the photo page for the hike, where I uploaded a couple dozen photos.

I'm posting just a few here, to whet your appetite for this park. There was such varied terrain and so much to see!

Parking at the trail head:

Breakfast by Gary:

A beaver was at this tree:

Stream crossing:

On a trail:

Waterfall:

Going uphill:

Short break:

One of the meadows we crossed:

Up:

Conclusion

Abby and I really enjoyed this hike. We promised ourselves that we would return to it next spring and summer. There's clearly so much to enjoy and explore in Boyce-Mayview Park.

If you want to check it out yourself, the Pittsburgh Meetup group often has hikes in this park.

I love living in Western Pennsylvania. There is so much to see around here. I will never get bored here. I feel blessed to be living here in Pittsburgh.

Review of the free Coursera course "Principles of Reactive Programming"

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 02:29:39 GMT

At long last, I have officially completed the free Coursera course "Principles of Reactive Programming", receiving my "Statement of Accomplishment".

This was an intense course, a lot of work, actually, and made the last two month s of my life (November and December) challenging as I juggled many activities. But it was worth the effort. I would definitely recommend this course to anyone who has completed the introductory course "Principles of Functional Programming in Scala" (or has the equivalent background). (See my review of that course as offered in fall of 2012.)

I took this course along with a bunch of local friends who are also members of the Pittsburgh Scala Meetup.

What is "Reactive"?

"Reactive" is a fairly new buzzword, popularized recently by the Reactive Manifesto to urge consideration of four traits modern applications may need to have:

responsive
scalable
resilient
event-driven

Instructors and topics

Each instructor was responsible for covering a key technology.

Martin Odersky

Martin Oderksy, the inventor of Scala and instructor for the previously mentioned "Principles of Functional Programming in Scala" course, focused on covering more advanced usage of Scala.

He immediately introduced monads, which are key to many of the concepts and libraries used throughout this course. Scala's support for monads through the syntax of for-comprehensions is very helpful. He introduced the property-based testing framework ScalaCheck (which uses monads for generation of data), and the first assignment involved working with the framework. (By the way, I gave a talk on property-based testing using ScalaCheck eight months ago.)

Then he discussed modeling event simulation in Scala using mutable objects. I felt that this unit was not in the spirit of the others, because there was so much uncontrolled mutable state running around. My friends and I agreed that the assignment for this unit was burdensome and not really useful. I thought to myself, in fact, that I would never solve the problems in this way.

Erik Meijer

Erik Meijer is a very energetic and humorous speaker. I really enjoyed his lectures.

In his first unit, he introduced asynchronous programming using Scala's Future monad (backed by a Promise), as well as the cool new macro-based async/await library, which greatly simplifies writing code. Our assignment, which was instructive and interesting, was to implement a baby version of Node.js in Scala, ha!

Then he introduced RxScala, a Scala adaptor for RxJava, which is a Java port of Microsoft's "reactive extensions" Rx framework. I enjoyed this unit a lot, and appreciated the great documentation available (the "marble diagrams" are particularly useful). One nitpick I suppose I must have with his presentation is that I'm not sure that, for a non-theory-oriented audience, the discussions of "duality" were necessary. The assignment was very practically-oriented, gathering data asynchronously and displaying it and allowing user interaction. It was enjoyable and showcased the power of using a framework like Rx.

Roland Kuhn

Roland Kuhn covered the most complex section of the course, introducing actors by means of the Akka framework.

The first assignment was fairly straightforward, on implemented a distributed binary tree with actors.

The second assignment I found quite difficult, and not only because it was crunch time at the end of December before holiday season! It was a distributed key-value store with multiple levels of possible failure. There is no way I would have successfully and correctly completed this assignment without the helpful discussions I found on the online Coursera forums. To really figure out what was going on required (for me) turning on logging in various places and writing a lot of tests using Akka's TestKit. I realized eventually that my code was ugly and not entirely clean and idiomatic, but it was definitely a worthwhile learning experience on a realistic problem to solve.

Conclusion

I learned quite a lot from this course. It is a very practical course on "reactive" programming. I felt after completing this course that I was ready to use the concepts and technologies covered in real problems. I am grateful to the instructors (who were active on the forums, by the way) for sharing their theoretical and practical knowledge as a free Coursera course.

Beechview urban hike: funky steps, Canton Avenue climb, delicious pizza at Slice on Broadway

Sun, 29 Dec 2013 00:07:00 GMT

Abby and I wanted to go out on a hike together, but the trails tend not to be so much to hike on these winter days, so we decided to do an exploratory urban hike.

I randomly chose for us to explore Beechview, which is actually still part of the city of Pittsburgh even though it is south, across the Monongahela River. We'd never been to this neighborhood before.

Actually, the choice wasn't quite random.

Canton Avenue

I originally thought of checking this place out because of recently hearing about Canton Avenue, which is used in the annual Dirty Dozen bike competition (see <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.dannychew.com/dd.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.dannychew.com/dd.html">Danny Chew's site</span>). Canton Avenue is the "steepest officially recorded public street in the United States". I know some people who did the Dirty Dozen this year (2013), so Canton Avenue was fresh in my mind.

I have no intention of ever biking up Canton Avenue, but its existence got me curious and I thought, why not check out a new neighborhood and walk up this street as part of a hike.

Pizza

I was also craving some pizza. So I checked to see if there was any interesting pizza place in Beechview. It turned out that there was a fairly new place called <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://sliceonbroadway.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://sliceonbroadway.com/">Slice on Broadway</span> in Beechview! So it was settled. We'd walk around the neighborhood, check out Canton Avenue, and eat at Slice on Broadway.

Summary

We did that and had a good time. And the pizza was actually quite good: a relatively thin crust, the way I like it. We were so hungry that we each ate an antipasto salad (pretty good) before the large specialty pizza was ready (well, yes, we did take home leftovers).

One thing we didn't do was navigate all the steps we saw, because of the residual ice that obviously made things dangerous. Maybe we'll come back later in the spring and take a tour of the steps. We find the steps of Pittsburgh fascinating, but still have not explored all the neighborhoods that have such steps.

Some photos

It's pretty hilly in Beechview:

We braved this staircase that involved a little bit of snow:

There was this weird short trail:

Emerging from the trail:

Well, this is the view going up Canton Avenue. It's steep but short:

Some steps along a street:

The trolley in action:

The station where the trolley had come from:

More steps, but we were getting hungry, and so we did not follow them:

Pizza! I almost forgot to take a photo as we already started devouring the pizza:

Are you familiar with the Nutcracker story? Check out ETA Hoffmann's other creepy tales!

Sat, 28 Dec 2013 00:15:36 GMT

It's the season when many of us either watch for the first time a production of the ballet "The Nutcracker", or remember having seen it at some point, or remember some non-ballet production of the story (I personally still remember seeing some children's adaptation of it when I was young).

But how many of you have actually read the original story by the German Romantic ETA Hoffmann, "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King"?

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/dms/ucp/books/jacket/0226/34/0226347893.jpeg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/dms/ucp/books/jacket/0226/34/0226347893.jpeg">[image: Tales of ETA Hoffmann]</span>

ETA Hoffmann, a forgotten writer?

I was reminded of the creepy tales of Hoffmann when this article about him came my way. It suggested that people don't know about him any more. I don't know how true that is, but because he is one of my all-time favorite writers, I decided to do my part to help promote the work of this fascinating 19th century writer. He wrote not only amazing fiction, but also wrote on philosophy and music: in particular, as this article notes, he was one of the first critics who welcomed the strange figure of Ludwig van Beethoven when Beethoven came on the scene and freaked everyone out with his revolutionary new music.

First encounter

The first time I heard of ETA Hoffmann was purely a result of hearing a musical excerpt from Jacques Offenbach's opera, "Les contes d'Hoffmann" ("The tales of Hoffmann"). This was when I was in high school.

OK, I have never watched this opera or listened to it, except for the famous Barcarolle. So basically, I only knew that there was someone whose name was Hoffmann and wrote some "tales" that were used in an opera. That was all.

Second encounter

My second encounter was when I was in college and learning to like the music of Mozart and Beethoven. I came across the book by the late Charles Rosen, "The Classical Style", and early on in the book, Rosen mentioned this music critic who so loved Mozart that he changed one of his names from "Friedrich" to "Amadeus" (hence our knowing him as ETA Hoffmann rather than ETF Hoffmann)! So that was intriguing. I looked at some of his writing.

A fine English translation of selected stories

As I immersed myself more in the music of the era, I grew increasingly interested in the philosophy developing that would later be called German Romanticism. I began reading Fichte, Schlegel, Jean Paul, Kleist, Hölderlin, Jean Paul, Hegel, Goethe, and other figures of the period. I even took a course in German. And of course I ran into ETA Hoffmann again.

I bought this really good English translation of selected stories of his and was not disappointed.

I looked online and there are more recent English translations since my college days.

The stories are really surreal, raising many questions about humanity and reality. And yes, they are pretty disturbing too: I will confess to having had nightmares based on the stories.

If you've read Edgar Allan Poe, think of Hoffmann the fiction writer as a much, much superior German analogue.

The Golden Pot

If you read only one story by Hoffmann, I suppose it would have to be "The Golden Pot". It's long and vivid, although in the end I could not really make coherent sense of it. It's a weird fantasy and has a lot of funny elements.

Here's an <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605801h.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605801h.html">English translation online</span>.

The Sandman

The story that really got under my skin, however, was "The Sandman". Very dark.

Here's an <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://germanstories.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://germanstories.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e.html">English translation online</span>.

Conclusion

It was interesting to be reminded of the stories of ETA Hoffmann at this time of year. Check some out if you haven't read any before. I have to confess they're not for everyone, and at this point in my life I am less interested in (and more wary of) this kind of Romantic literature, because I consider it "unhealthy", frankly, along with other aspects of German Romanticism in general, but I can't deny the guy was a genius.

Questions for you

If you've read some of Hoffmann's stories before, which ones are your favorites? Why? Do you think they're still as interesting now as when coming out from a mindset of the beginnings of Romanticism in the 19th century, or do they feel dated to you?

toString considered harmful, part 3

Fri, 27 Dec 2013 22:03:00 GMT

This is part 3 of a series of articles, "toString considered harmful".

Languages without the `toString` problem

There actually are quite a few languages that don't have the toString problem, or at least have it to a lesser degree.

C

There is no friendly generic conversion to a string (uh, really just a pointer to a null-terminated chunk of char) in C. The closest thing is using the type-unsafe printf family of functions, but you have to do almost all the work if you have some complicated struct and want to turn it into a C string.

C++

C++ introduced iostreams, where f you follow certain conventions and overload operator<< for every domain class of interest, you can build up decent looking strings, without using inheritance.

Or you could do the object-oriented thing and set up a hierarchy with a ToString abstract base class. But C++ does not come with everything already inheriting from an Object.

Haskell

Haskell does not force a toString on everything, but provides a Show type class for convenience in the standard prelude. It is easy (and convenient for debugging) to just tack on deriving Show and then call show to convert stuff to a string. This means that one can get lazy and fall into the same design traps as mentioned in the very first code example above. Again, the solution is to refuse to abuse show, and to use a different name instead for converting something to a string for a particular purpose.

Go

Go was invented at Google as a modernized C. It does not have classes, but does have <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://research.swtch.com/interfaces" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://research.swtch.com/interfaces">dynamic interfaces</span>. All that is required for a user-defined type to satisfy an interface is to implement the method String() returning a string. Basically, this makes the type implement the interface fmt.Stringer. Again, if you don't implement String() string for your type, then you will get a compile-time error when trying to treat it as a string.

Superficially, this sounds like Haskell type classes, but it's much more limited, because Go does not have generics and Go is only single dispatch. Go's interfaces really implement a kind of structural subtyping.

Standard ML

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.standardml.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.standardml.org/">Standard ML</span> does not have the toString problem. It does, by convention, supply a toString function in many modules in the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.standardml.org/Basis/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.standardml.org/Basis/">Standard ML Basis Library</span>, such as <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.standardml.org/Basis/integer.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.standardml.org/Basis/integer.html">Int</span> and <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.standardml.org/Basis/real.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.standardml.org/Basis/real.html">Real</span> and <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.standardml.org/Basis/bool.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.standardml.org/Basis/bool.html">Bool</span>, but these are just conventions and do not participate in any kind of unified conversion to string. If you want to convert anything besides a primitive type to a string, you have to write the conversion function yourself.

Furthermore, Standard ML, as a rather opinionated and <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/definition-standard-ml" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/definition-standard-ml">"purist" language</span>, designed specifically for static simplicity, semantic minimalism, and <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://mlton.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://mlton.org/">runtime efficiency</span>, does not believe in type classes, so there is no way to write a function that at runtime is generic over what can be turned into a string.

The best you can do is write something that is functorized, but then you have to apply it in a statically known context:

signature TO_STRING =
  sig
    type t
    val toString : t -> string
  end

functor DoStuff(ToString : TO_STRING) =
  struct
    fun doubleString (stuff: ToString.t) =
      let
        val s = ToString.toString stuff
      in
        s ^ s
      end
  end

structure MyStuff : TO_STRING =
  struct
    type t = int * bool
    fun toString (i, b) =
      "(" ^ Int.toString i ^ ", " ^ Bool.toString b ^ ")"
  end

structure DoMyStuff = DoStuff(MyStuff)

with

DoMyStuff.doubleString (42, true)
(* result is the string "(42, true)(42, true)" *)

Since the Standard ML ecosystem is so minimalist, it's hard to fall into the toString trap, because you would have to set it all up yourself.

OCaml

OCaml, like Standard ML, does not provide a generic toString out of the box, but the OCaml ecosystem is much more practically oriented.

There is a pre-processor for OCaml that can be used to generate convenient printers for types, deriving. There is also an S-expression based generator, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/data-serialization-with-s-expressions.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/data-serialization-with-s-expressions.html">Sexplib</span>. But these are mechanically generated, rather than part of something generic at runtime.

Of course, one could also use the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml-4.01/objectexamples.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml-4.01/objectexamples.html">object-oriented part of OCaml</span> to make a generic "to string" hierarchy starting with a suitable interface:

class type convert_to_string =
  object
    method to_string : string
  end

But I don't actually know many people who use the object-oriented features of OCaml!

Conclusion

An annoying bug I temporarily created in my code led me to take stock of the state of toString design choices in various programming languages, and also consider how we can better escape fragility in our code, independent of whatever language we are using.

toString considered harmful, part 2

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 22:03:00 GMT

This is part 2 of a series of articles, "toString considered harmful". [Part 1] introduced the problem in the context of a common design flaw present in object-oriented languages, and proposed a simple workaround.

In part 2, we look at advanced ways to organize "stringable" data, using either an object-oriented or functional style. Examples are in Scala because it equally supports either style.

Object-oriented vs. functional

The fix presented was in object-oriented style, adding a method toUrlString to a class. The other solution is the functional style, leaving the Id class alone, and writing an external function instead:

  case class Id(id: Int)

  def toUrlString(id: Id) = id.toString

with

    id match {
      case None => println("No id found!")
      case Some(n) => getUrl(makeUrl(toUrlString(n)))
    }

There are advantages and disadvantages to either solution.

More advanced OO

It would be very natural, given a whole set of domain classes in addition to Id, to want all of them to have a toUrlString. Then the natural thing to do is to create a mini-universe (parallel to the toString universe) by creating a hierarchy:

  trait UrlString {
    def toUrlString: String
  }

  case class Id(id: Int) extends UrlString {
    override def toUrlString = id.toString
  }

  case class ...(...) extends UrlString {
    override def toUrlString = ...
  }

Advanced string interpolation with OO

In fact, Scala and other languages with advanced string interpolation facilities allow yet another refactoring by making sure that what gets into a URL isn't just an arbitrary string in the first place!

Below we define a string interpolator that only operates on objects of classes that implement the trait UrlString, and therefore does away with an explicit call to toUrlString:

  implicit class UrlHelper(val sc: StringContext) extends AnyVal {
    def url(args: UrlString*): String = {
      val strings = sc.parts.iterator
      val expressions = args.iterator
      val buf = new StringBuffer(strings.next)
      while (strings.hasNext) {
        buf append expressions.next.toUrlString
        buf append strings.next
      }
      buf.toString
    }
  }

  /** Only ever use UrlString to create a URL. */
  def makeUrl(id: UrlString): String = url"http://service.com?id=$id"

with

    id match {
      case None => println("No id found!")
      case Some(n) => getUrl(makeUrl(n))
    }

This may or may not be overengineering.

Advanced string interpolation with FP

The functional approach doesn't like inheritance in the domain classes. We can implement it with type classes (a concept first pioneered in Haskell in the late 1980s) by means of implicits in Scala, in order to implement toUrlString outside of a class hierarchy but also allow it to be used in a constrained generic way. A full discussion of this is outside the scope of this post, but the basic point is that with type classes, one can write code that does not depend on an inheritance hierarchy. If you're used to monkey-patching in dynamic languages, think of it as compile-time monkey-patching.

  // A type class
  trait UrlString[A] {
    def toUrlString(a: A): String
  }

  // Wrapper class
  case class Id(id: Int)

  // Implement the type class UrlString for Id
  implicit object IdToUrlString extends UrlString[Id] {
    override def toUrlString(a: Id) = a.id.toString
  }

  implicit class UrlHelper(val sc: StringContext) extends AnyVal {
    def url[A: UrlString](args: A*): String = {
      val strings = sc.parts.iterator
      val expressions = args.iterator
      val buf = new StringBuffer(strings.next)
      while (strings.hasNext) {
        buf append implicitly[UrlString[A]].toUrlString(expressions.next)
        buf append strings.next
      }
      buf.toString
    }
  }

  /** Anything "viewable" as UrlString can be used to create a URL. */
  def makeUrl[A: UrlString](id: A): String = url"http://service.com?id=$id"

The final string gotcha

You may have noticed that there is still primitive obsession in this sample code: URLs are presented as String for simplicity. In real life, I use builders such as URIBuilder and HttpGet (Java Apache HttpComponents) or more sophisticated Scala-specific libraries such as Spray.

Conclusion

I thought it would useful to compare an object-oriented and a functional approach to unifying data that share a domain-consistent notion of conversion to a string. Scala is a language that allows easy expression of both.

In part 3, we will look at languages that just don't have the toString problem at all.

Watching "Hable con ella" ("Talk to her") (2002): thoughts on art, crime, and ethics

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 15:38:33 GMT

After a decade of putting it off, I finally watched Pedro Almodóvar's 2002 film, "Hable con ella" ("Talk to her"). I was actually on the verge of going to a local movie theater to watch it a decade ago when circumstances in my life changed and I put it on hold. But Abby and I just watched it together, partially because Almodóvar has been on my mind since I re-listened to some music sung by La Lupe a couple of days ago.

It turned out to be a fantastic film, totally gripping and moving, no slow or pointless moments, really tight. One of my favorite films of all time, surely.

It was also disturbing on many levels, as great art often is. Abby and I had some conversations about some of the issues, but there was even more still on my mind, so I decided to share them here.

Note: there are some serious spoilers in this post, so if you haven't watched the film yet, please stop reading now and go watch it first. In any case, I am skipping important plot elements in order to focus on particular themes.

The rape

Let's cut to the chase. In this film, a really weird guy, Benigno, who is depicted as unhealthily obsessed with a young woman ends up being one of her primary caretakers (he is a nurse) in the hospital when she slips into a coma after an accident. When we encounter him in the story, he's already been taking care of her for four years. We see him bathing her and massaging her in a way that might be considered loving and caring, but also creepy and too intimate, especially given how he had secretly stalked her before the whole accident. Everyone thinks he's gay (he lied to fool her father), so nobody seems to seriously question his care of her.

At the end of the story, we are led to believe (it was not depicted) that during the course of the story, he raped her and got her pregnant. Miraculously, at some point after her pregnancy was discovered, she woke from her four-year coma, but the child was stillborn.

My reaction

You can go online and see a lot of reactions to this rape, say, the IMDB forums. Some disbelieve, some try to justify her awakening as making up for his crime, others say they refuse to watch the film because they heard what the story is.

Myself, I disbelieved at first, despite the very clear signal straight from the film director himself. I thought, maybe it was the other main character, or the other man besides him. I thought this even though I knew it could not be. I found it very interesting that despite the obvious (except that I didn't see it happen), I did not want to believe that his man, even though he was clearly weird and inappropriately obsessed with the comatose woman, did this. I examined myself and asked why I did not want to believe. One reason was that other being all weird, he came across as being very gentle and caring, both towards her (taking care of her inert body) and to the other main character Marco, who became a close friend of his. For all we knew, he was still a virgin. And she hadn't gotten pregnant after four years of his care.

Of course, my "reasoning" was completely ridiculous. How did I know that he wasn't molesting her for four years, and just being careful about it, and only accidentally slipping up one night after watching that silent film he talked to her about?

So, I was very uncomfortable that aspects of his personality and behavior that made me feel sympathetic to him in general led me to doubt that he was capable of something horrible. This brought up memories of being confused and cynical in the light of revelations in recent years that some people's heroes were in fact very flawed: for example, the big Penn State scandal involving Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno's apparent role in concealing Sandusky's repeated sexual abuse of young boys. Or Lance Armstrong finally confessing to being a drug doper in sport. Or the history of sexual abuse by priests and other leaders in many religious institutions.

It turned out that I was detached from all those cases, not having any emotional involvement with the "heroes" in question, so it was easy for me to scoff at those who went out of their way to demonize the victims and proclaim their heroes innocent. So I was pretty disturbed that just through skillful storytelling, the film director here was able, for a split second, to cause me to doubt the obvious.

Bullfighting and respect for different cultures

Another thing that disturbed me was the bullfighting. I am hardly a member of PETA, but I find bullfighting frightening and perverse.

Of course, I am slightly ambivalent about this attitude. But only slightly. OK, it's an important cultural institution in Spain, and I am definitely not one to lightly dismiss long-standing traditions that clearly have served a purpose of some kind over centuries, even millennia. But I'm not a relativist who thinks everything's OK somewhere. For example, there are long traditions of human slavery that "we" (in, say, the US where I live and grew up) consider not to be OK, and "we" believe that women should have the right to vote, that female genital mutilation is unacceptable, that the ancient Chinese foot binding of women was an atrocity, etc.

You could argue that it's just sheer cultural conditioning that I happen to believe in what "we" believe, but nevertheless, I feel justified in my judgment and can't apologize for it. So if you're reading this and you're Spanish and offended, I don't know how to sugarcoat it, but bullfighting freaks me out. The best I can say is, there are probably things I believe in or do that you find disgusting also.

Cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy?

The weird thing is, even as I felt disgust at seeing all the blood during the bullfighting scenes in the film, I felt unease at my participating in a very sanitized version of the whole thing.

I'm talking about the ballroom dance "paso doble", which is a kind of weird, transformed re-enactment of a bullfight theme. I have never actually danced paso doble in competition, but have practiced basic steps and movements, and have fantasized about being some kind of macho bullfighter. See, in most of the standard ballroom dances, the focus of display and movement is almost entirely on the follower, the woman. In only the paso doble, the man is really the focus, being the bullfighter. (The follower is, bizarrely, his cape: the bull is invisible and only implied.)

I still periodically do a paso doble dance workout. When I do this dance workout, you can bet I'm not thinking about bloody bulls or the possibility of being gored to death. Somehow the whole thing has been sanitized. I feel slightly weird about this "Anglo" appropriation of a cultural tradition. I would say I feel slightly weird about the other sanitized and standardized Latin ballroom dances too (rumba, cha cha, samba) that have "authentic" roots from, for example, Cuba and Brazil.

But I feel only "slightly" weird, because cultural borrowing and appropriation is something that has always happened. I don't think we can or ought to stop it, any more than I can go around sniffing that a lot of "Chinese food" in American restaurants is not much like what I know to be more "authentic". The best I can do is know the difference, rather than reject evolution or borrowing of traditions. So, for example, I have watched videos of Cuban salsa, which differs from urban North American studio or club salsa. I did study "Argentine tango" after engaging in the heavily stylized and very different ballroom tango. I think these can all reasonably coexist, as long as one knows what each is and not pretend something is what it is not.

Gender roles

And then somehow everything brought me to the issue of gender roles. In the film, the bullfighter main character is a woman, Lydia. Unusual. That led me to think about other weird issues I have dealt with concerning ballroom dancing, and couple dancing in general where there is a clear separation between leader and follower. Are these dances a weird kind of anachronism? I have definitely met women who rejected or were openly uneasy about taking part in this kind of dancing, but obviously, as Abby and I have gone out dancing, we know of plenty of women who are OK with it. In fact, we often see women dancing the leader role, and admittedly less often, men dancing the follower role. I tend to think there's not really a problem with this kind of dancing, given that people really can and do switch roles these days.

Do the ends justify the means?

Some final thoughts: what happens when we accept that something is disturbing? Especially when we rationalize away our discomfort?

For example, why did Almodóvar tell a story about a rapist who some would like to say possibly "helped" a comatose woman awake? What if that were true? Does it make his crime any less bad? And what about intent? Does intent matter in an action? Fodder for your philosophy classes.

And what about the film itself? What is the response to those who refuse to watch this film because of a rape? Has Almodóvar committed a crime by making the character a sympathetic, tragic one? Or is this "only" art? Or is it because it is high art that it is justified?

And that reminds me of the controversy over Roman Polanski, many of whose beautiful, profound films I have enjoyed through my life? He fled the US in 1977 after statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. In 2009 there was controversy after the US tried to extradite him, and a lot of film fans apparently came to his defense. Were they making the mistake of making an allowance for a great film maker that they would not have made for some random guy? Is my continuing to watch his films a crime? Should I be boycotting his films?

A lot of questions, and I think no easy answers. Of course, our actions reveal our implicit answers. What we say does not matter. What we do does.

The science (added 2014-01-05)

One thing I forgot to discuss was the matter of whether people in vegetative states are actually aware of what is going on around them. Assuming they have some awareness, that makes a lot of what happened in the film kind of creepy (but also, what happens in real life in hospitals).

Here's a recent post about emotional awareness in patients in a vegetative state.

(Update of 2014-04-27)

A great article on vegetative states just came my way, reminding me of the discomfort I felt when watching this film.

Conclusion

For me, a great film is one that somehow makes me think about life and humanity in the broadest possible ways, even though I didn't really want to. I guess Pedro Almodóvar struck a home run with this film.

Not the kind of film I want to watch every night, because then I end up spending hours thinking about stuff. But there it is.

Do you find this kind of film too disturbing to watch or to think about? Are you concerned by inaccurate scientific portrayals in film? Are you concerned about films that make you sympathetic toward someone who is not only disturbed but also a criminal?

The Chess Improver: Imagining how a game position arose

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 13:02:57 GMT

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Imagining how a game position arose"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

import ChessPosition from '@components/embeds/ChessPosition.astro';

Recently I had a student start working through one of those chess puzzle books that contain positions drawn from actual games. The positions capture the state of games in any of the phases, from the early opening to the endgame. While discussing his attempts at solution, I couldn't help notice that many of the positions were such that one could easily deduce what opening led to them, or which class of possible openings could have led to them, because of features such as Pawn structure and piece placement.

It turns out that I have deliberately omitted any opening theory training for this student so far, because in my experience (unfortunately including my own as a youth), until one reaches a certain level, that way lies madness. But I got the idea that working backwards from typical positions would be a good way to begin introducing opening ideas, because of the concrete context of puzzles where there is a clear tactical or positional error made by someone.

So I got the idea of an interesting fantasy game: given a chess position, try to imagine how the game arose, such as what might have been the previous couple of moves leading to the position, assuming some kind of logical progression of threats and counter-threats, or more longer-term plans. Often in chess we are trying to think forwards, like aiming for a position. But how about if we also work backwards? For entertainment, one could even "reconstruct" an entire sequence of plausible moves leading to a given position that is still not too deep into the middle game. I am sure many of us have informally engaged in this speculation when being a spectator of a game already in progress, and we think, "How did this position arise?" I am suggesting that it might be worth exploring this fantasy more deeply.

What is particularly instructive, I think, is when there are multiple plausible paths to a position. Seeing this connects ups the elements that different openings may have in common, so that when one is learning a new opening, it is not in isolation, but can be related to something else with similar static and dynamic features.

One nice thing about this exercise is that one can enjoy it at any level, to any depth. There are no wrong answers, but there are more plausible and subtle ones. It is not necessary to know the names of different openings. I think it is a fun ice breaker for discussion about a chess position and the hidden history behind it that continue to drive the possibilities in it during a real game.

A final note: obviously, for games that are sufficiently high-profile to be in one of the big databases, it is possible to find out what really happened to reach a position. But I think it can be fun enough to fantasize without knowing the answer, although a hardcore student may want to study a given position more in depth.

Examples

First example

Here's one example that seems fairly "easy":

It seems plausible enough that this game was a closed Ruy Lopez: the general Pawn structure and the minor piece placements point to this. White played d5 at some point. Possibly White had a Bishop at e3 that traded with a Black Knight on c5 (it doesn't look likely that a black Knight made it to f4). Black is trying to do something with otherwise locked out dark-squared Bishop, hence it ending up on f4. The middle game looks complex, although it looks like Black has gotten a head start with Queen side expansion and White's loss of the dark Bishop is not going to help with an attack on Black's King side.

But: one should also be aware that these kinds of positions can arise from a Rossolimo Sicilian, or a Modern Defense, through a different move order. Both sides have many ways to reach this kind of position.

Second example

Here's a position that has undergone more dynamic changes:

First, it would be reasonable to look at the missing Pawns on both sides and conclude this was a Sicilian. Somehow, White lost a Queen, but presumably won a Rook and Bishop on c8 on the half-open c file. The Bishop on e7 and the doubled f Pawns (from Bg5 and Bxf6 trading Black's Knight on f6) and White's castling Queen side suggest a Richter-Rauzer in which Black played some tactic involved moving the Pawn from e6 to e5. Maybe White's Queen was trapped?

If only the Pawn structure was looked at, one would probably think a Sveshnikov Sicilian. But because of where the minor pieces are, that seems unlikely for this position. Then again, how did Black's Knight get to c5? That's a stretch for a Richter-Rauzer also, but at least there, one can imagine the Knight going from c6 to e5 to d7 and then to c5. Or was this a funny Najdorf in which the Knight went to d7 and then to c5? But then why would the f Pawns be doubled?

I don't have an answer to these questions. Here's a case where maybe if I were given the answer, I would learn something useful about the maneuvering possibilities of Black's Knight that ended up on c5, and by extension, learn something new about particular Sicilian Defense opening variations.

So you see how one could really get into trying to extrapolate backwards in a chess position!

toString considered harmful, part 1

Mon, 23 Dec 2013 23:54:00 GMT

It is easy to rant about the problems or unexpected subtleties involving the use of strings in programming languages. This post, however, is not so much a rant about strings as about design and meaning, with toString only as an obvious example.

I'll describe a pitfall that came up in my code, and a solution, and make observations about how different programming languages address or avoid this problem.

This is part one of a series.

A bug when evolving my code

My example code is in Scala, but the problem illustrated actually extends to many (most?) other currently popular object-oriented languages as well, including Java (which Scala inherited Object.toString from), C# (Object.ToString stolen from Java), Ruby (Object#to_s), Python (str, which uses object.__str__ in case of an object). (Later in the post, I discuss languages without this specific feature.)

First working code

Here's the first version of the code, which is a simplification of logic in a real application. A name is looked up to find an ID, then the ID is used to construct a URL to submit to a Web service.

object Example {
  type Id = Int

  /**
    @param name User name to look up
    @return ID of user
    */
  def findId(name: String): Id =
    if (name == "name") {
      42
    } else {
      0
    }

  def makeUrl(id: Id): String = s"http://service.com?id=$id"

  /** Simulate making the Web request. */
  def getUrl(url: String): Unit = println(url)

  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    val id = findId("name")
    getUrl(makeUrl(id))
    // output: http://service.com?id=42
  }
}

In this code, everything seems fine. This was the situation in my application when it was certain that finding an ID would succeed.

If you don't know Scala, just note that s"...$id" is just Scala's string interpolation syntax that behind the scenes calls id.toString.

Non-working code

It turned out that finding an ID could fail, so I changed findId to return the type Option[Id] instead of Id. To get the code to compile, I had to change the type of the parameter to makeUrl also:

  /**
    @param name User name to look up
    @return Some(ID of user) if found, else None
    */
  def findId(name: String): Option[Id] =
    if (name == "name") {
      Some(42)
    } else {
      None
    }

  // Oops, now this has an unintended bug!
  def makeUrl(id: Option[Id]): String = s"http://service.com?id=$id"

But this resulted in a bug (thankfully caught by my test suite that actually went over the Web to fetch stuff)! The bug was that the URL constructed was nothing resembling what I ever wanted to construct: http://service.com?id=Some(42) was being requested.

Furthermore, in the case of an ID not found, the URL constructed is http://service.com?id=None. How many of you have seen applications or Web sites or emails in which something was clearly missing and the text contained either an empty space or the string "null" or "nullvalue" such as

<blockquote> Dear NULL,

You ordered NULL items. </blockquote>

Yup, you guessed it: someone wrote crappy code like what I just showed you, and frightening thing is, it could have been me and it could have been you.

What's the big deal?

You might think, "Big deal, you changed your code, ran your test, and immediately found the bug, so what's the problem?"

The problem is that I have higher standards than that. I don't want to rely on my tests to find my bugs. In fact, the test that went over the Web to do stuff was an integration test, not a unit test. The bug only manifested itself when the actual Web request failed. And as we see in real life, many apps are not sufficiently tested to root out all possible accidental string generations.

So although I caught the bug quickly, I caught it far less quickly than I wanted. I didn't want to even construct an obviously garbage URL like http://service.com?id=Some(42) at all. I prefer to have the type checker catch stupid design-level bugs up front. So I was furious at myself that I wrote code that the compiler was perfectly happy with but was obviously wrong. I had gotten lazy in more ways than one, and had been punished accordingly.

A symptom of bad design

There were a couple of things wrong with my original code that made it not evolve well.

Don't use `toString`

First, by using string interpolation at all, I was relying on the implicit toString method of all objects. String interpolation is an admittedly very convenient feature that I use extensively, but now I consider it rather dangerous.

But even if I hadn't used string interpolation, I would have had to build up strings myself anyway, and would have called toString explicitly, and I would have had the same problem: changing the type of something from Id to Option[Id] does not get rid of toString. In fact, in object-oriented languages where toString is defined way up at the top, everything has toString, whether you like it or not! The best you can do is override toString. (Actually, Scala "helpfully" generates a nice toString override for you when you use case classes, hence the output of Some(42).)

I consider this global infection a flaw in object-oriented languages that impose a set of methods on all objects whether you want them or not. toString is hardly the worst offending method, actually, but I'll save my complaints about others for later.

First step in cleaning up the code: make toString explicit:

  /** Only ever use a String to create a URL. */
  def makeUrl(id: String): String = s"http://service.com?id=$id"

  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    val id = findId("name")
    getUrl(makeUrl(id.toString))
  }

(Later in the post, I will discuss alternatives to this explicit toString.)

Primitive obsession

Another design smell was that of using

type Id = Int

in the first place. This is a well-known lazy practice called primitive obsession. I know better than that.

The solution to primitive obsession is easy: create a new wrapper type. Hence, the original code, even before the possibly failing ID lookup, should have been

  case class Id(id: Int)

  /**
    @param name User name to look up
    @return ID of user
    */
  def findId(name: String): Id =
    if (name == "name") {
      Id(42)
    } else {
      Id(0)
    }

Note that this still would not have solved the toString problem, since the output would simply have been http://service.com?id=Some(Id(42)) or the dreaded http://service.com?id=None!

`toString` is a problematic concept anyway

The real problem is one that transcends programming language design. (Later in this post I'll show languages that don't have toString but still easily allow a similar problem.)

The real problem is that strings are used for multiple purposes. Some are used just for debugging, showing an internal representation of data. Some are used for "human" reading. In fact, many languages distinguish between these two purposes: Lisp has write, prin1, print, pprint; Scheme has write and display; Ruby has to_s and to_str; Python has repr and str.

One is often directed to override the "human-oriented" version of these mechanisms (implementing one's own special non-default format). In Java and Scala, that's toString. But this is precisely the problem. We are encouraged to abuse this built-in mechanism for getting a string from an object that is supposed to mean something in the context of an application. Yes, Some(Id(42)) is a useful human-readable string, but it's not what I want to put into a URL for an ID parameter!

Different names for different contexts

Suppose you had a Name class, and it had fields such as first and middle and last. It's nonsensical to expect a single toString override to express all the different contexts in which you might want to get a single string from a full name. Sometimes you might want to generate Franklin Chen; other times, Franklin Ming Chen; other times, Franklin M. Chen; other times, FMC. The point is that there should really be a method for each of these. toString should be treated really as a debugging device.

Instead of piggybacking on toString, we should call a spade a spade, and define our own methods whose name is actually informative and tells us for what purpose we are asking for a string.

Let's refactor the code:

  // Wrapper class
  case class Id(id: Int) {
    // Special method for turning to URL string fragment
    def toUrlString = id.toString
  }

  /**
    @param name User name to look up
    @return Some(ID of user) if found, else None
    */
  def findId(name: String): Option[Id] =
    if (name == "name") {
      Some(Id(42))
    } else {
      None
    }

  /** Only ever use a String to create a URL. */
  def makeUrl(id: String): String = s"http://service.com?id=$id"

  /** Simulate making the Web request. */
  def getUrl(url: String): Unit = println(url)

  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    val id = findId("name")
    // Will not compile because Option[Id] does not have toUrlString
    //getUrl(makeUrl(id.toUrlString))
  }

Now the code that was creating a junk URL will no longer compile: id is of type Option[Id] but that type does not have a toUrlString method. Mission accomplished!

To fix the code to get it compile, we handle both the case in which the ID is not found and the case in which it is:

    // Will not compile because Option[Id] does not have toUrlString
    //getUrl(makeUrl(id.toUrlString))

    id match {
      case None => println("No id found!")
      case Some(n) => getUrl(makeUrl(n.toUrlString))
    }

Simple!

The final string gotcha (to be discussed later)

However, at some point, data has to be turned into strings: this simply is how the Web works. It is at that point where one has to watch out. I will discuss that boundary in another post. String injection attacks are precisely a result of being sloppy about crossing that boundary.

Conclusion

I gave a small taste of what the toString problem is about, and some initial steps toward solving it through better design even if the programming language encourages us to be sloppy.

In part 2 of this series, I will expand on different design choices even in the situation we just examined, especially in the face of continued evolution in which there are multiple domain classes to be turned into strings.

Finally, there actually are quite a few languages that don't have this particular toString problem, but some have analogues to a lesser degree. Part 3 of this series will discuss the different design choices in the languages or in the standard libraries or idioms. Examples will be drawn from C, C++, Haskell, Go, Standard ML, OCaml, Rust, and JavaScript.

A favorite poem to share as 2013 comes to an end

Mon, 23 Dec 2013 01:12:54 GMT

For a party last night, hostess Gina announced some weeks ahead of time that we were to bring "a favorite quote, poem, lyric or inspired thought to share as we look forward to 2014 with gratitude".

I thought this was a really good theme for an end-of-year holiday party. At first I thought maybe I should write a new poem of my own, for the occasion. But I got cold feet and bailed out of that plan. Maybe for another party next year.

After thinking for a while, I decided I would return to an old favorite: the poetry of William Blake. I picked one of my (favorite) poems by him, and planned to recite it and say a few words at the party about what it means to me and how it applies in particular to my thoughts as 2013 comes to an end.

It turned out that we were all having too much fun at the party just eating and meeting people and talking and then some of us going off to play music together, and "forgot" about the quote/poem/lyric/thought thing for a while. But it was getting late and Abby and I had to get going at some point, so I reminded Gina about the theme, and she got everyone together and started off herself with a quote from Kafka. That led to some discussion, and then someone else offered a provocative thought, a question to the younger people present. It turned out that this question led to a lot of lively debate, which was great, but also meant that since I didn't want to interrupt it, Abby and I had to quietly excuse ourselves and leave the party. I told Gina I would share my thought later on her party page.

Originally I was only going to say a few words, but as long as I'm not limited by keeping things very brief, I decided I might as well write a full-fledged post about it.

My accidental introduction to really good poetry

First of all, I want to say something about an accident that led to my discovering some really good poetry as a child. I was not (and still am not) primarily poetry-oriented (I am music-oriented), but exposure to good stuff led me not to completely ignore poetry through my life. I was 9 years old at the time (my sister 5). We were living in an apartment in Royal Oak, Michigan at the time. One day we discovered a couple of boxes of books out on the sidewalk, obviously put out for trash day. Since our family owned very little, and I was a voracious reader who always had to beg to go to the public library to get books to read, this was like treasure from heaven for us. Linda and I hauled our stash back inside, and sort of divvied it up between the two us. I will probably write more about this stash later, because over the years many of the titles played a huge role in both our lives. These boxes of books changed our lives in every possible way.

For now, I just want to mention that I came across the poetry of William Blake through one of these volumes that I got from the trash in 1979, "Immortal Poems of the English Language". This book was already old and yellow when I got it from the trash then, having been printed in 1952, but they used to make books differently back in the day: really high-quality paper that stands the test of time. I still have this anthology on my book shelf at home. In fact, here's a photo of it:

I didn't browse through this book as a 9-year-old because I was interested in poetry. I did it because it was sitting there at home. A child who is at home and bored (this was before computers and video games and iPads, and we didn't even have a working TV at the time: our old 1960s black and white vacuum tube TV had not survived the move to Michigan) will find anything at least potentially interesting.

I flipped through the volume looking for short, easy stuff to maybe read. Well, it turns out that a lot of Blake's poetry is in fact really short, and really easy to read, without a lot of complicated words or subordinate phrases or fancy thoughts. (Much later, I realized that simple to read does not mean simplistic or "for children".)

I didn't fully understand what I was reading, but at least I got a taste.

Really enjoying Blake

My teenage years were quite difficult, filled with alienation, loneliness, anger, depression, and poor health. I found some unexpected solace reading Blake's poetry. In fact, it turned out that I embraced the fundamental messages inherent in his work. I have changed my opinions about one thing or another in the decades of my life since, but one constant has been my admiration for William Blake: the man, the poet, the philosopher, the do-it-yourself.

There were several poems that really spoke to me then as they do to me now.

He means so much to me that one of these poems is actually the "secret" inspiration for the title and subtitle of this very blog that I started over two years ago. Why is this blog "Franklin Chen's grain of sand: infinity in the palm of my hand"?

Read "Auguries of Innocence":

The poem for yesterday's party: "Eternity"

But that's a complex poem, not the one I was going to share yesterday at the party. The poem for yesterday was a much shorter one, "Eternity":

<blockquote> He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise. </blockquote>

(The old edition I have has "bends" instead of "binds".)

This is a very powerful poem. I have not always abided by its advice, but I believe in its wisdom.

For me, the poem is about attachment versus detachment, and eternity versus impermanence.

The lesson I have learned the hard way in my life is that being attached to something, whether an idea or a possession or even a memory, leads to suffering, because it contradicts the reality of the world and of human existence. This year has been particularly challenging for me, as I gave up some old, familiar habits and beliefs and activities in order to start new ones.

It is hard to say goodbye to something familiar and comforting, whether it is writing computer programs in a certain language, or taking part in certain music performances because you've done that for two years and feel a camaraderie with others you have done it with, or giving up or scaling down on a beloved hobby. But then I remember that if we love something, that does not mean we possess it, or that it possesses us. A musical ensemble will continue on without us; we should be happy for it without constantly feeling regret or sadness at moving on. We should be grateful for what we have given ourselves to in the past, without feeling shackled by it. And that I've found myself used to thinking or behaving a certain way doesn't mean I need to stay that way.

Easier said than done: there are still various things that I know I am still hanging on to that once made sense but now may not. Luckily, I have Abby as a source of input that can offer a point of view that is not just my own self-absorption. OK, I don't always accept her point of view, but I am grateful that she expresses it and offers it as something for me to give myself permission to consider.

Instead of trying to capture and relive a perfect moment, we can look forward to brand new moments. And especially as a new year arrives, we can symbolically renew our sense of freshness.

This doesn't mean necessarily throwing out the past; it just means recognizing the past as what it is, rather than as what we wish the future could still be.

Conclusion

I'd like to thank Gina for inviting us to take a moment to reflect on something of our choice as 2013 comes to an end. I wish I could have stayed longer last night to take part in the discussions that apparently lasted quite some time!

Appreciating the unique singer La Lupe

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 02:41:19 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

I recently listened to a great program "La Lupe: queen of Latin soul" about the black Cuban singer La Lupe, who died in 1992 (born in 1936) well before I was even aware of her existence.

(I also then found information on a film about La Lupe).

First encounter

I still remember the exact moment I first heard her electrifying singing, and remember looking her up to find more music sung by her. It was sometime around the year 2003.

It was during the final credits of the old 1988 film "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" by Pedro Almodóvar. It was a quiet evening alone as I was watching it on DVD in part because I was taking a course on Spanish, finally having decided to learn the language for real after having been exposed to it a lot thanks to Latin ballroom dancing and salsa and tango, listening to a lot of the music.

A strident voice rang out at me from the TV screen. I almost want to say "harsh", but the unique quality of the voice and the singing were so compelling that I don't want to use the word "harsh". This voice came out during the singing of a bolero, the musical genre that I love that usually involves a more smooth kind of voice and delivery. So it was really unusual being captivated by this amazing performance that played up the sense of loss and betrayal that were certainly in the lyrics.

It wasn't just that the emotional directness and yet control of the singing that captivated. I was also really pleased that I could hear every word, even as a beginning student of Spanish. This was a singer with impeccable articulation that could make a song seem as though it were spoken, telling a story. When she sang, it was the complete package: drama, phrasing, silence, a cold stare or a haughty laugh. It was not just notes or words. It was a performance.

The song is so raw that I can't really listen to it very often, but here it is (as linked from the program I just mentioned). I'm talking about "Puro Teatro", of course. (Here's an English translation of the lyrics.)

Finding more of her music

I had no idea who La Lupe was at the time when hearing her sing in the film. I managed to order an Almodóvar soundtrack CD that included her "Puro Teatro", got her name, then looked her up. Eventually I found more songs by her, buying a CD of just her music. Of course, now with YouTube, it is easy to find anything by anybody. But there was a time when it was much harder to find music.

The NPR program has embedded YouTube videos of several of her performances. She was fantastic in all kinds of music, ranging from really fast dance music to more moderate salsa or cha cha or slower boleros. She also sang, in heavily accented English, some songs in the English languages.

Since I am such a fan of slow boleros, here is "Que te pedí":

About La Lupe

I tend not to know a lot about the performers of music I have listened to, because I tend not to read music programs or the like. I did appreciate listening to this NPR program, because I hadn't realized many unique things about La Lupe.

She was really revolutionary back in the day: in the 1950s in Cuba, then after leaving Cuba, in the 1960s and 1970s. I had no idea she dated from way back. Not only was she a black Cuban who made it, but also as a woman she was controversial for her sensual presence and musical delivery (which included growls, gasps, sniffs, sighs, orgasmic moans, and a kind of maniacal laugh; you can hear it for yourself, it's still kind of shockingly direct for today I think). She was completely uninhibited. That's why I was surprised she was operating in the 1950s. I would have thought, OK, 1980s.

Conclusion

It was nice for me to have the opportunity to learn something about an amazing singer who has long since gone, and I hope people continue appreciating the quality of her art.

The Chess Improver: Making up fake games to improve understanding of themes

Thu, 19 Dec 2013 12:46:01 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Making up fake games to improve understanding of themes"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

When I was playing chess as a child, one of my favorite things to do, especially before my father found out about the existence of chess clubs and we started attending a local one when I was ten years old, was to make up fake games in order to enjoy seeing interesting play using some idea. In particular, it is useful to see how one can win using an idea, against, of course, less than perfect defense. Back in the day, one could use books or magazines to find collections of games to sudy, and but there was no way to search efficiently for exactly what one was looking for. Today computer databases and sophisticated search programs and even query languages enable doing many kinds of research that were not possible 30 years ago.

Doing it yourself, with computer aid

But even today, I think it is fun and instructive to make up one's own fake games. And there are better ways to make more realistic fake games, thanks to computers. In the past, if you were not already a master (or even if you were), there was no guarantee about the quality of your invented game. Maybe you created a fantasy game featuring an attack, but weren't sure whether it was sound at all.

There are many ways today to create fantasy games that can serve different purposes. One can still make up a fantasy game without any computer aid, and then check it, for example. Or you can rely on light aid, not checking every move. Or, if you are true computer geek, you can automatically generate games by programming an engine to choose 2nd or 3rd best moves (according to its evaluation function), or some weighted random distribution. There are all sorts of things one could do. As a non-professional chess player, I don't do any of the really fancy things that one could do; I'm just pointing out that one could do them.

For instruction

Recently I came across a beautiful game by Steinitz in Bruce Pandolfini's Chess Cafe column, in which he crushed the French Defense using his own variation against it (<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1262409" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1262409">Steinitz-Sellman, Baltimore 1885</span>). It turns out that I have been helping a student understand the French Defense and its thematic ideas, so I assigned this game for study. But I also immediately felt that I should have him understand that of course Black went wrong in various places, and playing the French Defense does not simply mean lying down and losing with an inactive light-squared Bishop. So I wanted to also give him a game in which it was Black who played thematically and well. But I wanted full control over the nature of the game, so I decided that instead of looking for some game that fit my parameters, I would invent one, with a bit of computer aid. This is the first time I've invented a fantasy game since my childhood! Maybe I should do this more often.

In the following game, I generated it simply by choosing "plausible" but poor moves by White, letting a chess engine generate reasonable-looking continuations (I did not always take the first choice, especially in light of its difficulty in fully understanding the closed positions in the French), and then myself interpreting the game in human-oriented positional and tactical terms. In some decision points I deliberately allowed the game to take particular directions.

Themes the game allowed me to illustrate:

The importance of the dark diagonal from a7 to g1 that White relinquished early in the opening. The danger of passive Bishop and Knight deployment by White in light of the opening configuration (with Queen on e2 and Bishop unable to get to e3) and the desire to castle King side (another illustrative game would show the dangers of castling Queen side given Black's a6/b5/b4 plans). Black's timely attack on White's center using f6. Use of the half-open f file, including a thematic exchange sacrifice on f3 to break through. Black's successful deployment of the "French" light Bishop to d7 and then on both wings to b5 and also back to e8 where it was ready to go to the King side.

Not bad for a mostly-generated game!

The main caveat I offer is that the computer is not useful in the opening unless you already know the long-term themes, because, for example, it does always realize how poor the "French" light Bishop is until too late; in many lines it wanted to play b5 and Bb7, which just goes along with White's plan that Steinitz came up with in the 1800s! This could be the topic of another article.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "C11"]

e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. e5 Nfd7 5. f4 c5 6. dxc5 Bxc5 7. Nf3 Nc6 8. Bd3 a6 9. Qe2 $201 { We have reached a critical position from Steinitz-Sellman, Baltimore 1885.} 9… Ba7 { Keeping control of the diagonal to g1, while making way for the Knight to go to c5.} ( 9… Nb4 $2 { Was the misguided idea in the Steinitz-Sellman game.} ) 10. Bd2 { For the sake of comparison, let White play a similar piece deployment as in the Steinitz game.} 10… Nc5 { Comparing with the Steinitz game: Black's Knight configuration is different and stronger, with Knights at c6 and c5 rather than d7 and b4.} 11. Nd1 f6 { Bam! Black sees that White's Bishop on d2 and Knight on d1 are not doing much for the center, and therefore attacks it immediately.} 12. Nf2 Qb6 { Threatening the b2 Pawn.} 13. b3 fxe5 14. fxe5 { Let's have White try to maneuver the Knight in order to castle King side.} 14… O-O 15. O-O Nxd3 16. cxd3 { The interesting feature of this position is that Black has kept control over White's d4 square since the moment White gave it up with dxc5 in the opening.} 16… Bd7 17. Bc3 { Trying to get in d4.} 17… Rf5 { Using the f file.} 18. d4 Rxf3 { Bam, the thematic exchange sacrifice on f3.} 19. Qxf3 Nxd4 20. Bxd4 Qxd4 { Black threatens Rf8 now.} 21. Rad1 Qb6 { Never mind the e5 Pawn.} 22. Qg3 Bb5 { Bam! Black's problem Bishop is now active.} 23. Rfe1 Rf8 24. Rd2 Qc5 25. h3 { White can really only sit around and wait.} 25… Be8 { To redeploy the Bishop to g6 or h5 to limit White's Rook activity.} 26. Rf1 Qb4 { The Queen is coming in.} 27. Rc2 Qe4 28. Rd2 h5 29. Kh2 Qf5 { The threat is Bb5.} 30. a4 b5 31. a5 b4 32. Kg1 Bb5 33. Re1 g5 { White has now been squeezed to death and will lose material soon.} 34. Qf3 Qxf3 35. gxf3 Rxf3 36. Rb2 h4 37. Rc2 Be3 38. Kg2 Rg3+ 39. Kh1 Bf4 40. Rc8+ Kf7 41. Rc7+ Ke8 42. Rc8+ Kd7 43. Rg8 Rxb3 44. Rg7+ Kc6 45. Rg6 Rf3 46. Rxe6+ Kc5 47. Nd1 Rxh3+ 48. Kg1 Bd2 0-1`} />

Stop limiting yourself by labeling yourself left or right brained

Fri, 13 Dec 2013 02:25:29 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://en.sommer-sommer.com/braintest/img/brain_result.png" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://en.sommer-sommer.com/braintest/img/brain_result.png">[image: Brain]</span>

It is popular in some circles to obsess over so-called "left-brained" versus "left-brained" characteristics, or even people. There are whole books hyping up such a distinction, and even promoting one or the other.

Now, there actually is such a thing as lateralization of brain function. But the popular stereotypes go well beyond the scientific findings on brain structure and function (which are subjects of continuing research, of course).

Actually, I've noticed that this whole notion is used as a weapon. For example, consultants sell their services to supposedly promote "right-brained creativity" in corporate settings. Or scientists who consider themselves left-brained make fun of the woo-woo artists who are helplessly right-brained. Or artists pride themselves on apparently having no left brain and therefore being warmer and more creative, something like that. I hear this kind of talk at parties.

30 second brain test

Not long ago, I came across a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://en.sommer-sommer.com/braintest/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://en.sommer-sommer.com/braintest/">"30 second brain test"</span> purporting to measure your brain dominance. This is not the first time I've encountered a test like this. And as always, I scored heavily right-brained. (<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://en.sommer-sommer.com/braintest/?data=OSw5MQ==" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://en.sommer-sommer.com/braintest/?data=OSw5MQ==">My results</span>.) This doesn't mean much to me. I can explain how some of my answer preferences came about by sheer accident. For example, I was taught by my father to fold my arms a certain way, and so that explains that. I don't "identify" as a right-brainer.

Those of us who have an intact corpus callosum have the two brain hemispheres connected and communicating anyway.

Looking at handedness

Even when it comes to a subset of brain usage, something as simple as left or right hand preference, when I catalog my hand usage, I find that I am split almost completely down the middle over dozens of activities, and that other than some very strong right hand preferences for writing and throwing, I have a lot of very strong left hand preferences also, and many of them are learned.

And in many cases, the learning to use the left hand has to do with efficiency: my right hand is already doing something. Some examples:

I hold cups in my left hand because my right hand is grasping a utensil.
I prefer to open doors with my left hand because I'm usually carrying something with my right.
In partner dancing, such as ballroom, swing, and salsa, the basic one-hand hold simply happens to be the leader using the left hand.
I recently started playing ukulele: well, the standard setup involves fretting with the left hand and strumming with the right.
I use my left hand to mouse with a computer because using only my right hand caused me RSI years ago, and now I use my right hand for mousing at work but my let at home.

Top and bottom brain

Some interesting recent research has been illuminating a lot more about the brain. For example, a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304410204579139423079198270" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304410204579139423079198270">recent article</span> talks about a notion of "top brain" versus "bottom brain".

Hopefully this new research won't spawn another wave of avid self-identification. I don't know. This article was excerpted from a new popular science book. Maybe it will hit the party conversation circuit.

Meanwhile, how about just not categorizing yourself, but <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/black-belt-brain/201312/left-brain-right-brain-whole-brain" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/black-belt-brain/201312/left-brain-right-brain-whole-brain">developing your whole brain</span>?

Pittsburgh Scala Meetup: code walk through tic-tac-toe with Play

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 03:15:52 GMT

The Pittsburgh Scala Meetup met again with Josh walking through his code for an interactive Web tic-tac-toe program implemented with Play.

It was a good session. I'm finding that studying code (with the code's author present) is a great way to learn, to discuss design decisions and alternate possible choices that could have been made. For example, when it comes to actors, there are decisions to be made about how many actors, what state they should contain, and how to transition.

The Chess Improver: The most beautiful opening trap ever, with its tempo twin

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 12:19:33 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""The most beautiful opening trap ever, with its tempo twin"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Recently, I noticed that some people have been playing a variation of the Scotch Game involving White retreating the Knight on d4 to b3 after Black's Bc5. That brought back memories of a beautiful opening trap that I learned from some dusty library book in my childhood, probably by Horowitz or Reinfeld. One thing that I found really remarkable about this opening trap was that there is a similar opening trap that I also encountered in those days that was the exact same position except with one important tempo missing. The tactical ideas are similar, but different in that the tempo means that the win is much, much harder. I think of this other trap as being the most beautiful opening trap I have ever seen. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

Where did the extra tempo go? Oh, it is a result of the positions being with colors reversed! I always thought that was fascinating.

Here are both traps: the easy one, then the hard one.

The easy trap

The easy trap is one that a student if prompted could find, being told to look for something, even if by just trial and error, because of forcing checks.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "C45"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 exd4 4. Nxd4 Bc5 5. Nb3 Bb6 6. Nc3 Nf6 7. Bg5 h6 8. Bh4 d6 9. Nd5 $2 Nxe4 $1 { A cute Queen sacrifice.} 10. Bxd8 $4 ( 10. Qh5 { White can try to limit the damage to just losing the e Pawn.} ) 10… Bxf2+ 11. Ke2 Bg4+ 12. Kd3 Ne5+ { Sacrificing a Knight!} 13. Kxe4 f5+ 14. Kf4 Ng6# 0-1`} />

The hard trap

The "twin" of the easy trap is much, much harder. I think it would take an advanced player to really work out the solution, with all the sidelines, to conclusion. This is because there is no immediate checkmate, and there are many possible variations. An impatient student might look for checks or look for captures, to no avail, missing the essence of the trap, which is to do what it takes, even if it takes several moves, to completely trap the King, rather than kick it around (in which case it will escape, and because of the huge amount of sacrificed material expended, the failed attacker will have a lost game).

I think this lovely trap contains much that is worth study. Besides the theme just mentioned, here are some additional ideas:

The "losing" side does not have to take the Queen. Have the student try to continue the game, even at the cost of a Pawn. This will illustrate that you don't have to give up just because you fell into a trap. The forced mate that I saw in the opening trap book is a mate in 7. It turns out that there is a mate in 6 that I did not know about until working on this article and turning on the chess engine. This mate is much more involved but quite beautiful. It's worth studying the shorter mate as well.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "B02"]

e4 Nf6 2. Nc3 d5 3. exd5 Nxd5 4. Bc4 Nb6 5. Bb3 Nc6 6. Nf3 e5 7. d3 Bg4 8. h3 Bh5 $2 9. Nxe5 $1 { Sacrificing the Queen.} 9… Bxd1 $4 ( 9… Qh4 { Tries to limit the damage, although of course Black is lost.} ) 10. Bxf7+ Ke7 11. Bg5+ Kd6 12. Ne4+ { Sacrificing the Knight.} 12… Kxe5 13. f4+ Kd4 { The missing tempo means that the King has an escape square!} ( 13… Kf5 14. Ng3# { This is the forced mate from the other position.} ) 14. Rxd1 $1 { Creating a mate threat that actually takes potentially many moves to execute!} ( 14. c3+ $4 { Lets the King escape.} 14… Kxd3 15. Nf2+ Kc2 { Black's King is not only safe, but it is also an attacking piece!} ) ( 14. Bxd8 $4 Bxc2 { Black is simply up material.} ) 14… Ke3 { Trying to bring the Knight to d4 and block a checkmate.} ( 14… Qxg5 { The best try, and one a student must analyze.} 15. c3+ { Check only now, after protecting the vital d3 Pawn.} 15… Ke3 16. fxg5 { And White has deadly threats involving castling and using the other Rook to checkmate. The variations are long but involve Black having to give back a lot of material to avoid an immediate checkmate.} 16… Nd4 17. O-O ( 17. cxd4 $2 { A materialistic student could grab the Knight, which does lead to a won game still, but potentially a very long one with a material edge.} ) ) 15. O-O { There's actually a forced mate in 8 here. One doesn't have to see the whole sequence, necessarily, because one can just be satisfied by the win of material in some lines.} 15… Nd4 $2 { This is the main line that I remember reading.} 16. Rde1+ { This is the "easy" forced mate in 7 from the book.} ( 16. Rfe1+ { This is the remarkable shorter but harder mate in 6 that was not in the book, but popped up when I was computer-checking the trap.} 16… Ne2+ 17. Rxe2+ { Sacrificing the exchange!} 17… Kxe2 18. Nc3+ Ke3 19. d4 { A beautiful motif, blocking the d4 escape square for the King, and now threatening Rd3#.} 19… Qxd4 ( 19… Qxg5 20. Rd3+ Kxf4 21. Rf3# { Wow. Black's Queen is in the way of King escape.} ) 20. f5+ { Remarkable how the Queen got deflected from the Bishop on g5.} 20… Qf4 21. Rd3# ) 16… Ne2+ 17. Rxe2+ { Sacrificing the exchange!} 17… Kxe2 ( 17… Kd4 18. Rd1 { c3 mate is coming. Black cannot stop it, even by playing Na4 or Nd5 or Bb4 to postpone it by one move.} ) 18. Bh5+ Ke3 19. Rf3+ Kd4 ( 19… Ke2 20. Rg3+ Ke1 21. Re3# ) 20. Bf7 { Paradoxical, returning to where it came from. c3 mate is coming.} 1-0`} />

MongoDB free online course: a review

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 03:03:55 GMT

I finally finished a two-month free online course on MongoDB, given by MongoDB, Inc.

This is a review of the specific course numbered M101J, "MongoDB for Java Developers", but it should apply to all thee introductory developer courses on MongoDB in any language, because actually, I had originally signed up months earlier for their original course (in JavaScript), and the content is largely the same (I had gotten busy and dropped that course).

Why learn MongoDB?

I had first heard of MongoDB over two years ago, at a meeting of the (now defunct) original Pittsburgh JavaScript meetup group, "In-depth look at Node.js and NoSQL".

MongoDB has become very popular; as far as I can tell, this is because of extreme marketing efforts, as well as the fact that it is very easy to get started doing stuff with it, being a document-oriented NoSQL database requiring no schema.

I took this course in part to expose myself to some NoSQL technology and also in part because I anticipated needing to use something like it. In fact, it turns out I did use it, heavily, in exactly the kind of use case that works fine with it.

Why did I take the Java version of the course?

I took the "M101J: MongoDB for Java Developers" version of the course because I anticipated writing code in Scala to access MongoDB. In fact, during the course, I ended up using the official Scala driver Casbah when possible.

Summary of the course

A lot of the course actually involved using the JavaScript-based MongoDB shell, which makes sense because it is easy to explore data that way. Since everything is JSON-like, there's no real escaping JavaScript if you're working with MongoDB.

The video lecture/quiz/assignment format is fairly standard for MOOCs, and worked fairly well.

The course was more work than I expected, because it lasted so long, two months.

The ad hoc nature of MongoDB's API (including the Java-based one) tended to bother me throughout.

The weird CRUD syntax, shoehorning everything into a JSON representation, took some getting used to.

The way to specify indexes and to evaluate your guesses about whether they are actually working the way you expected was to look at funny values in JSON. I found this low-level and annoying.

The aggregation API seemed even weirder. Overall, everything had a loose "dynamic" feel to it: this is the essence of MongoDB, really. Doing things wrong made me frustrated because of the runtime errors.

Finally, the sections on replication and sharding were particularly problematic. The lectures kept mentioning that various defaults and APIs were a moving target. Furthermore, actual hardcoded numbers even showed up that we were supposed to use to specify policies. Wow.

Conclusion

The lectures and quizzes were well-designed (until the final portion of the course that seemed particularly ad hoc). The assignments were sometimes rather tricky, with not much of a hint, but offered a decent variety of realistic query formation.

I would recommend this course as an overview to anyone who is committed to using MongoDB to its full extent.

However, although I got my "certificate" for completing the course, and appreciate that MongoDB, Inc offers this training for free, I felt that there was a lot of ad hoc stuff going on in the evolving design of MongoDB, and embedded in the API design as well. For what I needed to know for my work, I didn't really need the whole course.

Geeking out at the annual CMU psychology holiday party: beauty and selling out

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 01:31:24 GMT

At the annual CMU psychology department holiday party this year, the featured entertainment is the pub quiz, which my office team has come in second place basically every year since its existence. (Although we never win, we believe that if we accumulate the standings over the years, we are clearly first: our consistent second place performance clearly beats the wild variance of any of the other teams' performances.)

There was a movie trivia category that we did very well in. Given a graphic, we were to determine the film title represented by the graphic.

Well, one of the images had everyone confused and silent, except for me, it seemed:

The answer

The answer was immediately obvious to me, certifying me as the math geek in the department. Understandably, most psychology department people are not math geeks; but I'm not a psychologist, but a programmer, and my college degree is in physics.

The answer is, of course, "Beauty and the Beast", because Euler's identity is the "most beautiful equation" in all of mathematics. There is simply no doubt about this; it is so amazing and wondrous that if you've studied mathematics seriously, contemplating this equation is like seeing God or something.

And "666" is, by contrast, the mark of the beast.

The genuine "most beautiful" equation in mathematics

However, I have to add a disclaimer: Euler's identity as we know it is not really the most beautiful equation. It has a real flaw: it uses pi (π).

pi is a terrible mistake in the history of mathematics. The correct equation, had history adopted tau instead of pi, would have been more beautiful:

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://img.spikedmath.com/comics/fact-005-embrace-the-tau.png" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://img.spikedmath.com/comics/fact-005-embrace-the-tau.png">[image: Euler with tau]</span>

(Images from Spiked Math)

So, Euler's identity as we know it is not quite the most beautiful equation. But it could be, if we all embraced tau.

Back to reality

But I wasn't going to get any points for the team by snidely answering the question with the nonexistent film title "Half Beauty and the Beast". What can I say, I swallowed my pride and sold out to score an important point for our team.

Given how easily I sold out, it is clear that a hundred years from now, we'll all still be using pi instead of tau.

(Update of 2014-05-09)

Here is an interesting video reporting on brain research into the experience of "mathematical beauty" (both in mathematicians and non-mathematicians):

The Chess Improver: Imagining that you can play ten moves in a row

Thu, 28 Nov 2013 12:59:16 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Imagining the you can play ten moves in a row"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Now and then, I hear a non-chess-player make an analogy using the game of chess, suggesting that some competitive business advantage is like being able to play two moves in a row in chess. I try to point out that being able to play two arbitrary legal moves in a row in chess is not just some kind of small or large advantage, but an overwhelming one. For example, suppose it only takes one move to push a Pawn forward attacking your opponent's Queen: this means that given two moves in a row, you could win a Queen without doing any of the ordinary back-and-forth calculation that characterizes the complexity and beauty of chess.

However, the fantasy of playing two moves in a row is quite an important one, the first step toward making plans, if we place some constraints on the nature of the two moves.

First of all, as already mentioned, it's cheating if you imagine a sequence of moves in which the first move creates a deadly threat but in reality your opponent could block it easily, without making some other serious concession, because that's like being allowed a two-move sequence in a fight in which you get to both get in close and the deliver a blow, when in real life the whole trick is how to get in close without being punched back in the first place.

If your opponent can block the threat of the first move, but you have calculated a second move in response to the first defensive move that has no good defense, then what we have is a two-move combination. Although it is very important to be able to see and calculate combinations, this also is not what I'm talking about here. A tactical combination is where you figure out how to strike your opponent so that even after he puts up his best possible block, this leaves an opening for you to then deliver the final blow.

Rather, I'm talking about imagining two moves in a row where you pretend you have an opponent who will take minimal care to protect himself (avoiding immediate mate, loss of material, etc.), but at the same time may not be super aggressive. This fantasy works best if the position at hand is at least "closed" enough so that it is plausible for each of you to maneuver in your own space without stepping on the other.

Ten moves in a row!

In fact, the most closed position possible is the initial board, with nobody having played a move yet! This position is so closed that you can, and should, imagine that you can play not only two moves in a row, but more like ten.

Try this exercise, both as White and as Black. Keeping in mind to be consistent with your actual opening repertoire, set up the board and play the first ten moves of your ideal setup, with the assumption that you can only place Pawns and pieces on your half of the board. Be honest: do not just pile everything up on the f7 square, for example.

What does your setup say about what your middlegame plans are before you even make a move in each game that you play?

You might also want to test out playing this ideal position against someone who has not yet made any moves. Theoretically you should be able to win, with such a lead in development. You can even test out your ideal position against a computer engine and see how well you can do against best defense (one way to do this is to set up a position by forcing the computer to just move a Knight out and back home for ten moves).

Here are some sample positions that reflect different opening choices. Create your own!

White

Typical for many beginning players:

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "*"] [ECO "B02"]

e4 Nf6 2. d4 Ng8 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. Nc3 Ng8 5. Bc4 Nf6 6. O-O Ng8 7. Bf4 Nf6 8. Re1 Ng8 9. Qe2 Nf6 10. Rad1 Ng8 *`} />

A more advanced setup:

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "*"] [ECO "A15"]

c4 Nf6 2. g3 Ng8 3. Bg2 Nf6 4. Nc3 Ng8 5. Nf3 Nf6 6. O-O Ng8 7. d3 Nf6 8. Rb1 Ng8 9. b4 Nf6 10. a4 Ng8 *`} />

Black

Black setups are a lot trickier because typical opening theory has them being different from White setups as a result of forcing play by White. A mistake I see often is when someone as Black plays passively because of following a invisible script that is relevant only because of best play by White. But if White plays passively, there is no reason Black cannot immediately adopt an ideal setup rather than a compromise defensive setup.

Here is a Black setup that is less aggressive than one White might choose with colors reversed, but is often the best that can be done given constraints from early in the opening:

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "*"] [ECO "A04"]

Nf3 c5 2. Ng1 d6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. Ng1 a6 5. Nf3 b5 6. Ng1 Bb7 7. Nf3 Nbd7 8. Ng1 e5 9. Nf3 Be7 10. Ng1 O-O *`} />

Here is another typical realistic Black setup. Note that if not for typical constraints placed by White, Black could already have moved a Pawn from c6 to c5. Depending on what your opponent as White do, you don't have to follow the usual script, if you understand what you're aiming for and your opponent allows you to take a shortcut to it.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "*"] [ECO "A06"]

Nf3 d5 2. Ng1 Nf6 3. Nf3 c6 4. Ng1 e6 5. Nf3 Nbd7 6. Ng1 Bd6 7. Nf3 O-O 8. Ng1 b6 9. Nf3 Bb7 10. Ng1 Rc8 *`} />

A fine trumpet recital by Erin Yanacek

Tue, 26 Nov 2013 03:24:39 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://static.erinyanacek.com/img/home_page_new_photo_3.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://static.erinyanacek.com/img/home_page_new_photo_3.jpg">[image: Erin Yanacek]</span>

I attended a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.music.cmu.edu/events/282" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.music.cmu.edu/events/282">graduate trumpet recital</span> by <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://erinyanacek.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://erinyanacek.com/">Erin Yanacek</span>, in which she performed works of Robert Planel, Camille Saint-Saens, George Enescu, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Herbert L. Clarke.

(Update of 2014-07-28)

Erin has posted a video of the Herbert L. Clarke work from her recital:

A little about Erin

I first encountered Erin, without yet knowing who she was, from attending a CMU Baroque Ensemble Concert for the first time over a year ago. Then, some months later, without knowing the name or connecting it with anyone I had seen before, I saw a heartfelt article she wrote for a new blog on the arts, "The Muse Dialogue", <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://musedialogue.org/2013/02/11/seeking-the-love-of-music-that-i-once-felt/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://musedialogue.org/2013/02/11/seeking-the-love-of-music-that-i-once-felt/">"Seeking the love of music that I once felt"</span>. Then I bumped into her at a party Abby and I attended, and I finally connected the dots. It also turned out that she is a serious runner, and we've accidentally crossed paths while both running in the trails of Frick Park. And she's also a cyclist and has done the wildly difficult Pittsburgh <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.dannychew.com/dd_11.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.dannychew.com/dd_11.html">Dirty Dozen</span>.

Finally, if you're a fan of Pittsburgh's <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.rivercitybrass.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.rivercitybrass.org/">River City Brass</span>, you may have seen her recently, as she is now a cornet player there.

It's about the music

I rather enjoy Erin's playing. She's a versatile and sensitive musician, adept at different styles and different moods, exploring and showcasing what the trumpet can express. Whether it's pure brilliance, classical elegance, tender and lyrical romanticism, or jazzy/bluesy attitude and rhythm, I'm pretty impressed by the range of what Erin can do using a trumpet to communicate. Erin's program was a tasty sampler of trumpet delight. I especially like the way she shapes phrases, really making the instrument sing and speak.

Pittsburgh is blessed to have Erin as part of the local community of excellent musicians, and I hope to continue seeing her perform when I can! Check her out.

World Chess Championship 2013 round 10: Magnus Carlsen is the new world champion

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 23:17:34 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

In my continuing coverage of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, today I cover round ten, in which a draw gave 22-year-old Magnus Carlsen the FIDE World Chess Champion title. Congratulations to Carlsen, and thank you, Anand, for showing your fighting spirit by playing the Sicilian Defense today!

Game and notes below:

My opening predictions for today

I announced my opening predictions the night before today's game.

My primary prediction was that Carlsen would play 1 e4 and Anand would play c5 for an aggressive Najdorf Sicilian, and that Carlsen would play a Be2/Nf3 line in response. My secondary prediction was that if Carlsen played something other than 1 e4, then Anand would try a King's Indian as Black.

Summary of the game

It turns out that I was partially right in my prediction. There was a Sicilian Defense, and Anand did try entering a Najdorf. I was very happy to see this, because there was some discussion among my chess friends yesterday about whether Anand would simply play for a safe, quick draw, rather than try to fight back in the match for a win. Anand did try to fight back after all, playing the riskiest variation even against Carlsen's avoidance of the Najdorf with the drawish Moscow Variation.

Objectively the middlegame was very equal for some time, as Anand set up a Hedgehog position against Carlsen's Maróczy Bind setup. In fact, Anand implicitly offered a draw by shuffling his King back and forth. Carlsen decided to play on for a win, advancing on the Queenside with a4.

Shortly after that, Anand started slipping a bit, allowing Carlsen to improve White's position, and at one critical point Anand made a big blunder that should have lost the game, hanging the important d6 Pawn to White's capture by the e5 Pawn. But Carlsen prematurely captured the Pawn too early, allowing Anand to regain it and simplify into a Knight and Pawn ending that should be a draw.

However, White had chances because of the Queen side majority and more active King. Anand found very sharp counterplay that caused Carlson to decide to stop playing for a possible win, and shut the game down for a draw.

The state of the match

Carlsen is the new world champion!

The game

World Chess Championship 2013 round 9: I correctly predicted Anand's aggressively opening choice but he blundered horribly again to lose

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 13:59:36 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

In my continuing coverage of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, today I cover round nine, in which Anand finally went for the big win, but blundered horribly and lost instead.

The night before the game, five hours before it started, I tweeted:

<blockquote> It came to me in a dream: Anand playing d4 in the next round, then going for an f3, e4 Pawn storm against Carlsen #FWCM2013 </blockquote>

I have to admit to being proud of myself for having correctly predicted the opening that both players would willingly enter in today's game! I had been thinking about this even before the match, but apparently Anand didn't pull out his weapon until just now. Today, I explain my reasoning.

Game and notes below:

My correct opening prediction

`1 d4`

I concluded weeks ago that Anand would have to play 1 d4 for the win against Carlsen, as he did against Kramnik in 2008 and Topalov in 2010. I know this is a topic for a post in itself, but I think 1 e4 is dead at an elite match level if Black is willing to play 1... e5 in response. Alternatively, even in his successful defense of his title against Gelfand in 2012, Anand's 1 e4 was neutralized by Gelfand's use of the Sicilian 1... c5.

Nimzo-Indian

I predicted that Carlsen would play the Nimzo-Indian/Queen's Indian Defense opening complex in response to 1 d4. Very solid, dynamic opening choice for Black.

I believe the Queen's Indian Defense is mostly dead at the elite level, thanks to computer-aided analysis of some of the most important lines that lead to forced draws. Therefore, for Anand to play for the big win would require accepting the Nimzo-Indian challenge, creating positional asymmetries.

White against the Nimzo-Indian

There are many ways to play White against the Nimzo-Indian. As White I have tried many of them. The question is, what is the most aggressive way to play against the Nimzo-Indian? I think the answer is clear: f3 aiming for an eventual e4 and King side attack, involving f4 and e5 and f5 trying to checkmate Black's King!

Some years ago, a nice book by Yuri Yakovich came out, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.gambitbooks.com/books/Play_the_4_f3_Nimzo-Indian.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.gambitbooks.com/books/Play_the_4_f3_Nimzo-Indian.html">"Play the 4 f3 Nimzo-Indian"</span> which covers the ideas behind this way of playing for White. There are, of course, reasons why this is not played so often at top levels. Basically, the plan is risky, because White risks getting a weak c3 Pawn, being underdeveloped, or overextended, while Black gets counterplay on the Queen side. But in a must-win situation, I expected Anand to pull out this opening variation as a weapon eventually.

He has done this before. In his <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=65865" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=65865">2008 match against Kramnik</span>, he played against the Nimzo-Indian using this f3 variation in <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1510259" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1510259">Round 2</span>. Kramnik drew, but White had a good game.

Summary of the game

Carlsen characteristically avoided the most popular "main line" against the f3 Nimzo-Indian, and in fact even transposed into a line of the Saemisch Variation that for a long time, since Botvinnik's famous winning games in it, had been considered bad for Black.

But we have computers now that correct a lot of old assumptions. As a result, Carlsen played the most aggressive counterattacking plan right off the bat, going straight for Queen side counterplay before White even began developing the King side! Both players proceeded completely thematically and predictably after that, launching Pawns forward on opposite sides of the board. The question was whether Anand could break through on the King side first.

Carlsen cold-bloodedly assumed not, and played aggressively with b3 creating a possibly dangerous passed Pawn, even as Anand prepared f6 trapping Carlsen's King.

Probably objectively the position is defensible for Black. But Anand thought he saw a checkmate coming, and let Carlsen Queen the b Pawn while lifting his Rook up to deliver a checkmate threat. Alas, he completely missed that Qe1 stops the checkmate and White is dead lost, and had to resign. (It turns out that at the last moment, Anand could easily have forced a draw with Bf1.)

In this game, it is possible that if Anand had played a slower, less "objectively correct" line of attack, the game could have gotten interesting, in case Carlsen faltered. But unfortunately, we did not see that more interesting development of the game.

The state of the match

Carlsen has basically won the match. Carlsen already has 6 out of 12 points. He needs only one draw in the next 3 rounds in order to claim the title of FIDE World Chess Champion.

It's up to Anand to continue doing the best he can regardless of the inevitable result. It will be tough, especially since he just blundered horrifically again in a position that should have been a draw.

The game

The Chess Improver: The power of White's Pawn on e6

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:30:39 GMT

I wrote "The power of White's Pawn on e6" for The Chess Improver blog.

Unfortunately, the original article at https://chessimprover.com/the-power-of-whites-pawn-on-e6/ could not be recovered from the Wayback Machine or any other archive. We apologize that this content has been lost.

Chamber music concert at CMU featured Bach's Goldberg Variations arranged for string trio

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 04:04:37 GMT

I attended a special chamber music concert at CMU that featured some truly excellent musicians.

The musicians

I was particularly interested in seeing <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://trioverlaine.com/bios/lorna-mcghee/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://trioverlaine.com/bios/lorna-mcghee/">Lorna McGhee</span>, the current principal flute of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley, the concertmaster, both of whom are relatively recent additions to the orchestra. The other two musicians, also fantastic, were violist and CMU professor <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://trioverlaine.com/bios/david-harding/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://trioverlaine.com/bios/david-harding/">David Harding</span> and cellist Amit Peled.

Mozart's flute quartet no. 1 in D major

Lorna McGhee played in the first part of the program, which was Mozart's first flute quartet. I was very curious how she would approach the work, because I'm very picky nowadays about the performance of music from the 18th century or earlier, which I far prefer to be both on period instruments and in period style. The typical "modern" performance I can no longer enjoy, because of stylistic anachronisms that in my mind invalidate the beauty and freshness of early music.

I enjoyed the quartet's performance of the Mozart. The playing was crisp, lively, and transparent. There was little to quibble with in Lorna McGhee's performance: she played with verve, sensitivity, and clarity. In some phrases she held a legato longer than I would like, but overall I quite liked the performance.

Bach's Goldberg Variations arranged for string trio by Dmitry Sitkovetsky

The bulk of the program was devoted to a performance by the string trio of the entire Goldberg Variations by Bach.

In the past quarter century, I've listened to countless performances of the Goldberg Variations on all kinds of keyboard instrument, including harpsichord, fortepiano, and modern piano, but until tonight, I hadn't bothered listening to Sitkovetsky's arrangement for string trio that came out several years ago.

I thought it worked out pretty well tonight, with the three string players working really hard to create dynamism and contrast along with unity in this monumental work. I couldn't help but think that it's actually harder to pull off as a trio than as a solo keyboard piece. What was particularly interesting was visually seeing and hearing (in the different tonal qualities) all the different voices in the music. They are there in the original version, of course, but experiencing the spatial separation just made me even more amazed by Bach's creation.

Conclusion

I appreciate the time the four musicians took to perform in this chamber music recital free to the public, and thank you, CMU, for bringing them in for these invigorating performances of Mozart and Bach!

World Chess Championship 2013 round 8: the most boring game in the match so far

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 13:30:00 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

In my continuing coverage of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, today I cover round eight, in which apparently Carlsen took a break by playing safe for a quiet draw.

Game and notes below:

Summary

As White, Carlsen played e4 for the first time in the match. Anand countered with the Berlin Defense. Unfortunately, all hope that an interesting game with colors reversed from usual were dashed at move 5, which was implicitly a draw offer by Carlsen. Re1 is a completely harmless reply against the Berlin Defense, and leads to a lifeless position in which usually a series of trades leads to a drawn position.

Sure enough, Carlsen basically forced the draw quickly thereafter.

A total snorefest.

The state of the match

Carlsen has every right to play for a draw and win the match based on his two-point lead. If Anand had been ready to fight for a win at all costs, he would not have played the Berlin Defense; he could have played the Sicilian instead, for example. I hope I'm wrong, but it's looking like Anand may be going down without a fight, in fear of losing another game in the match.

The game

World Chess Championship 2013 round 7: Anand catches his breath with a quiet game

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 00:31:52 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

In my continuing coverage of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, today I cover round seven, in which apparently Anand took a break by playing safe for a quiet draw.

Game and notes below:

Summary

As White, Anand played e4 yet again (I'm still waiting for d4, which he used effectively against Kramnik and Gelfand in past world championship matches), and as in round 4 and 6, Carlsen used the Berlin Defense. Anand played a quiet, unambitious anti-Berlin again with d3, as in round 6, but this time went for a delayed Exchange Variation, giving up the Bishop pair for doubling Black's c Pawns. Nevertheless, this opening is considered harmless, and Carlsen chose a simple, effective plan that involved trading off his light Bishop for Anand's Knight, and then after further simplifications, there was nothing left in the game and they created a draw by repetition.

The only interesting points in the game to me were the obvious opportunities Anand chose not to take to try for more aggressive plans: playing g4 or playing fxe3. That he chose not to indicated that he was content to just get the game drawn and over with to stay safe and avoid creating complications that might allow him to lose.

The state of the match

Anand is running out of time to catch up in the match, but may have bought some time to rest and recover psychologically from losing two games in a row.

Some people might criticize his failure to strike back immediately in this game, but if he knew himself and knew he was not ready, then it was the wise thing to do.

However, I believe that the next time he has White, Anand should switch away from opening with e4, to opening with d4 for the win, since it looks like Carlsen can easily neutralize e4.

The game

Pittsburgh Recorder Society continues to add members

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:40:37 GMT

At the third meeting of this season of the Pittsburgh Recorder Society, I was pleased to see that we continue to add members. Wow. We already had a huge turnout last month!

Snacks!

World Chess Championship 2013, round 6: Carlsen wins the second game in a row when Anand blunders again in a drawn ending

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 04:51:36 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

In my continuing coverage of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, today I cover round six, in which Carlsen won the second game in a row.

Game and notes below:

Summary

Psychology already at move 4

As White, Anand played e4 again, as in round 4, and Carlsen again used the Berlin Defense. Anand deviated by refusing to go into the Berlin ending that had gone badly for him in round 4, and chose with d3 to transpose into a line of the Closed Ruy Lopez that is considered to be not so challenging for Black because of the lack of a White d4.

Personally, I think this was a psychological error on Anand's part, playing like Carlsen, avoiding the main aggressive opening lines. As we have seen in the match so far (and in Carlsen's whole career), Carlsen is good at holding his own when the opening is harmless or even worse for him. By giving up the fight for an opening advantage, I think Anand gave up one of his advantages, that of superior opening preparation.

Accumulating small weaknesses

Anand did not play the middlegame well. As in round 4, he used time-consuming Knight maneuvers that ended up simply allowing Carlsen to complete piece development with a harmonious setup. The result was a simplified position that looked like it should be a draw.

To my surprise, however, Anand kept on voluntarily accepting small weaknesses in his positions, first in the form of doubled e Pawns and then even isolated doubled e Pawns, when the most "natural" moves blocking up the position seemed safe and effective to hold for a draw.

Blundering a Pawn away

On the 38th move, Anand mysteriously blundered away a Pawn for no good reason whatsoever, in a position that seemed like it should be an easy blocked-up draw. This was a total shock to me. It made no sense whatsoever to me.

Still a draw, but Carlsen set a trap

In the Rook and Pawn ending, it looked like the ending should still be a draw, but Carlsen kept playing and making progress on the King side. In fact, he abandoned his Queen side in order to attempt to win on the King side. It was a great winning try.

I will confess that while playing over the score at this point in the ending, I lost all confidence in my ability to really understand what was going on without computer aid. I turned on the chess engine to analyze the ending, and it's really quite tricky. Even at a critical moment when the ending was still drawable by White, there is a large number of forcing lines that must be examined. In any case, what happened was that Anand fell into a trap in which Carlsen had a fine deflecting and clearance sacrifice that forced a win. Wow.

The state of the match

Anand is in terrible, terrible trouble. It's just that he has lost two games in a row, and almost certainly will not be able to make up the deficit in the remaining six games in the match. It's the way he's been losing: playing poorly in the middlegame in both rounds 5 and 6, then finally cracking and falling into difficult endings in which he failed to find the draws. He did in each game defend actively and resourcefully in the endings, with plans that should have worked, but each time he eventually blundered.

I hope Anand comes back to play well, regardless of the final outcome of the match, but right now, it looks like Carlsen is the one who has not made any blunders yet of the magnitude of Anand's.

The game

World Chess Championship 2013, round 5: Carlsen wins in a tense positional battle when Anand blunders!

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 01:27:57 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

In my continuing coverage of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, today I cover round five, a subtle positional battle in which Carlsen won in the ending. This was the first win by either player in the match!

Game and notes below:

Summary

Carlsen as White gave up on Nf3 and played c4 instead, a very smart choice, as it prevents Black from immediately playing d5. Anand used the Triangle System to try to transpose to a Semi-Slav, an opening that he has shown fantastic preparation for as Black in the past, including a recent brilliancy.

Carlsen sidestepped the Semi-Slav by playing the Marshall Gambit, but cleverly without the gambit, choosing a quiet line instead. After a Queen trade, Carlsen maintained some pressure, and eventually Anand pressed hard for counterplay in an ending in which he stood slightly worse the whole time. Unfortunately, at the critical moment, he mysteriously blundered just as he could have bailed out with a draw, lost the wrong Pawns, and allowed White to simplify into an easy win.

I found this game quite interesting because of the themes of bad Bishops, weak Pawns, and weak squares. Precise calculation is necessary to hold off or create invasions for either side.

The state of the match

Although Anand showed creativity in his attempt at Queen side counterplay, and in theory he could have held the draw, Carlsen clearly had the more comfortable and safe advantage for much of the game. Finally winning a game is a huge deal, of course. And Anand cannot be happy that he suddenly cracked during the game and lost. But it was not a one-sided game all the way through: it was only at the final moment when Anand made the losing move.

The game

The Chess Improver: Whether an interesting opening idea is good or bad depends on context

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 12:35:41 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""Whether an interesting opening idea is good or bad depends on context"".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Recently, I saw a cute game from 2005 (thanks to Nigel Davies) that featured a very early Knight redeployment by Black that was punished by White. My immediate reaction was that this was yet another instructive case of how GMs (Black was rated 2509) can be punished for breaking the "rules" of quick development and not moving the same piece three times early in the opening. However, one cannot just say that a very strong player did something completely stupid. Rather, there was a real point behind the maneuver, so strategically it was not a stupid idea. It just happened that concretely, tactically it was punishable by alert, precise play.

Examining situations like this is instructive and deepens one's understanding of the subtleties of chess. Here I offer representative middle game positions that illustrate how Black's Knight maneuver can be justified, if

It happens later in the opening when Black's King and center are solid and not vulnerable to immediate disruption. White does not play precisely, and therefore allows Black to catch up in development.

The Game

In this game, Black tried a Knight maneuver on move 4 of the opening to start redeploying from c6 to e7 to g6. There is a solid justification for this kind of maneuver, but alas, a precise attack starting with h4 and then hitting at f7 resulted in a nice sacrifice opening up Black's King. Although some imprecise play by White almost let Black have possibilities to draw a bad ending, Black's opening concept was clearly dubious.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Coventry op"] [Site "Coventry"] [Date "2005.03.25"] [Round "3"] [White "Efimenko, Zahar"] [Black "Cherniaev, Alexander"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "2509"] [ECO "C65"] [PlyCount "63"] [WhiteElo "2601"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6 4. d3 Ne7 $6 $201 { Risky because falling behind in development.} 5. Nc3 { Simple development, and threatening Nxe5.} ( 5. d4 { An attempt to immediately open lines.} ) ( 5. Nxe5 $4 c6 { Black wins a piece because if White moves the BIshop, then …Qa5+ wins the Knight on e5.} ) 5… Ng6 { Black has moved the Knight three times in the opening while not yet finishing King side development.} 6. h4 $1 { It is worth trying to punish Black's Knight play. The threat of h5 is quite real.} 6… c6 $2 { Oblivious to the danger, only chasing White's Bishop to a better square.} 7. Bc4 h5 8. Ng5 d5 9. exd5 cxd5 $4 { The losing move.} ( 9… b5 10. Bb3 cxd5 11. d4 { Black has a terrible position but at least is not yet dead.} ) 10. Nxd5 $1 { A nice piece sacrifice.} 10… Nxd5 11. Qf3 $201 { Black is actually lost, because of threats against d5 and f7.} 11… Be6 12. Nxe6 fxe6 13. Bb5+ Ke7 14. Bg5+ Nf6 15. Qxb7+ Kd6 $201 { White has two Pawns for the piece, and a raging attack against Black's King. Black is lost, according to the computer.} 16. c4 Rc8 17. Bd2 Rc5 18. Qxa7 $6 ( 18. a4 { Computer claims as winning this cold-blooded move just marching on the Queen side calmly.} ) 18… Qc7 19. Qa6+ Ke7 20. b4 Rxb5 { Sacrificing the exchange, resulting in White have Rook and 3 Pawns to Black's Bishop and Knight.} 21. cxb5 Kf7 22. Rc1 Qd7 23. b6 Be7 24. O-O $2 { Remarkably, after a series of inaccuracies by White, the computer claims Black is almost OK now.} 24… Nd5 $4 ( 24… Nxh4 $201 { Remarkably, it looks like Black may be able to hold, because of the strong Knights and White's weak center and unprotected King side.} 25. Rc7 Qd5 26. Qb7 Nf5 ) 25. Qa7 $2 ( 25. a4 { Immediately aiming to connect the passed Pawns was strong.} ) 25… Qxa7 26. bxa7 Ra8 ( 26… Ngf4 { White's passed Pawns will get very dangerous.} 27. Rc4 Ra8 28. a4 Nxd3 29. b5 Rxa7 30. a5 { White's connected passed Pawns should win.} 30… Bc5 31. b6 Rb7 32. Be3 Nxe3 33. fxe3+ Ke7 34. Kh2 ) 27. Be3 Bxb4 $2 { Black's Knight on g6 needed to get back into the game.} ( 27… Ngf4 28. Rc2 Bxb4 29. a3 Bxa3 30. Rb1 Nxe3 31. fxe3 Rxa7 32. exf4 exf4 { White is the exchange up for a Pawn, but the game is not over yet.} ) 28. Rc4 Bd6 $2 ( 28… Be7 29. g3 Nf8 30. Rc6 Kg8 31. Ra6 Nxe3 32. fxe3 Bc5 33. Rb1 Bxe3+ 34. Kg2 Rxa7 35. Rxa7 Bxa7 36. a4 Bd4 37. a5 Ng6 38. Rb7 Kf8 39. a6 Ne7 40. a7 Bxa7 41. Rxa7 Kf7 ) 29. Rb1 Nge7 30. Rb7 Ke8 $4 31. Bc5 Bxc5 32. Rb8+ { Queening.} 1-0`} />

The same opening with White not acting decisively

The problem with seeing a game like that out of context is that one might think "of course Black deserved to get punished for such an unusual opening concept". It's worth seeing how the opening might have turned out OK, if only White had played less aggressively, by developing "normally" and not quickly attacking Black's King side or center. Below is a sample continuation in which Black is completely successful in achieving a flexible Philidor type of position, with Pawns on d6, c6, and b5, and with the Knight being more active on g6 than on the usual square of d7. This is the kind of justified position that Black wanted to get.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "*"] [ECO "C65"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6 4. d3 Ne7 5. O-O c6 6. Bc4 Ng6 7. Re1 Be7 8. Nc3 b5 9. Bb3 O-O 10. d4 d6 { A series of "natural" developing moves by White has led to Black's successful ideal setup, equalizing. Black has an improved Philidor type of Pawn structure and piece placement.}`} />

A possible Four Knights Game position

Finally, let's look at the Knight maneuver in a "respectable" context, a slow Four Knights Game in which both sides have already developed most of their pieces and castled, and the position is closed. Here, because White plays a single passive move h3 at a moment when more disruptive moves were possible, Black manages to redeploy the Knight to g6, reaching a position even more active than in the Philidor situation, because of the dark Bishop being on b4 instead of e7. In fact, it looks like Black is playing the Spanish, only reversed. (A later article will examine the analogous Knight maneuver from b1 to g3 in the Spanish for White.)

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event ""] [Site ""] [Date ""] [Round ""] [White ""] [Black ""] [Result "*"] [ECO "C49"]

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bb5 Bb4 5. O-O O-O 6. d3 d6 7. Bg5 Ne7 8. h3 $2 { Does nothing to prevent Black from executing the plan.} 8… c6 9. Ba4 Ng6 $201 { Black has a fine position. In fact, the Pawn structure and piece placement are much like a reversed Spanish.} *`} />

Lessons

If you break a rule of development too early in the opening, it is likely a bad idea. If you see a rule of development broken, look for a possible disruptive refutation, through opening the center or attacking the King or some other tactical idea, even if it means interrupting your own "normal" development. "Normal" development in response to a weird idea may result in that weird idea turning into a virtue at your expense.

World Chess Championship 2013, round 4: who said the Berlin Defense was boring?

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 02:49:28 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

In my continuing coverage of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, today I cover round four, the most exciting and longest game of the match so far! Things are really heating up!

Game and notes below:

Summary

The game featured Carlsen as Black defending against Anand as White using the "infamous" Berlin Defense. I saw a bit more about the Berlin Defense in a companion post. Let's just say that it has had a reputation as a "boring" defensive opening for Black.

But this game was hardly boring. Anand seemed to falter in the opening as White, embarking on time-consuming Knight maneuvers that seemed to give Carlsen time to neutralize any attacking ideas. But then Anand provocatively offered a Pawn sacrifice, which Carlsen did not actually need to accept, but did. Then Anand pushed Carlsen's Bishop and Knight all the way back, in an attempt to just run him over with a thematic King side majority Pawn storm. The computer says this was not really sound, but it was exciting to see an aggressive, risk-taking Anand for the first time in the match, after his cautious play in the first three rounds.

Carlsen came up with good counterplay, but in very complex positions, began faltering, and could not refute Anand's play, even as Anand was fighting for his life. Anand sacrificed a second Pawn to continue the attack. That was an amazing idea to find! Carlsen finally faltered enough to allow Anand to achieve a drawn position. What an amazing game!

Warning: analyzing the game with a computer might give the wrong idea about whether Anand was lost or not during the game, because the positions are so complex that no human could have been expected under the circumstances (the game went for hours and hours) to calculate everything perfectly. From a practical point of view, Anand's attacking ideas were definitely difficult to counter, and it is to both Carlsen's credit and Anand's that they played out this game to a fighting draw.

The state of the match

I think the situation is about even now for both players. Anand has proved in this round that he is in fact able and willing to fight, and Carlsen has continued his tenacity.

The game

The exact moment I fell in love with the Berlin Defense for Black in chess

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 02:09:39 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

I have a confession to make.

For the last thirty years of my life, I have considered the Berlin Defense in chess to be boring. As a result, even as a child, I refused to play the main line as White, and I certainly never played it as Black. The quick Queenless middlegame that results from the main line did not appeal to me for either side.

I didn't play chess or follow chess news from around 1988 to 2004, so I returned to chess bewildered by the apparent popularity of the Berlin Defense among the world elite. I learned that Vladimir Kramnik had used it successfully as a drawing weapon for Black against Garry Kasparov in 2000. Just hearing that made me even less interested in the opening for either color.

My awakening

But everything changed for me this year on April 17, when, while following the Chess Improver blog (which I now contribute to), I saw an amusing post by GM Nigel Davies, "Not In Front Of The Children", in which he gave some amusing and brief annotations to a game from 1992 that, when I played over it, totally fascinated me, because it was so unusual that he was basically saying, young novice chess players might not understand what went on.

This was a game in which Black won, not drew, with the Berlin Defense, and won in such fashion that I felt compelled to analyze the game for myself to see where exactly White had gone wrong. In analyzing the game, I felt I learned a lot about the subtleties of this defense, and even so, realized how just how much more there could possibly be to it, because of the obvious asymmetries between the two sides and the lack of Queens on the board.

I even discovered that there are even entire books devoted to the Berlin Defense, e.g., John Cox, "The Berlin Wall", from 2008 and Igor Lysyj and Roman Ovetchkin, "The Berlin Defense", from 2012. I have not read them, but the game I saw definitely led me to realize that what I thought was boring, I simply did not understand. When I understood more, I found it less boring.

Why I am writing about the Berlin Defense now

I offer my analysis of this old game below, as a supplement to my analysis of the recent exciting round 4 game of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen.

Summary

White did not have a clear plan in this game, and wasted a lot of time on Knight maneuvers that led nowhere. Also, he weakened his Queen side. The result was that Black got play on both the Queen side and King side with an unusual pair of Rook lifts. A beautiful game to behold and study!

The game

World Chess Championship 2013, round 3: a fighting game worth studying

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 03:47:56 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

In my continuing coverage of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, today I cover round three, an exciting fighting game well worth studying.

Game and notes below:

Summary

If you were bored by the first round and the second round games, because the play in both games involved no major errors and therefore ended quickly in a draw, study this third round game, even though it too ended in a draw!

Carlsen opened with the unambitious Réti Opening yet again, and Anand was happy to repeat the Grünfeld Defense setup of round 1. Carlsen varied by a very quick c4 thrust against Anand's d5 Pawn, but Anand played the most aggressive continuation, taking the Pawn, guaranteeing an asymmetrical Pawn structure and therefore a chance at fighting chess.

The ambitious Maróczy Bind

In fact, Anand aggressively adopted a reverse Dragon Sicilian Defense setup, with good long-term positional prospects as Black. Furthermore, he also quickly chose a plan to try to transform the position into a deadly reverse Maróczy Bind structure to squeeze Carlsen to death. Carlsen played inaccurately and in fact allowed Anand to adopt this structure.

If you are not familiar with the Maróczy Bind setup, check out a couple of my games in which I won using it, so you can see what can happen against weak defense:

Carlsen's defense

Carlsen decided that instead of risking being squeezed to death, he would lash out and sacrifice a Pawn to get some open lines and possibly get chances against Anand's King in order to simplify to a draw. I'm not sure whether it was sound, and Anand may have been able to play more challengingly to win (I have not done the intensive computer analysis to draw a conclusion), but in the end Anand wound up allowing simplification and losing back the won Pawn with a dead drawn ending.

The state of the match: Carlsen under real pressure

This is now the third game in a row in which Anand acquired an advantage out of the opening. And in each game, his advantage in the game has only grown. This trend is not at all good for Carlsen. He has been completely neutralized as Anand has consistently gained superior space and piece play. Carlsen had to fight hard for a draw in this game. As White in two games now, he has been playing the opening poorly, which one does not need to be a world class player to see. Is this rope-a-dope or what?

But what about Anand? Why did he keep on taking the safe way out to a draw in three games when he could have avoided simplification each time in an attempt to win? If Anand plays cautiously when he has the advantage, what might happen if Carlsen starts playing differently and gets Anand's back against the wall in a game?

The game

World Chess Championship 2013, Round 2: declining the sacrifice

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 18:09:00 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

Yesterday, I covered the first round of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, which ended in a quick draw.

Today, in the second round, the colors were reversed, with Anand as White and Carlsen as Black. The game also ended in a draw, but featured much more interesting positions and possibilities.

Game and notes below:

Summary

Anand played an interesting attacking idea in the opening that featured maintaining a strong Knight on the e5 square to hamper Black's development. This idea inherently involved offering a sacrifice of his h4 Pawn.

If Carlsen had accepted the sacrifice, I believe Anand would have had good winning chances. It was a positional sacrifice, with no immediate punishment in sight if Black had taken the Pawn, but there would have been long-term compensation for White. Carlsen wisely declined to take the Pawn, but in doing so deprived spectators of a fierce attacking game!

Unfortunately, after Anand offered a trade of a Knight, the result was that all the Knights were traded off, and then Carlsen offered to trade Queens. Anand could have held out and refused, but for some reason decided to trade, which meant a resulting position that was clearly drawn, and sure enough, a draw was agreed shortly thereafter.

Carlsen can be happy about the outcome of the game. Anand seemed too quick to trade off pieces when it was not necessary, even if White's spatial advantage and head start on the King side attack was only small, and there was always the danger that allowing Black to start a counterattack on the Queen side would create complications.

This is now the second game in a row in which Anand had some advantage but rejected opportunities to maintain complexity in search of a win.

The game

World Chess Championship 2013 Round 1: how to understand the short 16-move Carlsen-Anand draw

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 17:00:33 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

In the much-anticipated first round of the World Chess Championship between Anand and Carlsen, the game ended in a very quick 16-move draw.

In accordance with my own advice on ways to follow the match to maximize learning, today I saw the match result, downloaded a PGN file of the game score, and then walked through it without a computer engine running, analyzing the game with my own mind as I replayed the game. Then I double-checked my thoughts with a chess engine. I still have not bothered to read or watch any coverage of this first-round game; I will do that later.

Game and notes below:

Disappointment in a short draw?

I'm sure a lot of people were disappointed by this short draw. But one has to realized exactly what happened.

Carlsen played the unambitious Réti Opening as White, presumably hoping to avoid special preparation by Anand. Anand neutralized the opening early on with simple development using a Grünfeld Defense setup. Carlsen attempted to place his remaining undeveloped piece, the Queen Knight, on a more active square than the more "natural" square that would have overprotected the c4 Pawn, but Anand punished this by immediately attacking the c4 Pawn, resulting in Carlsen basically having to play moves that enabled Anand to choose to repeat the position for a draw.

Carlsen had no choice but to take the draw or stand clearly worse, so he bailed out. The question then is, should Anand tried to continue playing for a win, since it was his choice to take the draw or not?

In a match situation at this level, typically the player as Black is quite happy to take a draw, so it made sense for Anand to do so. It was possible for Anand to not force the draw, at the cost of loosening up his own Queen side, but why play in this risky way, as defending champion?

The game

Below is the game with annotations. My task was made easy in this case because it was such a short and clear game, without much complexity. I hope it will be harder in subsequent games in the match!

The Chess Improver: How to watch the Anand-Carlsen World Chess Championship to improve your own game

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 05:01:45 GMT

For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""How to watch the Anand-Carlsen World Chess Championship to improve your own game"".

I have a couple of things to add to that post, based on new information that just came my way.

There is a lot of sport-oriented trash-talking out there before the match begins, for example <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.kasparov.com/garry-kasparov-a-win-for-carlsen-in-the-upcoming-world-championship-match-will-be-a-huge-win-for-the-chess-world/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.kasparov.com/garry-kasparov-a-win-for-carlsen-in-the-upcoming-world-championship-match-will-be-a-huge-win-for-the-chess-world/">Garry Kasparov rooting for young Magnus Carlsen</span>. This is exactly the kind of thing I want to avoid as I focus on the chess itself.

I have no real attachment to either "old" (43-year-old) Anand winning or 22-year-old Carlsen winning. I deeply admire both players, and I hope that high-quality chess gets played.

That said, since Anand is my age, of course part of me wants to see him do well, given the rampant ageism in our culture that is obvious not only in chess, but in many other areas of life.

Do not write off Anand yet: remember this brilliant game of his not long ago against Aronian.

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

The 2013 FIDE World Chess Championship match between Anand and Carlsen is about to begin.

Chess as spectator sport?

You may have already waded through articles and blog posts all over the world speculating about who is favored to win, etc. It's certainly good for chess that there is excitement over this match. Furthermore, chess really is a sport, in addition to being a science and an art. In fact, in past world chess championships I have tended to adopt a spectator "fan" mentality, including favoring one player or the other, and watching and reading commentary, trying to catch bits of games live (usually difficult because of time zone differences and work and other schedules), turning on the chess engines, and talking trash with other chess players: typical sports spectator behavior, of course.

An opportunity to get more serious

As I've said, although there is nothing wrong with having fun and sometimes engaging in our beloved game of chess as a sports fan, I got to thinking, for this Anand-Carlsen match, whether I can get more serious about it, as an active improver. Here are some ideas. I will use some of them myself.

Delaying consultation of commentary

Since the games start at what will be 4:30 AM EST (my time zone), I will not anyway be up to watch the games live.

Of course, there will be copious commentary on many sites and many blogs on the games, both while in progress and afterwards.

This time, I'm going to skip the commentary for a game until I've had a chance to look at the game myself first. It will be hard to avoid learning of the result of a game, of course, but we all know that the result does not tell the whole story, so I'm not concerned about downloading an unannotated PGN score of a game while knowing the final result.

Analyzing a game first without a chess engine

Although chess engines are fantastic aids for getting to the "truth" of a position, looking at them first before forming one's own hypotheses is like reading a textbook's questions while also reading the answer key. It may be resulting in a lot of pleasant nodding, "Yes, that makes sense", but there is value in doing at least a quick and rough analysis based on one's own mind. After that, one can check one's hypotheses with the computer.

In fact, even more demanding than simply analyzing a completed game is to guess what someone will do. You can do this the time-honored way with a printout to cover up moves, or if you have the game loaded in a computer program, just don't look at the score, and hit the "next move" button after writing down your guess. (It is actually optimal to write down your guesses or thoughts, rather than only think them, if possible, to morally commit to them and own them.)

Comparative commentary

To get a broader view of different kinds of evaluations, human oversights, and the psychology of both the players themselves and the commentators, it is possible to examine a couple of different sources of commentary (especially archives of unscripted, unpolished live commentary during a game). This sort of research task is clearly very intensive and not practical to do for every game, but might be instructive for everyone to do at least once during the match.

Match-level themes

Going beyond the level of a single game, we expect patterns to emerge during intense match play in a world championship match. Both sides will have prepared massively to generate new ideas and surprises whose full expression may be revealed through multiple games. So there is an opportunity to compare deviations from the same theme and achieve a deeper understanding than from a single game. For example, in past world championship matches we have seen repeated use of the Catalan or of the Rossolimo Sicilian, during a single match.

Exploring the themes in your own games

Maybe you learn some opening and middle game ideas while following the match. While your friends are also following and excited, how about playing some friendly games with them exploring the ideas you see? It's a good excuse as any to experiment in a shared context.

Conclusion

I've mentioned a few ways in which one can use the world championship as a learning experience. Many of them can apply to any tournament or match, but I think the excitement and intensity of a world championship provide extra incentive to make the most of following the sport that we not only watch but play ourselves.

Steel City Ukuleles: a nice session on playing by ear

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 02:20:29 GMT

It's been three (rather than the usual two, because of the nature of the twice-a-month scheduling) weeks since my last meeting of the Steel City Ukuleles.

I was definitely starting to miss the group meeting, and was happy to attend tonight, although I have to confess I did enjoy having more time to work on my own ukulele musical projects (rather than practicing the meetup music).

Playing by ear

Renee had volunteered to lead a session including basic practice for playing by ear, a very important skill that many of us coming from the "written score" orientation of music need work on. That obviously includes me. I'm always astounded when going to jam sessions and seeing and hearing musicians do amazing things who barely read music, for example. The freedom and flexible facility is just obvious.

Anyway, we started easy, doing songs with only two chords, then moved to three, then four. We did this in four different keys. For me, amusingly, it was a good thing that I didn't actually know most of the songs, so I had to pick them up in real time (or more accurately, partially in real time, then repair mistaken guesses after fumbling through the first repetition).

I very much appreciated the session on playing by ear. There is no reason I can't work on this by myself at home, of course, using various techniques. I have done some of this, but not as systematically as I should, so after tonight, I decided to spend every future musical practice session (regardless of instrument) doing something without any written music. I consider playing by ear to be a critical component of what I want to get out of music in my life.

Beatles

The rest of the time we had a Beatles-themed program of songs. I found these tricky because of the sometimes strange chord changes ("strange" relative to most of the stuff we play).

Ending a little early

We ended a little early because a subset of us were scheduled to use the time to rehearse for a recording session coming up. (I had not volunteered for this gig when it was announced along with the Ecofest gig that I did do.)

The dilemma of how to descend the Cathedral of Learning once at the top

Sun, 03 Nov 2013 14:34:44 GMT

Yesterday, right after I left one of the sessions of the annual Pittsburgh Jazz Seminar at the William Pitt Union, I immediately crossed the street to the Cathedral of Learning, in order to climb up to the 36th floor (I last climbed the Cathedral three days ago):

I took off my shoes, stuffed my jacket into my backpack, and went up at an "easy" pace, taking about nine minutes:

Then I faced the usual dilemma of how to get back down, except this time, the dilemma was magnified because of my time constraints: I really needed to get down and out quickly, in order to make it to an important appointment.

Choices and tradeoffs

Elevator down

One option is to take one of the elevators down. This is what I've almost always done ever since doing the Cathedral of Learning stair climb.

Unfortunately, whether this is time-effective depends a lot on various factors, such as whether Pitt classes are being held, Pitt students are roaming around, or tourists are roaming around.

It turned out that Saturday afternoon is a bad time to be taking the elevator. There were hordes of students as well as tourists throughout the building, and especially the tourists at the top floor.

Furthermore, I had noticed on the ground floor earlier that some of the elevators were out of service.

Finally, three days ago I had a bad experience with the elevator.

Taking the stairs down

The other option is to take the stairs back down, all the way. This option is one I take so rarely that I don't even remember when I last did it. I probably did it once earlier this year, but have no specific memory of it.

The drawback of taking the stairs down is the extra impact on the body.

But since I needed to descend as quickly as possible, I felt I had no choice but to take the stairs. In fact, I not only used the stairs, but ran down all the way.

It wasn't hard (thank you, gravity!), although it got boring and weird after a while, because it feels like forever going down 36 floors.

The day after

I thought everything was OK, but this morning, the day after, I woke up with a serious case of DOMS.

My calves were totally tight and trashed. Oops. Maybe I could have prevented this by stretching after running down yesterday, but I had no time, and had to make my appointment. Or maybe I just plain overdid things, not being conditioned at all to running down so many steps.

Anyway, I'm suffering, but no permanent damage done, of course: I will be OK after a day or two.

What next?

So does this mean that the next time I climb the Cathedral, I will stick to the elevator?

Actually, no. I take the experience as a challenge:

First, I want to defeat my sense of boredom going down, just as I've managed to defeat it on the way up. I will find something meditative and aesthetic about the process of descending the steps.
Clearly my soreness showed that my calves were insufficiently conditioned. The solution to that is not to avoid running down the steps, but to keep doing it, in a smarter way. Therefore, my plan now is that on any final repetition of the Cathedral stair climb, I will take the stairs back down, rather than the elevator, regardless of elevator congestion concerns.

Conclusion

An accidental case of trashed calves during a workout has led me to treat it as a learning experience and a challenge to overcome in the future.

(Update of 2014-10-22)

The "elevator modernization project" started in September 2014 and makes it even more attractive to just walk.

Say No to Daylight Savings Time

Sun, 03 Nov 2013 02:51:43 GMT

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://wedontneeddst.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://wedontneeddst.com/">We don't need Daylight Saving Time</span>.

I hate this messing with my internal clock.

Broccoli and friends

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 22:26:40 GMT

Today I saw an article about <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/magazine/broccolis-extreme-makeover.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/magazine/broccolis-extreme-makeover.html">marketing broccoli and other vegetables</span>.

By coincidence, I had this morning whipped up a vegetable dish in the kitchen that included some broccoli.

How my father got me to eat broccoli

Here's the basic story of why I ate broccoli as a child and through adulthood.

I distinctly remember not really liking broccoli as a toddler of around two and a half to three years old (my childhood memories do not go earlier than age two and a half). I also remember a major turning point, after which I "happily" ate it.

My mother was unsuccessful in nagging me to eat my brocolli. It was when my father called broccoli florets "baby trees". All of a sudden it seemed cool to eat them, as though I were a large beast swooping down from the sky (I liked trees and all my youthful drawings and watercolors included them; I have fond memories of sitting outside under a tree).

Simple vegetable medley

I used a wok, but for the volume, not at high heat.

Time: 25 minutes

olive oil
onion, sliced
carrots, sliced
celery stalks, sliced
broccoli florets and thinly sliced stems
assorted peppers, sliced
garlic
seasoning mix

Basically, I used what was at hand from our farm box subscription.

I still love to eat those florets as though I were a giant beast feasting on trees.

Surprised by the Go programming language's treatment of nil

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 23:38:00 GMT

So I happened to see an announcement of Go version 1.2. I saw something that disturbed me, having to do with nil, a "favorite" topic of mine.

What I know about Go

I don't currently use the Go programming language, although there actually is a local Pittsburgh Go programming meetup group, the Go Steel Programmers, whose meetings I have never attended.

Some months ago I did, out of curiosity (and respect for any new language that I hear about people actually using to get stuff done), work through the tour of Go tutorial, to learn about the Go language. I installed packages on my machine, and wrote some compiling and running programs. I know just enough that I could code in Go for some project if I wanted to.

`nil`

What caught my eye in the Go 1.2 announcement was a note about changes in the semantics regarding nil.

For the record, I don't believe any new programming languages should be invented that have the nil construct, Hoare's "billion dollar" mistake. I've already previously given a talk about why, so I won't repeat the arguments here.

But I think Russ Cox's note about nil checks speaks for itself.

It said that Go 1.2 tightens things up so that various uses (directly or indirectly) of nil will cause a runtime panic rather than silently producing an unusable pointer.

Read that again: until Go 1.2, you could get silent bad behavior, an unusable pointer. This from a language that purports to be "statically typed", improve on C, and provide memory safety guarantees.

Before Go 1.2, a chain of code involving a nil could result in behavior of which Russ Cox wrote:

<blockquote> The current behavior is at best merely historical accident; it was definitely not thought through or discussed. </blockquote>

There is also a note about a particular special case:

<blockquote> (it seemed like a good idea at a time) </blockquote>

You can read the whole document about nil yourself. You will find that it is still not a formal spec, but more a rationale of various special cases and possible implementation details.

C culture

Go arose from C culture. It was invented by those in C culture who wanted an improvement over the known problems of C. Unfortunately, I perceive it as today's C, in the same way that the C invented in the 1970s was born with the problems that one could have avoided already at that very time.

Conclusion

The Go language continues to evolve, which is good, but I was surprised that the full ramifications of something as dangerous as rampant nil were not thought about up front.

The Chess Improver: The double-edged nature of computer-based preparation

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 11:59:23 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

For The Chess Improver, I wrote about "the double-edge natures of computer-based preparation".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

When I returned to playing chess in 2005, after an absence of twenty years, I was surprised not only by the digital clocks and new time controls ("sudden death"), but also by the availability and strength of computer programs for personal computers. I soon decided to make use of chess engines as part of my return to serious tournament chess, as a way to explore different kinds of positions.

In 2006, I played a game in which I unleashed a computer-generated theoretical novelty in the opening on move six, a Pawn sacrifice. It shocked my opponent. I ended up winning the game, but not without being surprised myself, as I ended up in a position that looked equal to me. I had mixed feelings about the whole experience. Furthermore, five years later, in 2011, I saw an article on Chess Cafe analyzing my very "novelty" as having been presented in Chess Informant 110. I was a little thrilled to see some in-depth analysis of the entire line, but deflated to realize that I had only ever touched the surface of the possibilities in the line.

Tiger's discovery

At some point, I was looking for ideas for White against the Chigorin Defense, since I noticed that a particular local chess player always played the Chigorin as Black and I needed something against it. I turned on my chess engine Tiger, which was running off my laptop. You have to remember that seven years ago, in 2006, computers were much slower than they are now, and chess engines, although strong, were nowhere as strong as they are now.

While puttering around, I noticed that Tiger recommended in an important variation at move six a Pawn sacrifice by White! (It turns out that Tiger was well known to have an aggressive bias in its evaluation function.) I looked up all the books I could find on the Chigorin Defense and not a single one of them even mentioned this sacrificial continuation. I was intrigued, looked at a sample line, and concluded that it was worth playing: White gets a clear initiative for the sacrificed Pawn.

Unleashing the theoretical novelty but then being surprised myself

At some point, I finally faced the Chigorin Defense player in a tournament game: it was our very first game against each other. I remembered the sacrifice and unleashed it. My opponent was clearly shocked and spent a huge amount of time thinking for each move. To my surprise, he came up with a fantastic defense that I never even looked at during my superficial computer preparation: he counter-sacrificed an exchange in return for attacking my King! It was my turn to go into deep thought. I saw no alternative but to play into the counter-sacrifice. We reached a position in which I feared that there might be a perpetual check.

I kicked myself for not having seen and analyzed this entire possibility. In 2006, chess engines were still slow, and I only used them for interactive exploration, not for overnight analyses or the like, so it was quite possible that Tiger would have seen the exchange sacrifice resource if I had let it run for a while.

Anyway, my opponent made some errors, I maintained an advantage, and then I started letting it slip during a Queenless middlegame, but then he blundered and immediately resigned.

What was the truth of the gambit?

Five years later, seeing the 2011 article covering the gambit, I was pleased to find that in fact, there was a way for White to decline the exchange sacrifice while maintaining a strong initiative. The article had many complex lines demonstrating a White advantage. As a matter of intuition, indeed, one would expect that White has compensation in any case, because of Black's weak King, but it's definitely fascinating to see computer-verified concrete justification.

Generation vs. verification

Generation of interesting ideas can come both from humans and from computer engines. My experience with this Chigorin Defense line illustrates this. Tiger generated an idea. I followed up by looking at what it was trying to do. But I should have generated counter-ideas also, and did not. I believe that humans will for a long time have the edge in generating possible ideas, while using computers for verification or falsification of them. For example, even though Tiger found one sacrifice, it did not find the rejection of Black's counter-sacrifice. That required human exploration of possibilities and exploring long lines to prove White's attack would come to something fruitful in the long run.

I have not checked with today's engines and higher compute power whether a modern engine could now completely discover the whole idea without human guidance. It may or may not be the case. Meanwhile, chess innovation still continues. Chess is not dead; it has been transformed, with computers as helpers for humans.

The entire game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "2006 PA Open Team Championships West"] [Site "Pittsburgh "] [Date "2006.02.04"] [Round "2"] [White "Chen Franklin"] [Black "Renk Robert"] [Result "1-0"] [Annotator "Chen Franklin"] [BlackElo "2084"] [ECO "D07"] [WhiteElo "2061"]

d4 d5 2. c4 Nc6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Nf3 dxc4 5. e4 Bg4 6. Bxc4 $5 { My computer-discovered "novelty" prepared especially for my opponent, who always plays this variation of the Chigorin Defense. It is a gambit of a Pawn. My opponent was shocked and went into deep thought before accepting the Pawn.} ( 6. Be3 { The only move in the books I looked at on the Chigorin Defense.} ) 6... Bxf3 7. gxf3 Qxd4 8. Qb3 Ne5 $1 { Deliberately sacrificing an exchange! I was impressed that my opponent spent a huge amount of time on the clock to find this move, especially since I did not consider it in my preparation.} ( 8... O-O-O { This was the move I expected.} 9. Be3 Na5 10. Be6+ $1 $201 { Is it possible not to love these computer-discovered moves?} 10... fxe6 11. Qb5 { White is better.} ) 9. Qxb7 $6 { This seemed a reasonable continuation, but is not best.} ( 9. Be2 $1 { Maintaining the initiative. The resulting variations are quite complicated. Here is just one sample.} 9... Qb6 10. Qa4+ c6 11. f4 Ng6 12. f5 Ne5 13. Bf4 Qxb2 14. Rc1 { White has now sacrificed two Pawns, but Black's King is not safe.} 14... Ned7 15. Rc2 Qa1+ 16. Bc1 $201 { White is winning.} ) 9... Qxc4 10. Qxa8+ Kd7 11. Be3 $201 Nxf3+ $2 ( 11... Qd3 { Achieves equality.} 12. Ne2 Nxf3+ 13. Kf1 e6 { Turn on the computer analysis and you will see that Black has sufficient counterplay because of threats of perpetual check.} ) 12. Kd1 g6 $2 { Too slow.} ( 12... e5 ) 13. Kc2 Bg7 14. Rad1+ ( 14. Rhd1+ { Was more accurate.} ) 14... Ke6 15. Qb7 Ng4 $201 16. Qd5+ $2 { Trading off Queens a bit prematurely.} ( 16. Rd3 ) 16... Qxd5 17. exd5+ Kd7 18. Bxa7 Ngxh2 19. Rd3 h5 20. Ne4 ( 20. Bc5 ) 20... Ra8 21. Bc5 ( 21. Ra3 ) 21... g5 $4 { Simply a horrible blunder.} ( 21... f5 { Black actually has some compensation for the material deficit.} ) 22. Nxg5 1-0`} />

An early start on Cathedral of Learning stair climbing

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 23:18:47 GMT

After work today, I had gone to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, main branch in Oakland, to pick up some books, when I looked across Forbes Avenue and saw the Pitt Cathedral of Learning. Primed by Becky's message today about forming a team again for the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.lung.org/pledge-events/pa/pittsburgh-climb-fy14/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.lung.org/pledge-events/pa/pittsburgh-climb-fy14/">Fight for Air Climb at One Oxford Centre in downtown Pittsburgh, for next March</span>, I suddenly decided to do the 36-floor stair climb of the Cathedral of Learning to "officially" begin my training for that event!

I'm getting an early start this year on training for the Fight for Air Climb: last year, I didn't even think about that event until I saw a poster for it during my first Cathedral climb in years, right after Christmas. So I'm going to have an additional two months of training.

Going up

Unfortunately, in addition to my not having done the Cathedral climb in probably over half a year, I was wearing my work clothing and shoes and a backpack full of heavy books, so the climb was rather strenuous and sweaty. I even "forgot" to go to the 36th floor and got off at the 35th instead (no big deal).

Going back down

Once at the top, I didn't stop to rest, because I wanted to get home quickly for dinner. Unfortunately, lots of people were already on the elevator when it came down from 36, and after I got on at 35, we kept on stopping to pick up others, and I felt very uncomfortable being sweaty and packed into the elevator near the back.

(Update of 2013-11-03)

Three days later, I did the Cathedral climb again, and did take the stairs, but experienced a surprise.

Did glucosamine and MSM relieve my knee pain?

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 02:39:20 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://www.drug3k.com/img2/msm_16804_4_%28big%29_.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.drug3k.com/img2/msm_16804_4_%28big%29_.jpg">[image: MSM]</span>

I just saw an article "Glucosamine and MSM for Joint Pain?" that brought up some old memories. The article examined whether these supplements are actually useful.

My story

I started running and hiking over a decade ago, at age 29. Some of my blog posts here have discussed why and how I started.

For the first couple of years of such activity, I was plagued with a lot of knee and other pain (especially shin pain). I experimented with many things, including changing types of shoes and foot landing form. Meanwhile, someone told me about MSM and swore by it for his joint pain, and shared some with me. He showed me packets of white powder he bought from bulk by mail order, and I periodically mixed some in with water to drink. I was never sure whether it was effective, but wanted to believe it was. But I still got knee pain periodically; I never knew whether I got it less bad than when I wasn't taking MSM.

My actual solution to pain

Eventually, I did fix my knee pain, so I stopped taking MSM (and glucosamine, which I was taking also, as late as 2003).

My solution, found by sheer trial and error and desperation, was to migrate entirely to wearing only minimalist shoes: in particular, a zero-drop heel. Some experiments with different shoes revealed to me a clear correlation between knee pain and the height of the heel of a shoe.

It was very difficult for me to accept this solution, as I had acquired a large collection of non-minimalist shoes: in fact, I had stocked up on some of the "less bad" shoes and had boxes of shoes in my basement that I had never opened!

But the complete disappearance of my impact pain and injuries said it all.

Now, a decade later, there is much more widespread knowledge of the differences in impact forces depending on shoe style and foot strike. Obviously, there are many variables and individual differences in biomechanics, but here is a good overview of the sorts of things that happen during foot strike.

I seem particularly susceptible to the forces on my knees when running in shoes with a built-up heel, so I have finally decided to completely abandon them. Up till now, I had abandoned them except for winter running when I did not have a good alternative.

I am currently evaluating suitable minimalist running shoes for winter, before winter arrives.

Conclusion

I learned a big lesson a decade ago when I tried to solve physical problems by throwing medication and supplements at them, and eventually found out that my problems had to do with misusing my body with shoes that disabled me from running in an optimally healthy way. Since then, I have never resorted to medication or fancy technology as the first step in solving problems.

The Chess Improver: The computer plays the exchange sacrifice

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 13:02:10 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

I saw a fascinating chess computer game and analyzed it for The Chess Improver: "The computer plays the exchange sacrifice".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

The year is 2013. Those of us who remember playing against chess computer programs probably fondly remember the days when chess engines were relatively weak and did not "understand" chess. But 16 years ago, when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a match, it became clear that however one wanted to define "understand", chess played by a computer could be of reasonable quality. And since then, of course, chess engines running on a personal computer have become far stronger than humans. Furthermore, they happily choose to do things such as sacrifice a Pawn or an exchange for compensation.

Although I regularly use chess engines for analysis, I have up till now not looked much at computer vs. computer games, but by accident, I saw a tweet by Dan Heisman in which he noted that "A classically instructive exchange sac by Komodo in Gull-Komodo has left Komodo now on the edge of winning." I was intrigued and found the score of the game, which was played in the latest <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://tcec.chessdom.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://tcec.chessdom.com/">TCEC tournament</span>. Gull is an engine rated 3063, while Komodo is rated 3086, so it is particularly interesting to examine the kind of game in which there are no immediately losing blunders. I think there are lessons that can be observed by and used by us humans. My aim is to cast a human interpretation on what happened in this game.

Opening

Komodo as Black chose to play a passive but solid variation of the Bogo-Indian Defense, giving White the expected small advantage.

Middlegame

There were many opportunities for White to choose a thematic attempt to pressure Black, such as by forcing the hanging pawns structure and also forcing Black to play c4 giving White control of the d4 square. I think many of us humans would have played this way in an attempt to make progress.

An exchange sacrifice easy to see

But Gull chose to go for more by seemingly first preventing c4 with b3 before aiming at destabilizing Black's center. Gull's idea was revealed when it played Ne5, banking on a pin of Black's Knight on d7 because of the Rook on c8.

But that backfired because Komodo simply took the Knight on d5, sacrificing the exchange for a Pawn. This is easily seen to be completely sound; most strong human players would do this almost reflexively after checking a few concrete lines. Without this resource, Black would have been in trouble. With this resource, Black completely equalizes.

It is an interesting question why one strong chess engine sees something correctly that another does not. In any case, this shows that even strong chess engines do not always see the subtleties in positions.

Weaknesses in White's position

It turned out that White's King side, lacking piece defenders, began suffering as Black provoked weaknesses, first as White played h3, and then when White played f3. What you have to remember is that these were not just patzer moves. Gull played them because they are justified given the danger to White's King. And despite the "weakening" moves, White can still hold. But it is instructive how important it is, even in a seemingly even position, to make some kind of progress through provoking weaknesses.

Draw offer rejected?

Then there was shuffling around of pieces, but then Gull made the decision to avoid a repetition by playing aggressively on the Queen side with a4. From a long-term thinking human standpoint, this was very risky, permanently weakening the b3 Pawn as well as setting up the a4 Pawn as a target for Black's Bishop, and creating a hole at b4. Still, because a strong engine chose it, it is not yet a losing move.

A nice Knight maneuver

Then there was much shuffling around yet again of pieces. But then Black came up with the fine Knight maneuver back to e8 and then to c7. As though by magic, after some more moves, Black had improved its position yet more, and White's pieces were looking very strangely placed and passive. If any side had winning chances, it was clearly Black.

More weakening by White

White then made the decision to advance on the King side with h4 and h5 to gain space and drive Black's Rook away from g6. Again, objectively this is not yet losing, but it is risky. It was especially risky to land on h5, a light square, because Black has a light-squared Bishop.

Endgame

Finally, Black redeployed the Knight to b4 (highlighting a drawback of White's early a4 advance weakening the b4 square), and White traded it off. With the reduced forces, I'll call the resulting phase of the game an endgame.

Provoking another weakness

There was much shuffling of pieces again. Black managed to redeploy the Bishop to attack White's h5 Pawn, forcing the loosening defensive g4. Then Black swung to the other wing to advance with b5. White defended, but Black then advanced b4.

Maneuvering

After more maneuvering, Black was ready to play c4, and then c3.

Final error

Even then, at the 61st move of the game, White could have held the position for a bit, by preventing Black from invading on the King side. I have not done a full analysis, but it is possible that White is lost anyway, given Black's perpetual threats of advancing to c2 and/or opening up the King side with f5.

But for sure, White's allowing the Queen to come to h2 resulted in Black tying up White's Rook on g3 and then striking with Bh7 and c2 followed by penetration at c3, game over effectively. It took another 50 moves for Black to gradually win more material, force and exchange of Queens, and play in a simplified endgame of Bishop and three connected passed Pawns versus Rook.

Summary of the game

The big-picture summary of the game is that White allowed a sound exchange sacrifice that resulted in a position that clearly only gave Black winning chances. White refused implicit draw offers (of pieces shuffling around) and made weakening Pawn moves that Black took advantage of with Knight and Bishop attacking the weaknesses, until White's overextension finally resulted in a precarious position. One slip by White, allowing an invasion on the King side that immobilized one Rook, led immediately to a lost position.

One lesson that can be learned is: pay attention to Pawn moves that create long-term static weaknesses. In this game, Black did quite a bit of maneuvering to provoke and attack these weaknesses. Another lesson is, playing for a win when the draw is obvious can be dangerous. It's strangely enjoyable seeing how even chess engines can be punished for refusing draws.

The full annotated game

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "nTCEC - Stage 3 - Season 2"] [Site "http://www.tcec-chess.net"] [Date "2013.10.21"] [Round "2.2"] [White "Gull 2.3"] [Black "Komodo 1121.05"] [Result "0-1"] [BlackElo "3086"] [ECO "E11"] [Variant "normal"] [WhiteElo "3063"]

d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 Bb4+ 4. Bd2 Bxd2+ { An unambitious variation of the Bogo-Indian by Black. A human would typically play this way as Black to defend a draw.} 5. Qxd2 d5 6. Nc3 O-O 7. e3 Nbd7 8. cxd5 exd5 9. Qc2 h6 10. Bd3 c5 11. O-O b6 $201 { White has a clearly comfortable game, but Black has the extra Queen side c Pawn that has a chance of proving useful in the endgame.} 12. Rfd1 ( 12. dxc5 { An alternative is to force the "hanging Pawn" structure and apply pressure to the c Pawn.} 12… bxc5 13. Na4 Qa5 14. Rfc1 { Forcing a concession by Black, but Black should be able to defend everything.} ( 14. Rac1 c4 { Similar, but White's a Pawn is left undefended.} ) 14… c4 15. Be2 ) 12… Qe7 $201 { A critical position. White has many possible ideas here.} 13. Bf5 ( 13. dxc5 { White can here also force the "hanging Pawns" on Black.} 13… bxc5 14. Rac1 Bb7 15. Qb3 Rfb8 16. Qa3 $201 { A thematic Queen maneuver to put pressure on both the c Pawn and the a Pawn.} 16… Qe6 { Black should be able to hold everything together.} ) ( 13. Nh4 { White can aim toward the King side with a Nf5 maneuver.} ) ( 13. Bb5 Bb7 14. Qf5 { White can aim at the center and King side, with ideas of Ne5.} ) ( 13. Rac1 { White can develop the final piece and wait and see.} ) 13… Bb7 14. Rac1 Rfe8 $201 15. b3 $6 { Not a very useful move if White wants to strike before Black is fully developed.} ( 15. dxc5 bxc5 16. Bxd7 Qxd7 17. Na4 c4 18. b3 cxb3 19. axb3 { White can force the "hanging Pawns" and then an isolated d Pawn.} ) 15… Rac8 $201 { The problem for White now is that Black has completed development and can defend with either the hanging Pawns or even in some cases the isolated d Pawn, if White tries to clarify the situation of Black's c and d Pawns.} 16. Ne5 $2 $201 { A surprising error.} 16… Nxe5 $1 $201 { Sacrificing the exchange for a Pawn here should be obvious not only for humans but also for computers. For example, I loaded up Stockfish, which immediately chooses this continuation.} 17. Bxc8 Bxc8 18. dxe5 Qxe5 $201 { Black clearly has full compensation. He has a wall of Pawns from a to d that well-defended and prevent White's Rooks from being active. The half-open e file is owned by Black. The formerly bad Bishop will spring to life. Objectively, this game is now clearly a draw, if neither side makes weakening Pawn moves, and just shuffle pieces back and forth.} 19. h3 Ba6 20. Re1 Bb7 21. Qd3 Qg5 22. f3 $201 { Objectively best and good and justified because of the threat against g2, but presents potential weakening of e3 and g3.} 22… Qg3 23. Qd2 Bc6 24. Rcd1 Qg5 25. Qd3 Qg3 26. a4 $6 $201 { Not a losing move, but a risky one, because of the weakening of b4 and b3.} 26… a5 27. Re2 Re6 28. Qd2 Re8 29. Ree1 Qe5 30. Qc2 Qg5 31. Qf2 Re6 32. Re2 Qe5 33. Rc1 Ne8 $1 $201 { Very nice. With all the shuffling around of pieces, Black is somehow slowly improving his position while White has gone nowhere. Black's Knight will go to c7 where it is not only defensive of d5 but supports a possible future b5 break.} 34. Qh4 Nc7 35. Kf2 Rf6 36. Qg3 Qe7 37. Rd1 Rg6 38. Qh2 Kh7 $201 { Now what for White? Somehow White's Queen has ended up in a strange corner, and White's b Pawn and Knight are undefended. Objectively, White can still hold, but it's remarkable how Black has achieved a fine position.} 39. h4 { Not losing, but very committal.} 39… Re6 40. Ree1 Rd6 41. h5 Na6 { More Knight maneuvering!} 42. Re2 Nb4 43. Na2 Nxa2 44. Rxa2 { Now the Knights are off.} 44… Re6 45. Qf4 Rf6 46. Qh2 Rf5 47. Rad2 Re5 48. Rd3 Qe6 49. Rc1 Be8 50. Rcd1 f6 51. g4 b5 { Black makes the b5 break.} 52. Qf4 b4 $201 { Another transformation: Black is now aiming for c4 that will also undermine White's b3 and a4 Pawns.} 53. Rc1 Qe7 54. Rdd1 Bf7 55. Rg1 Qd6 56. Rcd1 Qc7 57. Rc1 c4 $201 { Black gets c4 in.} 58. Qd4 Re8 59. Rh1 c3 $201 { Committal but playing for a win. How can Black possibly break through though?} 60. Rhg1 Kh8 61. Rc2 $2 { Allowing Black to invade on the King side.} ( 61. Kg2 { Prevents Black's King side invasion.} ) 61… Qh2+ 62. Rg2 Qh4+ 63. Rg3 Bg8 $201 { Fascinating redeployment of the Bishop! White may be lost already.} 64. Rc1 Bh7 65. Kg2 Qg5 66. Kf2 Qe5 67. Rg2 Qe6 68. Ke2 c2 $201 { Amazing how far the c Pawn has advanced. Next, Black will go after White's b and a Pawns. The game is virtually over. White's Rooks are barely active.} 69. Ke1 Rc8 70. Re2 Rc3 71. e4 dxe4 72. Rcxc2 Rxc2 73. Qd8+ Bg8 74. Rxc2 exf3+ 75. Kf2 Qxg4 76. Rc8 Qg2+ 77. Ke3 Qe2+ 78. Kf4 Qe5+ 79. Kxf3 Qxh5+ 80. Ke3 Qe5+ 81. Kd2 Qb2+ 82. Rc2 Qxb3 83. Qxa5 Bd5 84. Qa6 Be4 85. Rc8+ Kh7 86. Qc4 Qb2+ 87. Ke1 Qe5 88. Qg8+ Kg6 89. Qe8+ Qxe8 90. Rxe8 Bc6 91. Rb8 Bxa4 92. Rxb4 $201 { The game is really over. Black has a Bishop and three connected passed Pawns for the Rook.} 92… Bc6 93. Kf2 Kg5 94. Rc4 Be8 95. Rc7 g6 96. Re7 Bc6 97. Re6 Bd5 98. Re3 f5 99. Rg3+ Kf6 100. Rd3 Bf7 101. Rd6+ Be6 102. Rd8 h5 103. Rh8 Bf7 104. Kg2 f4 105. Rb8 g5 106. Kg1 g4 107. Rb4 Ke5 108. Rb7 Bg6 109. Rb5+ Kf6 110. Rb3 h4 111. Rb4 Kg5 112. Rd4 h3 113. Rd5+ Bf5 114. Ra5 g3 115. Kh1 0-1`} />

I never expected my first wooden recorders to be Renaissance recorders

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 01:24:54 GMT

Yesterday, I noted that I picked up two recorders during the Pittsburgh Recorder Society meeting.

They were these <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.vonhuene.com/Default.aspx?tabid=42" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.vonhuene.com/Default.aspx?tabid=42">Renaissance</span> instruments:

Nice maple recorders, Mollenhauer Kynseker models:

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.mollenhauer.com/en/catalogue?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=170&category_id=121" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.mollenhauer.com/en/catalogue?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=170&category_id=121">Kynseker Soprano 4107</span>
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.mollenhauer.com/en/catalogue?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=172&category_id=121" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.mollenhauer.com/en/catalogue?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=172&category_id=121">Kynseker Alto 4217</span>

These are my very first wooden recorders. All my other recorders are Yamaha plastic recorders, because they are inexpensive and easy to maintain. I've periodically considered buying wooden recorders, but to get some of clearly higher quality than the plastic ones is expensive!

Why bother with Renaissance?

I jumped at the opportunity to bid in the auction for these two Renaissance recorders to acquire them inexpensively.

Up till recently, I wouldn't have considered buying Renaissance recorders at all, because of the difference in construction and tonal quality from the Baroque-style recorders that I have and that we play in the Pittsburgh Recorder Society meetings.

But this summer at the Mideast early music workshop, I paid attention to people playing Renaissance recorders (for Renaissance music and other music too) and found the louder and "reedier" sound intriguing. I could see myself playing them in contexts in which this kind of sound quality would be advantageous.

So now I have these two wooden recorders to play with.

Note that the solo soprano recorder music by Jacob van Eyck from the Renaissance that I played last year would have entirely been suited to my new soprano Renaissance recorder! I may revisit that music to play it on the new instrument.

The biggest Pittsburgh Recorder Society meeting I have attended in two years!!

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 22:04:10 GMT

At the second meeting of this season of the Pittsburgh Recorder Society, I was amazed by the huge turnout. There were fourteen of us, easily double the typical attendance in the past two seasons since I first joined in 2011:

Fred was very excited by the attendance and told us he would like for us to perform as an entire group sometime.

As promised after last month's meeting, I took the opportunity in this meeting to do some playing on my bass recorder. I also played tenor and soprano for some other pieces we worked on.

Halloween-themed desserts

Since it is almost Halloween, Helen brought in some "scary" cupcakes that were, to me anyway, a sight to behold.

Pittsburgh's rubber duck

People were talking about the planned departure later today of our rubber duck.

In fact, in the duck's honor, I had brought my ukulele, and during the break I played Rubber Duckie on my ukulele while singing along, and Anita joined in the singing too. I had worked pretty hard to be able to passably play this song before our duck left. I still need more work on the song.

More recorders for me to play

I picked up two recorders from Helen that I had bid on at the last meeting, when a large collection of recorders was given to us to be auctioned off. More on this later!

Conclusion

I had another great time at the Pittsburgh Recorder Society monthly meeting. Every month, our Sunday afternoon meeting is something I truly look forward to.

The Chess Improver: The strange pleasure of drawing a lost game

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 11:40:02 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

I concluded my series of posts about the Pittsburgh Chess Club six-round Tuesday night tournament that I just completed with an article about managing to draw my final round game: The strange pleasure of drawing a lost game.

Now that my tournament is over, I will use other material for my weekly blog posts on The Chess Improver!

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

In the sixth and final round of the Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament that I just completed, I experienced a pleasure that is very rare in my games: the strange pleasure of drawing a lost game. In a way, this game was the game of my tournament that I was most proud of, because of how much I suffered and struggled out of a mistake in the opening, and managed to not lose! The game was the last game of the tournament to complete; when we finished, most people had already gone, and the prize money winners had already collected their cash and left. (I was no longer in the running for any prize money, because of my draw and loss in previous rounds.)

A summary of my game: out of a strange opening played by my opponent (rated USCF 2061), I missed a chance at a refutation of Black's play at 6, and then at move 9 made a blunder that meant struggling for almost four more hours for a draw, because my blunder left me with a severely weak e Pawn as well as surrendering my Bishop pair. One way or another it looked like I was probably going to lose a Pawn eventually. It turned out that my opponent won the wrong Pawn, my Pawn at h2, and I took advantage of the distraction to try for counterplay on the Queen side, and after some erroneous play, I was able to force an obviously drawn position by promoting one of my Pawns, to win the exchange in return for two Pawns. The game didn't actually end there, however, as I was in severe time trouble, and my opponent continued playing to the bitter end, hoping I would make a blunder. I did not, and so I got my draw.

It was a poor tournament for me (final score 4.0/6.0), but I hope it provided some educational fodder!

A couple of salient lessons from this game and tournament as a whole:

In the opening, it's all about development, as illustrated in my round 2 game. Really. It's amazing how many losing or difficult positions arise out of the opening when someone neglects development. Aside from round 2, my round 3 and round 5 games also featured asymmetrical speed and efficiency of opening development. Activity can matter more than material advantage. When defending and about to lose material, it may be worth seeking counterplay. Even if a computer can refute it, on a practical level I think changing the nature of the game is worthwhile for the defender to become the attacker instead. In time pressure, keep things simple, and don't be clever. In an equal position, where there is a clear draw, it is too dangerous, with little time on the clock, to complicate matters. Look for the draw, bail out, and fight for a win another day. I failed to do this in my earlier game in round 4 of this tournament, in which I lost an easily and clearly drawn position. In my case, the psychology was complicated by the fact that I was the second-highest rated player in the tournament and part of me wanted to win every game. I know this is a mistaken attitude, because it the objective situation on the board as well as on the clock, combined with an honest assessment of your opponent's play in the game, that should determine what final result to accept.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "15th Fred Sorensen Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2013.10.08"] [Round "6"] [White "Chen, Franklin"] [Black "Booth, James"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [BlackElo "2061"] [ECO "A80"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "2164"]

d4 f5 2. Bg5 d6 $6 { Obviously trying to get in Nd7, but slow and weakening.} 3. e3 Nd7 4. Bd3 ( 4. Nh3 { Computer loves. It's good, aims at the weaknesses on e6 and g6.} 4… Ndf6 5. Bc4 ) 4… Ndf6 5. Nf3 ( 5. Nd2 { My original idea, a good one, to push e4.} 5… e5 6. dxe5 dxe5 7. e4 { White is better.} ) ( 5. Ne2 { Also good.} ) 5… Ne4 $4 { A blunder that loses a Pawn by force.} 6. Bf4 $2 ( 6. Bxe4 fxe4 7. Nfd2 { Black is in terrible shape.} 7… Bf5 8. Nc3 d5 9. f3 exf3 10. Qxf3 { White wins material.} ) 6… Ngf6 { Now Black is OK.} 7. O-O g6 8. c4 $6 { Slow.} ( 8. Ng5 Nxg5 9. Bxg5 Bg7 10. c4 O-O 11. Nc3 { White has a pleasant position.} ) 8… Bg7 9. Nfd2 $2 { A terrible mistake that caused White four hours of pain for the rest of the game.} ( 9. Qc2 O-O 10. Nbd2 ) ( 9. Nbd2 ) 9… e5 $201 { Now White is struggling.} 10. Bxe4 exf4 11. Bf3 fxe3 12. fxe3 O-O 13. Nc3 { Black has the two Bishops, and White has a weak e3 and dark squares in general. White is almost lost.} 13… c6 14. Qb3 Qb6 15. c5+ $2 Qxb3 16. axb3 dxc5 17. dxc5 Be6 $201 { I think White is lost here. Surely White will start losing material before long.} 18. Nc4 Nd7 19. Na4 Bxc4 20. bxc4 { Picking off a Pawn immediately was possible.} 20… Rae8 $201 21. Rfd1 Ne5 22. Be2 Bh6 23. Ra3 $201 Rd8 $2 ( 23… Ng4 24. Bxg4 fxg4 25. Rdd3 { Black will win a Pawn somewhere.} ) 24. Rd6 Nf7 25. Rxd8 Rxd8 26. b4 Ne5 $201 27. Kf1 a6 28. b5 axb5 29. cxb5 cxb5 $2 { Now White has chances with the c Pawn.} ( 29… Ra8 { Pinning White was strong.} ) 30. Bxb5 Ng4 31. Ke2 Nxh2 $201 { Black has won a Pawn, but at great cost. White has some counterplay on the Queen side now.} 32. Nb6 Ng4 33. Bc4+ Kf8 34. Bd5 Re8 $201 35. e4 $5 { Hoping to create complications.} ( 35. Nc4 { Keeping everything protected was good enough to hold the draw.} ) 35… Re7 $2 ( 35… Nf6 ) 36. Ra7 $2 $10 { Concedes a draw. Played with only 5 minutes left on the clock. Black had 37 minutes left on his clock!!} ( 36. Ra8+ { Was actually strong and would have given White some advantage.} 36… Kg7 37. Rg8+ Kf6 38. Rb8 fxe4 39. Rxb7 Bf4 40. c6 Rxb7 41. cxb7 ) 36… Nf6 37. Rxb7 Nxd5 38. Rb8+ Kf7 39. Nxd5 Rxe4+ 40. Kd3 Ke6 41. c6 Kxd5 42. c7 Rd4+ 43. Ke2 $10 $201 { It's a draw, because White will win the exchange but be down two Pawns for it.} 43… Rc4 44. c8=Q Rxc8 45. Rxc8 Bf4 46. Kf3 Be5 47. g4 h5 48. gxf5 { Guarantees a draw. Black has isolated Pawns and neither of them has a Queening square the same color as the Bishop. I offered a draw at some point here, with very little time left on the clock.} ( 48. g5 { Possible, but risky because of time pressure. I decided to take the easy draw instead.} ) 48… gxf5 49. Rd8+ Ke6 50. Re8+ Kf6 51. Rg8 h4 52. Rg1 h3 53. Rh1 h2 54. Kg2 Kg5 55. Rf1 Kg4 56. Rh1 Bg3 57. Rf1 f4 58. Kh1 Kf5 59. Kg2 Ke4 60. Kh1 Ke3 61. Kg2 Bh4 62. Kxh2 Bf2 63. Ra1 f3 64. Ra3+ Ke2 65. Rxf3 $201 { Finally the draw was accepted.} 1/2-1/2`} />

Steel City Ukuleles: back to plain good fun, including the cups song

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 02:06:02 GMT

It's been over a week since I performed as part of the Steel City Ukuleles in the Wilkins School Community Center Ecofest. I was very relieved to have no more self-imposed performance obligations for a while, feeling burned out for a while, to tell the truth. But I was ready to get back into playing just for fun.

Members' choice!

We had a fun session this week in which all of us had earlier been invited to submit music we personally wanted to play. I had submitted "Mister Sandman", a song I've loved since (amusingly) first hearing it when watching "Back to the Future" way back. I was really excited to finally be singing it and playing it with others.

We did various other member-contributed selections also, including a "Cups" song that apparently has become all the craze because of moving cups around as part of percussion! Three of us had practiced ahead of time to play the cups. I have to say I was impressed:

Rubber Duckie

We went over "Rubber Duckie" again. I love this song. I'm getting better at singing and strumming it simultaneously.

Kazoo

I finally bought a cheap kazoo for use in the future (several of us used kazoos in the Ecofest performance, but I did not have a kazoo at the time), as Jack got a whole bunch to sell to us:

Conclusion

I enjoyed getting back to just plain fun with singing and playing ukulele, with no more performances in the near future that I've volunteered to be a part of.

Why it's so funny that Fama and Shiller just simultaneously shared the Nobel in economics

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 02:32:14 GMT

It was terribly amusing to me when I heard that Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller shared the Nobel in economics for 2013.

I'm not an economist, so I don't know all the details of the work of these guys. In fact, I had not heard of Lars Peter Hansen before, so I have nothing to say about him. But Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller are practically household words if you pay any attention to financial markets and investment, and the story of the housing bubble. What is really funny is that Fama and Shiller have such different opinions about fundamental matters in economics, but are sharing the Nobel! I think it's cool that the media are covering this amusing situation, because maybe the wider public will get an idea of what kinds of ongoing debates there are in economics.

And here's one of the economics blogs I follow that has a discussion of what these economists did.

Eugene Fama

I first learned about Eugene Fama through books on personal investing that promoted his efficient market hypothesis and therefore the use of indexed mutual funds and ETFs. Dimensional Fund Advisors, making use of the work of Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, has in particular promoted sophisticated portfolio management based on modifying plain indexing (such as Vanguard's mutual funds) with small cap and value stock overweighting. William Bernstein was famously enthusiastic about DFA and even suggested ways for individual investors to do their own simulation of their three-factor approach.

More on <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://indexinvestor.com/Members/2004/November/nov045.php3" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://indexinvestor.com/Members/2004/November/nov045.php3">DFA versus Vanguard</span>.

Fama's fellow Chicago school economist wrote up some <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/papers/Fama_nobel.pdf" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/papers/Fama_nobel.pdf">very opinionated and enthusiastic praise and summary of Fama's work</span>.

In any case, Fama remains one of the biggest die-hard defenders of the efficient market hypothesis, to this day. His impact on the world of investing cannot be overstated. If you invest in passively managed indexed funds, rather than chasing alpha, you're implicitly relying on and believing in the work that he and others have done.

Robert Shiller

Robert Shiller comes from a completely different economic philosophy and even public existence.

In stark contrast to Fama and the Chicago school of neoclassical economics based on rational expectations, Shiller is a behavioral economist, which believes in irrationality and market inefficiency.

He has written a lot of <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/books.htm" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/books.htm">popular books</span> and often goes around giving talks. He is most famous for warning about the market bubbles of the past decade and more, including the last housing bubble.

Speaking of bubbles, check out what Fama said about the housing bubble and bubbles in general. He's practically denying that bubbles exist.

Conclusion

I think it's awesome to have two very outspoken economists with radically different approaches to economics shared the Nobel this year. It may help the public understand better the nature of the field of economics.

(Update of 2013-12-10)

Two months later, Fama and Shiller are still an item. Check out this interview.

What's this about "Columbus Day" and Bartolomé?

Mon, 14 Oct 2013 23:24:50 GMT

So there's an Oatmeal comic that's been going around before today, Columbus Day, about Christopher Columbus and some guy I hadn't heard of before, Bartolomé de las Casas.

It's worth checking out, although be warned, it's a big rant. For "balance", here's a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://observationdeck.io9.com/seriously-screw-the-oatmeal-1443252499" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://observationdeck.io9.com/seriously-screw-the-oatmeal-1443252499">rebuttal by someone unhappy with that Oatmeal rant</span>.

Meanwhile, people seem to still be debating the time-honored theory that <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/columbus-syphilis-010512.htm" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/columbus-syphilis-010512.htm">Columbus brought syphilis back to Europe</span>.

Also, there's discussion of how Columbus caused inflation in Europe.

Whatever else one can say, it cannot be denied that the arrival of Columbus to the "New World" in 1492 completely changed the course of world history, in a huge number of ways.

Oh, and what about Bartolomé? Read about him at the Oatmeal link and here. Another controversial historical figure, arguably more complex and interesting than Columbus.

My promise to prioritize my sleep

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 02:33:48 GMT

Despite my knowledge (both firsthand and from reading research results) that sleep is important to healthy living, I have been failing to get my optimal sleep for a long time now. There are several reasons of this, but I am taking steps to address each one of them.

Too many activities

I began the process of catching up on sleep today by sleeping almost all day. Abby and I had yesterday decided to cancel our hiking plan for today because we both felt tired and decided it was a good time to just rest. We both have a bad habit of doing too many activities and not getting enough down time.

I already mentioned some of the things I'm scaling down on: musical activities. Today was the Cool Hand Uke workshop and concert, both of which I had decided earlier to skip.

Night time distractions

I'm not sleeping as early or deeply as I should, because of not turning down the lights and getting off the computer at night. I'm going to change that.

In particular, social media at night are the worst. My decision today to take a break from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ will help a lot. Too much stimulation at night.

Exercise

There is a symbiotic relationship between sleep and exercise: the better the sleep, the more energy for stimulating exercise, and the more exercise, the more ready the body is to sleep in the evening.

Today, after I slept almost all day, I found myself with energy to go for a run (I've barely been running in the past week). To my surprise, I effortlessly kept going and going, and ended up doing ten miles, no problem, in Frick Park and Summerset.

It was huge confirmation to me, that just catching up on sleep enabled me to enjoy a ten-mile run when I've barely been feeling like running at all in the past week.

Conclusion

I'm going to keep up good habits in order to improve my life. Sleep is the number one priority that I believe will benefit everything else.

What can you quit today? I'm taking a break from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 02:30:37 GMT

Tonight, I officially announced through my accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ that I was leaving social media for a while.

Reasons?

Right now, I don't feel like explaining in detail all the many reasons.

The reason for leaving is not just one isolated event, although blocks of certain series of events and actions on Twitter have been particularly discouraging to me.

The most recent seed for quitting actually came just a couple of days ago, from a blog I follow, where I was challenged to ask myself, "what can you quit today?":

<blockquote> The idea, of course, is that we’re all doing things we don’t need to be doing. Things that zap our energy and passion and crowd our lives so much that we can’t do the amazing things we should be putting all our passions into. </blockquote>

One of the many thoughts I had was that my blogs have been stagnant for quite some time now. There is a clear inverse relationship between my participating on Twitter and Facebook (I never did do much on Google+) and my writing long form articles. So I am going to return to regular blogging.

RSS

In the past, whenever I published a blog post, I would post a link to the social networks I'm on. Well, as part of my experiment, I am going to stop that. I realize that this means many fewer people will keep up with my blog. I have had people tell me that they don't use RSS feeds any more. I would like to encourage them to get back to RSS so that they can receive updates on blogs such as mine.

And I am fine with having fewer regular readers. It turns out that most feedback I get on my blog is from people who don't actually regularly follow it anyway, but find something useful from its archives because a Web search led them to my blog. So I feel no need to be timely. Enough people are doing that. I will try more to be timeless instead.

Conclusion

I cannot exaggerate how beneficial I have found social media to be since I got involved two years ago. But there have been severe down sides as well. Meanwhile, I will experiment with taking a break from my biggest sources of distraction and alienation.

Neil Newton on the harmonic structure of atonal music

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 01:01:43 GMT

I attended a fascinating and illuminating lecture by <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.music.pitt.edu/faculty/newton" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.music.pitt.edu/faculty/newton">Neil Newton</span> at the University of Pittsburgh with the title "The Inner Life of Harmonies: An Examination of the Middle Voice in Pop, Classical, and Early Post-Tonal Music".

The big question I've sometimes asked myself is, what is atonal music anyway? How do we make sense of it?

Neil Newton provided what seemed to me an interesting explanation.

Atonal music is not random but has order!

I'm very interested in atonal music because of how, when successful, when I enjoy it and it somehow "makes sense" (which it does not always), it falls between the boundaries of order and chaos, like a dream. Also, I should emphasize that I like to make a clear distinction between truly atonal music and the serial (twelve-tone) music that Schönberg invented after he became dissatisfied with his atonal experiments. Serial music, unlike atonal music, is very strictly organized through a mathematical system; atonal music was its "freer" predecessor.

I don't listen much to atonal music, but there is some atonal music I have mentioned enjoying, by Schönberg. So it was with great interest that I attended this lecture trying to explain how atonal music can be understood not as being devoid of traditional harmonic relationships, but rather as embodying a different kind of relationship, a different kind of order. It is not random or chaotic, just ordered differently.

Substitution of a different kind of order

The main idea Newton explored was that of finding a replacement for the dominant-tonic relationship that is key in tonal music for "tension and resolution" or "charge and discharge" (his preferred terminology). For example, he argues that the interval of a tritone (ic6) in conjunction with voice leading can be used to generate functional movement and therefore build up structural significance that is analogous to the kind of structure significance that exists in tonal music.

Particularly interesting to me was how Newton used statistical analysis to look for correlations and patterns in the music he studied and justify his thesis.

Also, he unifies his ideas with application to other "weird" musical phenomenon, such as that found in many pop and rock songs that violate the traditional tonal system. (The music of the Beatles, for example, was quite marked in its oddity.)

For details, check out Newton's paper, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/musa.12018/abstract" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/musa.12018/abstract">"An Aspect of Functional Harmony in Schoenberg's Early Post-Tonal Music"</span>. I don't pretend to understand more than a fraction of what he tries to show, since I am just an amateur musician, not a trained theorist, but the overview and audio examples he gave in his lecture gave me a glimpse of what he's doing, and I was happy to have attended.

(Update of 2014-05-28)

The Pitt music department blog just mentioned Newton's work and provided a link to an <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/musa.12018/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/musa.12018/">enhanced HTML version of his paper</span>.

Conclusion

I think it's great that serious work continues in trying to understand what lies underneath music that we intuitively enjoy but find odd because it doesn't obey the usual expectations of traditional tonality.

Pittsburgh Scala Meetup: learning by reading Josh's code!

Fri, 11 Oct 2013 04:09:33 GMT

The Pittsburgh Scala Meetup met to learn by hacking. There was a change of plan because Josh couldn't make it to the meeting, so instead of a presentation by him, we got a link to his GitHub repository for an implementation of an interactive Web-based tic-tac-toe game using Play.

Sometimes interesting things happen when plans are changed.

Reading Josh's code

Since Josh wasn't around, we decided to study his code, and use it as the basis of discussion of Scala language features and idiomatic style, making sure that all of us understood what the code was doing. This turned out to be a surprisingly useful exercise, very participatory by everyone.

Justin took charge of an SBT session as we played with modifying the code and figuring out what things did. I shared some tips on using SBT in "trigger mode", which some had not known about. While experimenting, we ran into interesting Scala gotchas involving def and val in classes that mix in traits. We also had useful discussions on coding style, such as point-free style and use of underscores in closures, and converting between curried and uncurried functions. My personal point of view is that I prefer to be more explicit rather than more concise, to improve clarity, but much does depend on assumptions about people's prior knowledge. Josh was writing this code for only himself, and the complete application was actually not meant to showcase the tic-tac-toe game logic anyway, but the use of Play.

Conclusion

I thought it was a really useful session in which we all helped one other get up to speed on various Scala language features or standard library APIs. We all learned something new, and we figured out Josh's code, and collected questions to ask him when he comes back!

Finally learning about Carnatic music

Fri, 11 Oct 2013 03:04:45 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://f0.bcbits.com/img/a2399391511_2.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://f0.bcbits.com/img/a2399391511_2.jpg">[image: Sandeep Narayan]</span>

I attended the Thursday CMU music school convocation that featured a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://music.cmu.edu/events/267" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://music.cmu.edu/events/267">lecture/performance by Sandeep Narayan and his brother Nirmal Narayan</span>. I very much enjoyed the presentation.

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://sandeepnarayanmusic.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://sandeepnarayanmusic.com/">Sandeep Narayan</span> is a Carnatic musician. Carnatic music is the "classical" music of Southern India. I'd never specifically listened to it before, because I'd never had an introduction to it so that I would know what to listen for.

Sandeep is unusual in that he was born and grew up in the US, in Los Angeles, before eventually settling in Chennai, the center of Carnatic music. I imagine he must have faced quite a bit of curiosity and skepticism as one who walks between two worlds.

In any case, his introduction to the elements of Carnatic music, along with brief performance excerpts with his brother (Sandeep sang and Nirmal provided percussion backup), was fantastic! It was a very clear introduction to the elements of pitches, scales/modes, rhythms, and different levels of improvisation. It was particularly helpful that he related the different vocabulary to that of Western "classical" music and jazz.

I wish I had been able to attend the free concert he was giving this evening, but in any case, after receiving this introduction, I feel ready to pursue Carnatic music further as a listener. I always feel intimidated and lost when thinking about how to understand a new kind of music; I'm not quite adventurous enough to just jump in with a tiny bit of prior background knowledge. Introductions like his go a long way to providing just enough that it is possible to start enjoying.

One thing Sandeep emphasized is how the music is fundamentally based on improvisation. He joked that his instrumentalist accompanists have to know more about music than he does, because they all have to follow wherever he goes. They have no idea what he is going to do with the musical material, till he is actually doing it.

Here is his YouTube channel.

The Chess Improver: the difference between accepting reality and making excuses

Thu, 10 Oct 2013 12:04:02 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

Last week, I wrote on The Chess Improver about my fourth round game in the current Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament, in which I lost a game that should have been drawn.

This week, I wrote about my fifth round game, in which I won, but played poorly at a critical point: "The difference between accepting reality and making excuses".

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

When men lose against me, they always have a headache … or things of that kind. I have never beaten a completely healthy man! (Susan Polgar)

When something bad happens in a chess game, we ask ourselves why. Sometimes we may simply beat ourselves up with negative talk like "I'm no good at chess. I don't understand anything." This is not useful. But often we go to the other extreme, with protests like "I had a tough day at work" or "My stomach was hurting from that sandwich I ate for lunch".

But what is the truth? What is the reality? The answer is often more subtle than we'd prefer. We'd prefer a simple explanation that would at least make us feel like we have clarity rather than complexity in our chess lives. But often there are many things going on, and we have to be objective about each of them and the interplay, and not focus just on one aspect of the situation.

I've been having a terrible Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament. In the last two games, I blew won positions, one resulting in a draw and the other degenerating into a drawn position and then loss.

I've hesitated to offer an explanation for what has been going on in my play, because the last thing I want to do is offer excuses.

But what is the difference between the truth and an excuse? We're wading into philosophical and ethical territory here. I think the difference is one of scope and intent. I would say that an excuse isolates one thing rather than situates it in a larger context. Also, an excuse is used to reject change, to live in the illusory comfort of an alternate reality. I think the truth sometimes properly incorporates excuses, but only as a subset.

I've been thinking about this because of my round 5 game in the 6-round tournament, in which I won a very one-sided game that is embarrassing to show, but illustrates something disturbing about my recent play. (My opponent was rated USCF 1829.) I had won a Rook for nothing and all I had to do was consolidate, but I hallucinated and started dropping material; there really is no good explanation for what happened, other than that my mind is blanking out. The game could have ended a draw.

The fact, or excuse, is that I have not been playing well because I have not had the time or energy to perform at the level I used to years ago. I have been busy with work as well as many personal projects (which my personal blog says something about). I came back to tournament play after not having played in seven months.

If this is all I said and thought, then it would be classified as an excuse.

Because we are all busy. My opponent in this came is a doctor. He is allowed by our tournament director to keep his beeper on. Occasionally he does get paged during a tournament. We all come to the board in whatever condition we are in: a hard day at work, a cold, surviving cancer (a number of the club members fall into this category!!), a death in the family, etc. So focusing on our own lack of ideal chess-playing conditions is an excuse, because it ignores other factors that are by contrast inadvertently in our favor. We should not just complain about accidental misfortune without acknowledging accidental fortune as well.

What then, is not an excuse? Perhaps it is that of accepting that I am at a point in my life when I will simply play worse than in the past, just as when I run races, I am much slower than I was a decade ago: I have not made it a priority to put in the training and maintain top fitness. This is reality.

Now, what can I do about reality? I can simply accept it, or I can change it. If I really want to get back to playing at a higher level, I must cut something out of life in order to make more room for chess. Or, I can choose to cut chess out. It is not an easy choice. But the difference between an excuse and reality is that reality means choices, while excuses mean idly daydreaming.

After this tournament ends, I will evaluate what level of chess activity to continue engaging in. There is nothing that says I have to play tournament chess at all. I can play casually, or only in one-day weekend tournaments that do not involve starting a game at 7 PM after a day at work. And of course I can always write about chess.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "15th Fred Sorensen Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2013.10.01"] [Round "5"] [White "Prokhov, Vassil"] [Black "Chen, Franklin"] [Result "0-1"] [BlackElo "2164"] [ECO "B80"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "1829"]

e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Be3 e6 7. f3 b5 8. g4 h6 9. h4 $6 { Weakening the King side while not developing.} 9… Nbd7 $2 { Ironically, although a developing move, it is too slow and justifies White's play.} ( 9… b4 { Immediately pushing White's Knight was good.} ) 10. a4 $2 ( 10. Rg1 { Actually threatening g5 was strong.} ) 10… b4 11. Na2 $2 { Passive.} ( 11. Nc6 Qc7 12. Nxb4 d5 { Fine for Black.} ) 11… d5 $201 { Thematic break in the center, without any cost. White has a terrible position.} 12. g5 $2 hxg5 13. Bxg5 $4 Qc7 $201 { White is totally lost. Although it looks superficially like White is ahead in development, White's King is completely exposed and Black controls the center.} 14. exd5 Qg3+ $6 { Unnecessary "cleverness", since White was not going to be able to castle anytime soon anyway.} ( 14… Nxd5 { Simple and effective. Black will simply finish developing and White's King is unsafe.} ) 15. Kd2 Nxd5 16. Rh3 $4 { Loses a piece.} 16… Qf2+ 17. Kc1 $201 Nc5 $2 { Black is still winning, but there was a more decisive way.} ( 17… f6 { Wins a piece. I saw this but foolishly decided I did not want to lose the e6 Pawn and "open" up my King, although given White's lack of development, there is nothing open about Black's King really.} 18. Nxe6 fxg5 ) 18. Bc4 $4 Ne3 19. Bxe3 Qxe3+ 20. Kb1 e5 $201 { White is completely lost and will lose material because of the double attack on the Knight on d4 and the Rook on h3.} 21. Ne2 { I was shocked that White did not resign. He will now be an entire Rook down for nothing.} 21… Bxh3 22. Qd5 Ra7 23. Nxb4 $201 { Black is so obviously winning that paradoxically, the situation is potentially psychologically confusing, because the question is, there are too many choices for how to finish off the game.} 23… Rxh4 ( 23… Nb3 { I didn't see or look for this tactic, which is the clearest way to immediately consolidate.} 24. cxb3 Bxb4 { White obviously has no attack and no compensation for the lost Rook.} ) 24. Ra3 Qh6 $4 { Unimaginable move, in retrospect. I got careless and somehow "forgot" that the e5 Pawn would hang.} ( 24… Qg5 { Simple and winning.} 25. f4 { For some reason, I was irritated by the possibly of this ( harmless ) move, which is why I suddenly chose Qh6.} 25… Qf5 26. Re3 e4 { White has nothing at all.} ) 25. Qxe5+ $201 { I had to collect myself after this move, because I was so disappointed that I lost my mind in the previous move. I started imagining all kinds of weird things and became unable to think clearly. It was terrible.} 25… Kd7 $4 { And I chose a terrible move that concedes a draw.} ( 25… Be7 { Gives back an exchange to stay safely a piece up. It is unbelievable that I did not play this.} 26. Qb8+ Bd8 27. Qxa7 Rxc4 { Black is still an entire piece up and has a won position.} ) 26. Bxf7 $4 { Loses immediately.} ( 26. Qb8 Rc7 ( 26… Rb7 27. Qxf8 Rxb4 28. Qxf7+ Kc8 29. Qf8+ { Perpetual.} ) ( 26… Rxc4 27. Qxa7+ Ke6 28. Qa8 $201 { White has enough threats to draw.} 28… Qd2 29. Qxf8 Qxb4 30. Re3+ Kf6 31. Qe7+ Kg6 32. f4 Be6 33. Rg3+ Kh7 34. Qh4+ Kg8 35. Qd8+ $201 { Perpetual.} ) 27. Qxf8 Be6 28. Bxe6+ Qxe6 29. Nd3 { White can hold, because of Black's unprotected King.} ) 26… Be6 { With back rank mating threats.} 27. Qb8 $4 Rh1+ $201 { Mate in 1.} 0-1`} />

Pittsburgh Pirates: it was not to be

Thu, 10 Oct 2013 03:54:12 GMT

At work today, there was a little celebration in honor of the bizarre winning streak of the Pittsburgh Pirates ("let's go Bucs!"). I've lived in Pittsburgh for sixteen years now, so it's been pretty weird seeing the Pirates doing so well. I don't follow baseball these days, but I've been to a handful of games over the years: each time but once, we lost. It was kind of a sad sight, because almost every time I went to a game, there were so few fans out there.

I enjoyed having my first Bucco Cookie.

Unfortunately, the Bucs lost tonight, so it was not meant to be.

I wonder how excited everyone will be next year.

I remember as a kid in Michgan watching the Pirates (on TV) win the 1979 World Series, thanks to Willie Stargell. To be honest, that's what first put the word "Pittsburgh" into my vocabulary!

Was that a ukulele I heard in Frick Park? No, a cavaquinho

Sun, 06 Oct 2013 18:19:09 GMT

I had just run into Frick Park past the blue slide playground entrance when I thought I heard someone playing a ukulele! I looked around and saw a guy sitting on a park bench. I thought of approaching him, but decided not to interrupt my run, and kept going.

Here's what Frick Park looked today on a trail, with some fallen leaves. Bizarre that it's still summer temperatures right now though.

When I came back around out of the trails, I saw the guy again and he was packing up to leave, so I approached him.

It turned out to be Ben, to whom I had lent a trumpet two years ago (since returned)! I asked him if the instrument in his case was a ukulele. He said no. I asked if it was a guitar. He said no. It was a cavaquinho, the Portuguese ancestor of the Hawaiian ukulele! He pulled it out of the case and let me check it out. It's tuned differently from the ukulele:

I had heard of this instrument, from reading something about the history of the ukulele (in particular, I had looked at <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.coolhanduke.com/worldukehistory.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.coolhanduke.com/worldukehistory.html">Cool Hand Uke's booklet on ukulele history</span> recently). Also, Handerson (who is from Brazil) had asked me if I knew where to buy a cavaquinho. Ben said he was looking for other cavaquinho players in Pittsburgh, so I sent him Handerson's contact information.

So no, I was not just hallucinating post-ukulele-gig when I thought I heard a ukulele in Frick Park.

You never know what or who you might encounter in the park on a nice day.

Performing with the Steel City Ukuleles at the Wilkins School Community Center Ecofest 2013: with videos

Sat, 05 Oct 2013 23:38:08 GMT

It was a beautiful day outside at the Wilkins School Community Center Ecofest in Regent Square: warm and sunny, and dry. It had been raining, and was even drizzling rain in the morning just before we performed at around 11:15 AM for an hour.

There were vendors, information booths, food, and families with children hanging out. Abby helped out with using our camera on a tripod to get footage of the Steel City Ukuleles performing, then went off to the clothing swap.

Also, Marlene and others came out to listen to us and support us. That was great!

I was happy to see parents with their children watching us, and some of them dancing a bit too. I silently thought to myself, "I am playing for the children standing in front of me". Music is a beautiful thing to share with children; I remember how happy I was when I was young and encountered music.

Videos

We managed to get about half of our program recorded on my camera. Unfortunately, the memory card ran out of space halfway through because we forgot to erase all the photos and videos that were still on the memory card from long ago. Still, we got quite a bit of footage.

We missed recording the first two songs, because of a confusion with Abby about start time that resulted in her arriving in the middle of our second song, but then we got rolling and successfully recorded eight songs, before the memory card filled.

Cindy

Shangri-La

Notice the mention of Pittsburgh in the verse!

Roxy's Waltz

This was a trio, performed by Amber, Sunny, and Jon.

You Are My Sunshine

Tonight You Belong To Me and By The Light Of The Silvery Moon

One of my favorite musical selection in our playlist, but also the trickiest for me to play, because of the key and the chord changes.

Mountain Sound

Adam had a solo intro in this one.

Stealin' Stealin'

Rough On Rats

Then the camera memory card filled.

Sadly, we did not get footage of our concluding sing-along songs where we encouraged everyone to sing along!

Afterwards, at the Ecofest

I packed up right after we were done performing, because I could only stay around several minutes longer to explore Ecofest with Abby before heading over to Point Park University downtown for the afternoon sessions of PodCamp Pittsburgh, whose morning sessions I missed because of the Ecofest gig.

But others of us hung around to do more jamming:

A view of Ecofest from front:

Panoramic view of Ecofest from the back dining area outside:

Some vendors and information booths:

Reflections on our performance

I felt fairly pleased with our performance. The three rehearsals we had in the past two weeks were crucial. We did flub some things that we didn't flub in rehearsal, but that happens. But overall, we produced a fine unified sound. The videos don't completely reflect that because of the distance and the background conversations at the event.

I myself made more errors than in rehearsal and in private practice. There are a couple of reasons for this. I think the most interesting one is simply that I did not practice enough in a performance mode. Most of the time, when I practice music, I am focused entirely on getting the words right, the melody, the rhythm, the harmonic changes, the fingerings, etc.

But in performance, there is the audience, and the point is to play for the audience, not for oneself. I had a hard time reallocating my scarce attentional resources toward engaging with the audience. When I did, such as by avoiding looking down so much at the fret board (actually, in the videos you can see that I could not entirely avoid this, because I don't have a perfect feel yet for my finger positions, so I keep bobbing my head toward my instrument), I could feel myself miss nailing a chord.

Having seen the footage, I will work more in the future toward specific practice oriented toward polishing up for performance. This means improving technique and memorizing as much as possible (chord changes, lyrics). It is "easy" to go out there with a music stand and run through stuff, but it is much harder to appear relaxed, confident, and attentive to the audience. I feel that this is quite important to a successful performance, whose aim is to truly touch the hearts and minds of those who are paying attention to us.

It is of course pointless to pay too much attention to aspects of presentation if your technique and intonation are poor, so I would say that performance presentation is not the most important thing to work on, all things considered, but my aim is to master the musical basics enough that I can also reliably add the presentation aspect as an integral part of complete musical development. I believe that a truly good musical performance must incorporate the spirit of those who are listening to us and feed it back into what we do in real time.

Conclusion

I enjoyed participating in my first ukulele gig. Now, I am exhausted, and will take a break from performance. It has been an amazing learning experience for me.

Final rehearsal for my first ukulele gig: and some hard decisions about music in my life

Sat, 05 Oct 2013 02:15:33 GMT

The night before our Ecofest gig, those of us in the Steel City Ukuleles who are performing in it had one final rehearsal.

It was a very good rehearsal. We're sounding more and more together as an ensemble, ending solidly on each song the way we agreed, and singing more in tune and balance.

Also, Sunny reminded us that we are performing, and so we should not just grimly look at our music booklets, but instead, when we can, we should look up and smile and engage with the audience.

Singing

I still don't have all the songs down as much as I would like, but by the end of the two-hour rehearsal, I was totally hoarse. I am ready to sing out strong while simultaneously playing my ukulele.

I just realized that in the past three months, I have sung more than in the previous forty years of my life combined. Wow. And I'm loving it. There's nothing like singing, especially singing with others.

Performance is time and energy consuming

I almost didn't make it to the rehearsal. I've completely exhausted myself this week with work and other activities, and badly need a break. There are times, such as earlier today, when I felt overwhelmed by everything.

In fact, yesterday, in discussing my musical plans for the coming months with Abby, I made some decisions.

This is my last ukulele gig for the year, for sure. I want to get back to basics and work on my technique and in really mastering some songs, rather than get back on the treadmill of more material for performance.

Also, this winter, I am not planning to participate in performing on recorder for the holiday gigs at Phipps Conservatory "candlelight evenings" that I've treasured in 2011 and in 2012. That was always a huge amount of work for me. Unless I can participate in significantly reduced capacity, I don't see how I can manage.

I will probably perform in the Pittsburgh Contras and Squares Holiday Ball again, because it's something I've been doing with Abby every year, and because after two years of doing it, I know the music, and therefore it will not require much work to participate in (if I want to do some Irish flute and tin whistle solos, of course, then I can add as much extra work for myself that I want, ha).

What is the best use of my limited time and energy for music?

Also, there have been announcements and reminders for some time about recorder and ukulele workshops and concerts coming up soon. I have decided not to sign up for any of them, because I really need some rest time on weekends that I have not been getting; weekends are also the time when I can do more household chores and spend time with Abby.

I find that my main enjoyment and improvement in music comes form what I do daily, anyway, rather than what I can possibly do in a long, extended workshop format. I've always been frustrated that when I attend a one or two day conference or workshop on any subject (computer programming, salsa dance, etc.), I don't actually retain or engage with as much as I would like. There are ways to optimize these experiences, but that requires a certain kind of immediate followup that I don't have time for right now.

So, I will sadly miss the fantastic Flanders Recorder Quartet when they come to Pittsburgh in November, and I will miss the workshop Annie has arranged for them to give here for the local recorder community.

And I am going to miss Cool Hand Uke when he comes to Pittsburgh to give a workshop and concert.

Conclusion

Life is full of choices, especially for those of us who have many interests, not just one. This week I made some decisions about my involvement with music in October, November, and December.

9 things you could be doing in Pittsburgh on Saturday, October 5

Fri, 04 Oct 2013 04:46:44 GMT

I'm always frustrated at this time of year because there are so many events of interest to me in Pittsburgh that seem to happen on the first weekend of October. Since I cannot attend all of them, I figured I might as well attempt a public service and mention some of them so that if you are in the Pittsburgh area, maybe you can go and enjoy what I can't attend.

So here are 9 of the probably dozens of cool things you could be doing tomorrow, Saturday, October 5, 2013.

Free concert: Allegheny City Ragtime Orchestra

If you're interested in ragtime or Latin music, check out <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.shadysideacademy.org/page.cfm?p=12541" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.shadysideacademy.org/page.cfm?p=12541">this concert by the Allegheny City Ragtime Orchestra</span>.

Some articles in anticipation of it:

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.post-gazette.com/stories/ae/music/preview-ragtime-orchestra-connects-with-history-705929/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.post-gazette.com/stories/ae/music/preview-ragtime-orchestra-connects-with-history-705929/">Post-Gazette</span>
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://triblive.com/aande/music/4763900-74/ragtime-music-concert" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://triblive.com/aande/music/4763900-74/ragtime-music-concert">Trib</span>

Abby and I wanted to go, but finally decided that we have too many other activities earlier in the day and need to just stay home and unwind in the evening.

Free conference: PodCamp Pittsburgh 8

The 8th annual PodCamp Pittsburgh should be good. If you have any interest in using social media for personal or professional purposes, you should check it out. Interesting talks, opportunities to just socialized and learn new things.

I attended in 2010, 2011, 2012, and will attend again for the fourth year. Unfortunately, I will only be able to attend the afternoon sessions. But I didn't want to completely miss it.

It turns out that PodCamp completely changed my life. For example, I started this blog in 2011 because of my second PodCamp, and I became serious about using social media in general, and that led to a total transformation of my life as I learned about local activities and made new friends. (Unfortunately, I didn't get around to finishing my draft reports about my experience at last year's PodCamp 7.)

Pittsburgh South Side Slopes Step Trek

The annual Pittsburgh South Side Slopes Step Trek is another event you can attend tomorrow.

Check out my blog coverage two years ago as well as my recent update.

Unfortunately, Abby and I will be missing it this year.

Run Shadyside 5K

If you like to run in races, a fine race is the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.runshadyside.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.runshadyside.com/">Run Shadyside 5K</span>. Fast and flat, with a pancake breakfast and festivities afterwards.

I'm not running in it this year, just because I have too many other things to do already for the rest of the day, but here's my report from two years ago.

Free: 5th annual Wilkins School Community Center Ecofest in Regent Square

Interested in green living? Check out the 5th annual Wilkins School Community Center Ecofest in Regent Square. Abby has regularly attended for the clothing swap. There will also be food, information, and entertainment.

It turns out that this year, I will also be attending, to perform as a new member of the Steel City Ukuleles. I just started playing the ukulele a bit over two months ago, and have been working hard to help put on an entertaining show!

We'll be performing around 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM. If you come, say hello!

CMU Donut Dash 2 mile race

Or, if you are into weird running events, there is the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://cmudonutdash.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://cmudonutdash.org/">Carnegie Mellon University Donut Dash</span>, a 2 mile event serving as a fundraiser for the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC. This is not an event I have ever done, and not one I intend to do, but what the heck, some of you might love this sort of thing!

National Chess Day: Gateway Open tournament at the Pittsburgh Chess Club

Did you know that it's time for National Chess Day? There will be a tournament at the Pittsburgh Chess Club, the 56th annual Gateway Open. Yes, chess in Pittsburgh has a long and illustrious history.

Pittsburgh Perl Workshop

If you are a Perl programmer, the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is back this year. Registration is already closed, so it's not so helpful right now for me to mention it, but in case you didn't know it existed, watch for it next year.

Ninth thing?

Actually, I guess I miscounted. But there are a whole lot more than nine things to do in Pittsburgh tomorrow.

For example, if you are interested in some free stuff to do, there's RADical Days listing a whole bunch of stuff.

Conclusion

There's no shortage of stuff to do in this great city of Pittsburgh at any time or day of year. I think it's unfortunate that many things I like to do happen to repeatedly fall on the first Saturday of the year, but I'm not complaining about an embarrassment of riches. Go out and take advantage of what I can't.

The Chess Improver: the psychology of losing a drawn game

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 11:29:14 GMT

Last week, I wrote on The Chess Improver about my third round game in the current Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament, in which I had a won game but did not win.

This week, I wrote about my fourth round game, in which I did even worse, hence my new post: "The psychology of losing a drawn game".

Unfortunately, the original article at https://chessimprover.com/the-psychology-of-losing-a-drawn-game/ could not be recovered from the Wayback Machine or any other archive. We apologize that this content has been lost.

Rubber Duckie and Steel City Ukuleles rehearsal

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 01:43:30 GMT

This week's Wednesday meeting of the Steel City Ukuleles was an unusual one: it was split into two halves, the first half being our regular meeting (involving going through a new playlist), the second half being the second of three rehearsals for the Ecofest gig. The deal was that everyone was open to stick around for the rehearsal if they wanted to, but with the caveat that it was serious rehearsal time, rather than the more casual regular meetup atmosphere. It turned out that a few people who were not performing in the Ecofest gig did stick around, although most others left.

Sunny was not present, so Amber took charge of this meetup session.

Rubber Duckie

I enjoyed learning some new songs in the first half.

One slightly crazy thing we tried was running through "Rubber Duckie", which I had actually suggested to Sunny in email for the playlist for the next meetup, but apparently others had also suggested, for obvious reasons here in Pittsburgh.

This song is hard, with a lot of chord changes. I would like to actually master it and play it solo for Abby before Pittsburgh's rubber duck leaves.

Rehearsal

The rehearsal was intense, but we managed to cover the rest of the songs we are to play in the Ecofest gig three days (!!) from now. A lot of homework for me to do, just as I have been doing with the first half of the program.

An erhu player and a tuba player at a party said "Let's jam"

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 02:02:19 GMT

Abby and I attended a music potluck party tonight. We had been unsure about whether to attend, since I do have the Great Race 10K to run tomorrow and need to avoid staying up too late. So we went with the understanding that we would leave early as needed, in order for me to wind down at home and go to bed.

Food

I whipped up a large batch of roasted vegetables to bring to the potluck:

Music

After a lot of eating and chatting, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.appalasia.com/Mimi.htm" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.appalasia.com/Mimi.htm">Mimi</span> was ready to start jamming, and got out her erhu. A guy who had brought a tuba was ready to play.

OK, who else was in?

I pulled out my flute. Abby took out her mandolin. It seemed like nobody else (yet) was interested in joining in. (But as we know, the party usually really gets going later in the evening when musicians are involved.)

The tuba player seemed really into jazz. He asked for requests and started his own rhythmic bass sometimes. I tried to join in with him and Mimi as they led the way. It was pretty hard for me, and frightening, but I did what I could to contribute.

At one point, I volunteered to sing and play "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" on ukulele, which I did (for the first time by myself outside home), and they followed along. I don't know if that was the first time an erhu, tuba, and ukulele were in action simultaneously!?

Lending my flute out

At some point, a guy arrived at the party who wanted to jam. He hadn't yet brought in his trombone, but asked if he could borrow my flute. I recognized him from previous parties, and I had seen him play flute in at least one of them.

So he borrowed my flute and I sat back and watched and listened. He was a really good improviser. Actually, at the suggestion of the tuba player, who really liked totally free improvisation, the three of them did something I found amazing and beautiful. Starting with some long tones, they created an eerie sonic soundscape together, listening to one another while blending the erhu, tuba, and flute. I was really moved by this display of musicality and feeling.

Leaving early

Abby noted that it was getting "late" for us, and so we regrettably had to leave. Guests were still coming in and bringing food, even though those of us who had arrived early had filled our stomachs long ago. I got my flute back and packed up.

Conclusion

It is always a special treat for me when I get to hang around creative, accomplished musicians and get to see them make music spontaneously. I'm usually too intimidated in these kinds of situations to join in, but I did briefly tonight.

(Update of 2013-11-06)

I was surprised and saddened to learn from Mimi that just a couple of days ago, the man who had borrowed my flute and played so beautifully, David Olson, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://obituaries.triblive.com/listing/231895/David-E-Olson/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://obituaries.triblive.com/listing/231895/David-E-Olson/">died</span>. Even in the brief time that I interacted with him at all, just in a handful of music parties, I was struck by his enthusiasm, humor, and graciousness. It is hard to believe that he is gone now, just a month since he was playing my flute. RIP, David.

First rehearsal for my first ukulele gig: dealing with anxiety

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 03:09:23 GMT

It's now officially two months since I started learning to play ukulele. It's hard to believe, but two months ago, I was still struggling to play three chords: I could play C, of course, but had trouble with G7, and had even worse trouble with F: I had no finger strength or dexterity and could not arch my fingers and everything was a painful buzz, and I could spend only five minutes a day practicing because of the pain on my uncalloused fingers.

And after just over a month of playing, and joining the Steel City Ukuleles, I had volunteered to perform in a gig for Ecofest in Regent Square, as a way to force myself to maintain momentum.

And this week, just in time, I got my brand new concert-sized ukulele.

The gig is in just over a week. I attended my first rehearsal with extreme anxiety. I was even thinking about bailing out instead of attending. Here's why.

New music for me

I went into rehearsal with basically none of the songs we were going to perform. So it was basically a sight reading and singing session for me.

One reason is that I was waiting to get the official bound compilation of performance songs that we were to receive at the first rehearsal, which we did. I had not requested to get one ahead of time, because I was too busy all week anyway to make good use of it if I had possessed it.

Also, it turns out that many of these songs are already familiar and played by most of the other members of the performance group; they are part of the general repertoire, for previous years' Ecofests as well as for other gigs.

New performance group for me

I know that breaking into a performance group for the first time always involves an initial learning curve because there are those who already know everything inside and out. I still have very vivid memories of other times in my life when I have entered a performance group and felt lost for a while.

I was briefly in marching band, during the 9th grade in high school. As a new freshman, I was unfamiliar with the repertoire, the choreography, etc. It was a tricky experience for all us freshmen, of course, amidst the 10th, 11th, and 12th graders.

Similarly, over a decade ago, for a couple of years I was a member of the Carnegie Mellon University ballroom dance club, and I was on both the competition team as well as the formation team. I'd made ballroom dancing the main focus of my life, throwing myself into lessons and competition and being in performances with the formation team while still a beginner. I improved my dancing significantly and quickly as a result of jumping in.

And more recently, I have been performing in a small recorder quartet/quintet at winter holiday time. Practicing so that I wouldn't totally flub everything always took a huge amount of work for me, but the side effect was that I really improved my recorder playing and musicianship.

So I know firsthand the benefits of just jumping in and being around very experienced team members who are inspirational to emulate and learn from, and to exert some healthy pressure on myself not to let the team down!

Listening, watching

A lot of what I did during rehearsal was listening and watching, while doing what I could to keep up and go and make dozens of mistakes everywhere. (It's particularly important to boldly make those mistakes and write down what to work on for homework.)

There was no way I was going to be able to play everything at first sight. In fact, that's not even the right way to think about the situation. This isn't classical music where you really do "sight read". This is music where almost everything is transmitted by ear. Not knowing the melodies, and not having an actual score, I have to listen and figure out where the melodic lines roughly are, and where the chord changes are. I have to learn what the prevailing strum rhythms and breaks and mood the group has largely decided on. The goal is to learn how to blend in and contribute.

I didn't do much extended singing during this rehearsal. But we have two more rehearsals after this one, so it was not necessary to get everything down right away. I would, of course, be doing my own homework, looking up YouTube videos, in between official rehearsals.

For consistency, I found it very useful to focus my listening on one person at a time to emulate. Usually that person was Sunny, because she is leading us. Sometimes that was Adam, because I was sitting near him and because as a strong male voice, I could follow him especially in songs where we had male and female voices split.

The fact that there were over a dozen of us in the group for this gig was very helpful to me, because it meant that there was much less pressure on me to get everything right. I don't always have to sing, or sing everything. I don't always have to play the tricky chord progressions that I'm not ready yet to get right. I can leave stuff out judiciously.

Half the songs

In two hours, we covered half the songs we planned to play at Ecofest. I felt there was still a huge amount of work for me to do in order to really contribute to the group, but no longer felt helpless.

The cost of excellence

I still think it's a little crazy that I jumped into committing to performing when still a beginner at ukulele, but in the past couple of years, I have learned that shorter, tighter learning and creating cycles considerably speed up the improvement process, provided that one actually puts in the hard work on a daily basis.

There's been a huge cost, unfortunately. I have let some things slide while focusing on ukulele in the past two months. For example, I have been playing chess very poorly. Last week, I drew a game that I should have won. And just two days ago, disaster struck: in my fatigue, I lost a game I should have won. If I had known I was going to have ukulele take over my life outside of work, I would have chosen not to play in the current chess tournament.

Now as in the past couple of years, I have chosen to sacrifice my chess performance when other things come up. This is why I rarely play chess tournaments any more: I hate playing worse than I am actually capable of playing. As I mentioned two weeks ago, I had anticipated becoming busy in November, but I had not anticipated being so busy now already, in September!

Conclusion

Sunny led a great rehearsal for our Ecofest gig coming up. I really like some of these songs we're working on, and left feeling that after more work, we can sound really good and have a lot of fun at the gig!

The Chess Improver: the psychology of not winning the won game

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 12:13:50 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

I published my third post on the blog The Chess Improver. It covers my third round game in the current Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament, in which I was very disappointed because I had a won game but failed to actually win the game!

"The psychology of not winning the won game."

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

We've all experienced this: building up an overwhelming position at the board, perhaps winning material or having a huge attack, and knowing (not just hoping) that we have a won game, and that it is just a matter of time. But the opponent is stubborn and keeps fighting, perhaps surprising us with unexpected or strange counterplay. Maybe it looks sound, or maybe it looks like unsound but practically justifiable desperation.

Sometimes we start drifting, and notice that we haven't made progress, or worse, the opponent's counterplay is strangely working. Did we miss a win somewhere? Dis we miss a refutation?

And finally, maybe we get into a position that is clearly no longer truly advantageous. Somehow it's looking like a draw. Now what? Anger? Self-reproach? A last-ditch attempt at reclaiming an advantage? Our confidence is shaken. We don't know if we really know how to play this frustrating game called chess. How do we regroup and continue playing? Or should we even continue playing? Should we offer a draw? Or should we believe that since we outplayed our opponent for so much of the game, we are better and "deserve" to win, and therefore we can try again for a winning advantage?

In my 3rd round game in the current Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament, I played an opponent whom I have three wins and three losses against in the past several years (rated USCF 2200). I went into the game vowing not to get emotional about seeking "revenge" for the last three games we played (all of which were my losses).

The game took some fascinating turns. Out of the opening, as Black I had a clear advantage. But my opponent deliberately offered what I thought was a Pawn sacrifice, in an attempt to free his position. I accepted the challenge, only to find that his real plan was to sacrifice both a pawn and an exchange! Although unsound, this was quite creative and disruptive to me over the board, and I did not play optimally in return. Instead of accepting the challenge and keeping the exchange, I gave it back and retained a Pawn advantage. However, consolidation proved difficult. I missed some tactical winning shots in the ensuing middlegame, and ended up in a position in which the best play for both sides was a draw by repetition. I was upset by the knowledge that I must have missed a win somewhere, but I also knew that if I did not take the repetition, I would have to lose back the Pawn, in which case the position was going to be a draw anyway. Given that I did not trust my mental abilities at the late hour (11:00 PM, the last game still in progress, with the tournament director waiting to close up the club, and time was getting low on the clock for both me and my opponent), I had no reason to continue the game and risk playing badly for a loss rather than a draw. So I accepted the draw offer.

In the past, I have sometimes played on despite the signs of mental tiredness and no realistic winning chances, and lost games in which I was a Pawn up. I was happy that this time around, I did not. I think my mind was still on the recent Sinquefield Cup last round game between Carlsen and Aronian in which Aronian won a Pawn and kept playing for a win and ended up losing instead.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "15th Fred Sorensen Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2013.09.17"] [Round "3"] [White "Magar, Thomas"] [Black "Chen, Franklin"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [BlackElo "2164"] [ECO "A60"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "2200"]

d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 c5 4. d5 exd5 5. cxd5 b5 6. Bg2 d6 7. a4 { Very committal.} 7... b4 8. Nd2 Nbd7 9. Qc2 { White should be developing the Kingside.} 9... Ba6 { Black should also be developing the King side.} 10. Nh3 g6 11. O-O Bg7 12. Re1 $2 { Black can quickly create pressure against White's underdeveloped position.} 12... O-O $201 { White is rather bottled up now. Black is ready to start expanding on the Queen side.} 13. b3 $5 { A provocative attempt to free the position by giving up some material.} 13... Nxd5 { I decided to snatch the d Pawn.} ( 13... Re8 { First threatening the Pawn on e2 was also possible.} 14. Nf4 Nxd5 15. Bxd5 Bxa1 16. Ne4 Rxe4 17. Bxe4 Rb8 { Black remains a Pawn up.} ) 14. Bxd5 ( 14. Bb2 { More accurate, just sacrificing a Pawn rather than the exchange.} 14... Bxb2 15. Qxb2 N7f6 16. e4 { White has a Pawn for the exchange but Black is winning because of White's weak Queen side.} 16... Nc3 { White has some compensation.} ) 14... Bxa1 15. Ne4 $1 $201 { I simply did not see this nice resource when I accepted the Pawn on d5. Black is still better, but White has some compensation for the exchange and Pawn, amazingly!} ( 15. Bxa8 $2 { I had expected White to take back the exchange.} 15... Qxa8 { Black may be "only" a Pawn up, but is clearly winning here.} 16. Bb2 Bxb2 17. Qxb2 Re8 $201 ) 15... Bg7 $2 { Careless. The decision was to give back the exchange with a better position.} ( 15... Rb8 { Just keeping the exchange was fine.} 16. Nxd6 Ne5 { Looks complex, but Black is winning.} 17. Qxc5 Rb6 $201 { White is lost.} ) 16. Bg5 Qb6 17. Bxa8 Rxa8 18. Rd1 Bf8 $201 { By this point, I realized that my extra Pawn was not very helpful, and White has compensation.} 19. Nf4 Bb7 20. Nd5 $2 { Inaccurate and should lose.} ( 20. Qc4 ) 20... Bxd5 21. Rxd5 Re8 $5 { Wrong move order.} ( 21... Qc6 { Winning with the unstoppable plan of Re8 and pushing White back with Re6 or f5.} ) 22. Bf4 $4 Re6 $2 { Missing the win.} ( 22... Qc6 { Immediately wins material.} 23. Nxd6 Qxd5 24. Nxe8 g5 { White's Knight is almost trapped.} 25. Qd2 Qxd2 26. Bxd2 c4 $201 ) 23. Ng5 $2 Qc6 $2 { Throwing away the win.} ( 23... Nf6 { The other way of attacking White's Rook is strong.} 24. Rd3 Re8 { And Black will consolidate, get d5 in, and win.} ) 24. Rd2 Rf6 25. Ne4 Re6 26. Ng5 { Seeking a draw by repetition.} 26... Rf6 ( 26... Re8 { Continuing to play for a win by giving back the Pawn was possible, but both players were already running low on time.} 27. Qc4 d5 28. Qxd5 Qxd5 29. Rxd5 Nf6 { This should be a draw.} ) ( 26... d5 $2 { I briefly considered a speculative exchange sacrifice to keep the game alive, but quickly concluded that it only favored White.} 27. Nxe6 fxe6 28. e4 Nf6 29. exd5 exd5 { It is White who has the real winning chances here.} ) 27. Ne4 Re6 28. Ng5 { White offered a draw, which was accepted.} 1/2-1/2`} />

Why you should go out to the Pittsburgh South Side Slopes Step Trek

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 01:37:56 GMT

Thanks to my blog coverage two years ago of the annual Pittsburgh Step Trek, I was invited, as I was last year also, by the South Side Slopes Neighborhood Association to a special preview small group tour of the "church route", which includes 820 stairs (379 stairs up, 441 stairs down), led by Brian Oswald.

I decided to attend for a couple of reasons:

To refresh my memory; I had not been to the South Side Slopes for probably a year, since Abby and I entertained her visiting sister and her boyfriend by taking them on a tour ourselves, along with <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.carrieplant.com/kitty/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.carrieplant.com/kitty/">Kitty</span>.
To take my work colleague John along and show him this unique part of Pittsburgh.
To learn what is new with the maintenance of this unique neighborhood.
To better promote the annual Step Trek event, which is enjoyable and benefits the neighborhood.

Here's my report on the evening preview tour.

Meeting up

John and I left straight from work to meet up with Brian at the entrance to South Side Park.

A number of other people were supposed to attend, but it turned out only one of them made it, representing Pop City. After waiting around for a while, we had to get going because of the danger of it getting dark before we would finish about an hour hike.

Starting

A last view back north toward the South Side Flats:

We started immediately with a staircase underneath the Mission Street Bridge:

Sample street on the route:

Guided tour

Along the way, Brian served as a tour guide, telling us all about renovations and repairs of various staircases, as well as particular ones that still needed work (such as a handrail that was broken). Two years ago, when Abby and I did the Step Trek event, we followed the nice booklet and route map that had a lot of historical information, but I wasn't aware of all the details of what people like Brian of the South Side Slopes Neighborhood Association do to find funding for neighborhood improvements and keep the staircases functional. It's a challenge getting all the repairs done that are needed. That's why the Step Trek is so important as a fundraiser.

Throughout the tour, we encountered quite a few people who were using the staircases, including runners as well as walking residents who used them simply as the most practical or only way to get from one place to another.

Lighting

One improvement that Brian was particularly proud of showing us was an entire staircase with LED lighting installed, in order to make it particularly usable at night. It also helps against freezing in the winter. (Unfortunately, as we walked down, I forgot to take photos of the LED lights visible from going up.)

Alleys

Some alleys are actually public parts of the route!

Churches

Lots of churches on this route, hence "church route". These are historical reminders of the early days of Pittsburgh with its ethnic churches all over.

Railroad

Walking on a bridge over railroad tracks:

More steps

Steps.

St. Paul of the Cross Monastery

Here's a nice view from the parking lot of the St. Paul of the Cross Monastery along the route (on Step Trek day you can enter). (Unfortunately, it was getting dark, so the photo is dark.)

Billy Buck Hill

A lot of rather hilly roads in this neighborhood. A good workout!

Views

South Side Park

Brian pointed out the successful planting of new trees as part of the improvement of South Side Park:

We did not take the steps leading back through South Side Park, which are part of the official Step Trek route:

Instead, we ventured into the woods. This way can be tricky because of the footing and possible mud, etc.

The advantage is we could get to a field with a nice view:

Community garden

Brian showed us another great improvement to the neighborhood, a rather large community garden.

It was rapidly getting dark:

We hurried to get back to where we had started, under the Mission Street Bridge.

Many thanks to Brian for leading this preview tour and answering our questions as we enjoyed a little hike with him through his neighborhood!

Other improvements

Brian told us about improvements to the Step Trek event itself. For one thing, they have an improved map booklet out, and also improved support for smartphones. These improvements are not just for the Step Trek event but will be usable for any visitors to the South Side Slopes neighborhood anytime, as well as a valuable reference for residents.

For example, check out this great interactive map site!

For more information

Check out the main Web site of the South Side Slopes Neighborhood Association.

Also, they have an active Twitter account @sssna and Facebook page.

Step Trek information

You can register early for the Step Trek here.

Remember, the Step Trek also includes open houses, refreshment stops, and of course you can just hang out in the South Side Slopes checking out food and shopping too. The annual event is a great way to help the neighborhood and experience unique geography and get some exercise in also!

And at the entrance, there will be food trucks and entertainment, so that when you are done with however much hiking you want to do, you can hang out and relax.

For more on the Step Trek as experienced in daylight, review my blog coverage two years ago.

Conclusion

The Pittsburgh South Side Slopes is a unique historical neighborhood that you should check out, and what better way is there than to explore it on foot on Step Trek day?

Finally got a nice new ukulele: Mainland Classic Mahogany Concert

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 03:10:46 GMT

Exactly two months after beginning to learn ukulele, I finally got a quality instrument for myself, ordered online from Mainland Ukes in Indiana (yes, there are good ukuleles made outside of Hawaii).

I first encountered Mainland because of an electric tenor that Linda lent me at my very first Steel City Ukuleles meeting. This instrument had some very nice qualities I appreciated: its construction, appearance, and sound.

Why now?

I delayed two months because I wanted to get sufficiently proficient that I could actually tell what was good and what I like.

Also, Abby's friend really wanted the banjolele back (I had been playing it mostly, amidst the other loaners), and having already signed up to perform in a gig soon (!), I really wanted to have my own instrument for that.

Why this Mainland Classic Mahogany Concert?

After trying various instruments, I concluded that I really did want a solid wood ukulele, rather than a laminate, because of the fuller sound. Given that, there was the question of a reasonable price point. I figured that I did not want to spend more than $300 on an instrument.

Another thing was that I wanted to make sure the intonation and action were decent, and were set up with care. That meant ruling out buying from some random store without a specific person responsible for setting up.

I looked up a lot of reviews and descriptions online, and also demonstration videos. Hawaii Music Supply was much mentioned, for example.

But I found information that made me think Mainland was the way to go.

Here are some reviews of Mainland instruments that I paid attention to:

Comparing the woods, I liked the deep mahogany sound. Although the bright spruce-topped instruments sound great too, I prefer deep to bright, even if the classic ukulele sound is on the bright side.

The sound of the mahogany just seemed gorgeous to me, and also the Mainland instruments are quite resonant:

Ordering

So I eventually contacted Mike of Mainland and asked him some questions, and then put in the order, and the instrument quickly arrived. I already love it!

Conclusion

I felt I did a reasonable job in evaluating (in person or from online information) various instruments before finally ordering one. This was not an impulse purchase.

Now that I have a beautiful instrument, I feel committed to play it every day! I expect to enjoy this investment for many, many years to come!

The Chess Improver: remember the importance of development

Thu, 19 Sep 2013 12:34:10 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

I published my second post on the blog The Chess Improver. It covers my second round game in the current Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament, in which I won, but suffered for a bit because I neglected a basic principle in chess.

"Remember the importance of development!"

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

Looking at the games of elite players, a club player is often bewildered by the nature of some of these games, in which development and castling are sometimes ignored in favor of weird flank attacks and the like. Sometimes this way of playing succeeds and sometimes it fails; furthermore, sometimes it succeeds when it is actually unsound, and sometimes it fails when it is actually sound, because of human fallibility on both sides.

As a practical matter, even when it is sound to delay development, such as when accepting a gambit and believing that it should be possible to defend, the slightest inaccuracy may lead to headaches. I believe there is value in practicing both sides of gambits, in order to learn both how to attack and open lines, as well as how to defend. Also, it is instructive to see where one slip can completely change the evaluation of a position, while practical considerations might make one side easier to play.

I present three recent games illustrating the challenges of playing in a queenless middlegame when behind in development:

One of my recent tournament games
A Kamsky-Carlsen game from the Sinquefield Cup in which Kamsky got in trouble and lost
The final Carlsen-Aronian game from the Sinquefield Cup in which Carlsen got in trouble (but Aronian self-destructed)

The main message is that all of us, whatever our level, should remember the basics of good chess play: developing pieces quickly to good squares and keeping the King safe. It is risky to try for a more aggressive setup through slower development with an intention of getting each piece (especially Knights) to a seemingly better place, because there may not be enough time.

In a recent game on mine (round 2 of a 6 round tournament in progress at the Pittsburgh Chess Club), as White I accepted a gambit offered by my opponent (rated USCF 1998) on his third move, which quickly resulted in a curious queenless middlegame in which I had a King on e2, and my King side pieces could not be developed immediately, in return for being a Pawn up. (I saw people watching the game with funny looks on their faces.) Although the gambit is not wholly sound, which is why I was happy to enter the position, it presented practical opportunities for either side to go wrong. In particular, I made a couple of decisions that led to slowing down my development and offering a tactical target in the form of a poorly developed Bishop on e3. However, with the help of my opponent, I did end up consolidating and winning. But I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by simply focusing on accelerating my development after winning the Pawn. As it turned out, because of inaccurate play, I was defending from move 3 to 22 and only when I made my first non-defensive move did I actually consolidate.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "15th Fred Sorensen Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2013.09.10"] [White "Chen, Franklin"] [Black "Jansen, Peter"] [Result "1-0"] [BlackElo "1998"] [ECO "B12"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "2164"]

e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. f3 { The so-called Fantasy Variation of the Caro-Kann.} 3… e5 $5 $201 { A sharp sacrifice.} 4. dxe5 Bc5 5. Nc3 Qb6 ( 5… Ne7 ) 6. Na4 { This was actually the limit of my opening theory knowledge in this line.} 6… Bf2+ $6 { Forcing an early Queenless middlegame that is objectively good for White, but is an interesting practical attempt.} ( 6… Qa5+ 7. c3 ) 7. Ke2 Qd4 8. Qxd4 Bxd4 $201 { Black has sacrificed a Pawn for activity in a Queenless middlegame and clearly has compensation. White still has two Bishops, a Knight, and two Rooks to somehow develop, while having to move the King one more time to let out the King side pieces.} 9. exd5 $5 { One way of trying to hang onto the Pawn, but at the cost of time. I evaluated the two main and objectively better alternatives but then decided to resolve the situation in the center.} ( 9. Bf4 { The best way of keeping the Pawn, defending the e5 Pawn and continuing development. The resulting positions are more tactical, however, with e5 being in danger of falling eventually.} 9… b5 10. Nc3 b4 11. Na4 $201 ) ( 9. f4 { Giving back the Pawn was quite possible and decent.} 9… dxe4 10. Be3 Bxe3 11. Kxe3 $201 { At the cost of returning the Pawn, White is now the one with the development advantage as well as a spatial advantage, and Black has weakened dark squares at c5 and d6. White has a small but clear advantage.} ) 9… Bxe5 10. dxc6 Nxc6 $201 11. Be3 $2 $10 { Inaccurate because White should be catching up on King side development immediately.} ( 11. Kf2 { White can consolidate by clearing the way immediately for the light squared Bishop to be developed.} ) 11… Bf5 12. c3 { White is barely holding the fort.} 12… Nge7 13. Kf2 $201 O-O-O { Natural but slow.} ( 13… Nd5 14. Bc5 O-O-O 15. Bb5 Nf4 16. Be3 Rhe8 ( 16… Nd5 ) 17. Nc5 Bd6 18. Nb3 a6 19. g3 axb5 20. Bxf4 Bxf4 21. gxf4 Bd3 ) 14. Bc4 { Frantically catching up on development.} 14… Nd5 { Better late than never, forcing White to give up the Bishop pair.} 15. Bxd5 Rxd5 16. Ne2 Re8 $10 $201 { White has nothing. The Knight looks funny on a4, and the Bishop on e3 is a target.} 17. Rhe1 $2 { The point was to give more support to the Bishop on e3, but it turns out that here and in the next moves, Black actually always had the option of taking the Pawn on h2.} ( 17. Nc5 Bd6 18. Nb3 Rde5 19. Ng3 { Striking immediately would have given White some trouble.} 19… Rxe3 20. Nxf5 Re2+ 21. Kf1 Bf8 22. Rb1 Rc2 23. Na1 Rd2 24. Nb3 ) 17… Bc2 $2 $16 { Not only missing the opportunity to regain the Pawn with advantage, but also misplacing the Bishop.} ( 17… Bxh2 18. g3 $2 { Trying to trap the Bishop fails.} 18… Ne5 ) 18. Nc5 $6 ( 18. b3 { Simple, effective defense, and allowing the Knight to come back to b2.} ) 18… Bd6 ( 18… Bxh2 { Black still could have regained the Pawn, but by now, White still has some advantage even with the returned Pawn, because of better placed pieces and the c Pawn is more important than the h Pawn.} 19. Nd4 Nxd4 20. Bxd4 Be5 21. Rac1 Bg6 22. Nb3 Bxd4+ { This computer-generated line shows just how tricky White's defensive task is. White is still under pressure.} 23. Nxd4 $201 ) 19. b4 $6 { Trying to keep the Knight active rather than retreating it.} ( 19. Nb3 { Best, not weakening the Queen side.} 19… Bxh2 $2 ( 19… Bxb3 20. axb3 Bxh2 { Black is in trouble.} 21. g3 h5 22. Red1 Rde5 23. Rd3 h4 24. gxh4 Rh5 25. Nd4 Rxh4 26. Nxc6 bxc6 27. Rxa7 ) 20. Nbd4 ) 19… b6 ( 19… Bxh2 $2 20. g3 h5 21. Nd4 Nxd4 { Again, Black's Bishop is not trapped, but Black will have to give back the Pawn to save it.} 22. cxd4 h4 23. gxh4 { White is still a Pawn up.} ) 20. Rac1 $2 ( 20. Nb3 { Natural and good.} 20… Bxh2 $2 21. Ned4 { Very strong.} 21… Bxb3 ( 21… Nxd4 $4 22. Nxd4 Bg6 23. g3 { Oops, Black's Bishop is trapped!} ) 22. axb3 Nxd4 23. Bxd4 Rxe1 24. Rxe1 $201 { Black is in big trouble.} ) 20… Bg6 21. Nb3 $201 { A critical position. White is on the verge of consolidating the Pawn advantage.} 21… Ne5 $2 { One inaccurate move by Black throws away the entire initiative gained in the first 20 moves in the game.} ( 21… Bxh2 { Regaining the Pawn equalizes.} 22. g3 Rh5 { Black saves the Bishop.} 23. Nd2 Bg1+ $1 24. Kxg1 Rxe3 25. Nf4 Rxe1+ 26. Rxe1 Re5 { A simplified, equal position.} ) 22. Nf4 $16 $201 { White's first non-defensive move so far in the entire game! It's amazing, but White had been defending against some immediate threat starting from move 3.} 22… Nd3+ 23. Nxd3 Rxd3 24. Bd4 $201 Rxe1 25. Rxe1 f6 26. Ke2 $201 { Planning to trap Black's Rook on d3 and win it.} 26… Bxh2 $4 $18 { Losing the exchange. Objectively, the game is over now.} ( 26… Be5 { Mandatory to save the Rook.} 27. Bxe5 ( 27. Nc1 { Trying to win the exchange gives up two Pawns and is not worthwhile.} 27… Rxc3 28. Bxc3 Bxc3 29. Rd1 Bxb4 $201 ) 27… fxe5 28. Rc1 $201 { White is a clean Pawn up but the game isn't just over.} ) 27. Nc1 $201 { Winning the exchange. The rest of the game is uneven because both players were moving quickly, but the win is just a matter of technique, pushing Black back.} 27… Bg3 28. Rh1 Rxd4 29. cxd4 Bd6 30. b5 Kb7 31. Nd3 h6 32. Rc1 Be8 33. a4 a6 34. Rb1 axb5 35. axb5 Bd7 36. Ke3 g5 37. Rh1 Bf8 38. Rb1 h5 39. f4 h4 40. fxg5 fxg5 41. Ne5 Be8 42. Ke4 g4 43. Rh1 h3 44. gxh3 gxh3 45. Rxh3 Bxb5 46. Rh7+ Ka6 47. d5 Ba4 48. Rf7 Bc5 49. Rf6 Kb7 50. d6 Bc2+ 51. Kf4 Kc8 52. d7+ Kc7 $201 { Black's flag fell as he made the final move, but Queening and checkmate were coming soon anyway.} 1-0`} />

Recently in the Sinquefield Cup, Gata Kamsky lost a game because he neglected natural and quick development in a queenless middlegame at White.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Sinquefield Cup"] [Site "0:06:33-0:03:33"] [Date "2013.09.13"] [EventDate "2013.09.09"] [Round "4"] [Result "0-1"] [White "Gata Kamsky"] [Black "Magnus Carlsen"] [ECO "C69"] [PlyCount "118"]

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Bxc6 dxc6 5.O-O f6 6.d4 Bg4 7.dxe5 Qxd1 8.Rxd1 fxe5 9.Rd3 Bd6 10.Nbd2 Nf6 11.Nc4 O-O 12.Nfxe5 Be2 13.Re3 Bxc4 14.Nxc4 Ng4 15.Re2 Bxh2+ 16.Kf1 Rae8 17.Nd2 Rd8 { Things look bad for White } 18.f3 Bg3 19.Kg1 Ne5 20.b3 Ng6 21.Nf1 Be5 22.c3 Bxc3 23.Bb2 Nf4 24.Rc2 Ba5 25.Ng3 g6 26.Rf1 Rd3 27.Kh2 Bb4 28.Ne2 Ne6 29.Nc1 Rd7 30.g3 Rfd8 31.Kg2 Kf7 32.f4 h5 33.Kh3 a5 34.Kg2 Nc5 35.Kf3 Nd3 36.Re2 Be7 37.Nxd3 Rxd3+ 38.Kg2 Bc5 39.Rc1 Rd2 40.Rc2 Rxe2+ 41.Rxe2 Rd3 42.Rc2 Bd6 43.Bc1 Be7 44.Kf2 a4 45.Rd2 Rxd2+ 46.Bxd2 axb3 47.axb3 c5 48.g4 b5 49.gxh5 gxh5 50.Bc3 b4 51.Bb2 Bh4+ 52.Ke2 Bg3 53.f5 h4 54.e5 h3 55.e6+ Ke7 56.Kf3 Bf4 57.Bg7 Bg5 58.Be5 c4 59.bxc4 Bf6 0-1`} />

And Magnus Carlsen tried to be clever with a dubious a5 and Bishop and Knight maneuvers that just left him with a terrible position after which he probably really should have lost.

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "Sinquefield Cup"] [Site "0:02:33-0:00:33"] [Date "2013.09.15"] [EventDate "2013.09.09"] [Round "6"] [Result "1-0"] [White "Magnus Carlsen"] [Black "Levon Aronian"] [ECO "C84"] [PlyCount "139"]

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.O-O Be7 6.Re1 b5 7.Bb3 O-O 8.a4 b4 9.d4 d6 10.dxe5 dxe5 11.Qxd8 Rxd8 12.Nbd2 h6 13.a5 Bc5 14.Bc4 Ng4 15.Re2 Be6 16.Bxe6 fxe6 17.h3 Nf6 18.Re1 Rab8 { A remarkably ugly position for White } 19.Nc4 Rb5 20.b3 Bd4 21.Bb2 Rc5 22.Ra2 Bxb2 23.Rxb2 Ne8 24.Ra2 Nd6 25.Nfd2 Nb7 26.Nf3 Kf7 27.Kf1 Kf6 28.Ra4 Nbxa5 29.Ne3 h5 30.Rea1 Rd4 31.Ne1 Ke7 32.f3 Rd2 33.Rd1 Rd6 34.Rda1 Kd7 35.Nd1 Rd2 36.Nf2 Kc8 37.Nfd3 Rb5 38.h4 Kb7 39.R1a2 Ka7 40.Kg1 Kb6 41.Kf1 g6 42.Kg1 Kb7 43.Kf1 Kc8 44.Nf2 Rd8 45.Ned3 Kb7 46.Ke2 Kb6 47.Ke3 Kb7 48.Nd1 Kc8 49.N1b2 Rd6 50.Ra1 Kd8 51.Nc4 Nxc4+ 52.bxc4 Rb8 53.c5 Rd7 54.Rxa6 b3 55.Rxc6 bxc2 56.Ne1 Ke7 57.Nxc2 Rb3+ 58.Ke2 Rb2 59.Rc1 Ra2 60.Ke3 Kf7 61.f4 Kf6 62.fxe5+ Kxe5 63.Ne1 Ra3+ 64.Kf2 Rd2+ 65.Kf1 Rd7 66.Nf3+ Kf4 67.Rxe6 g5 68.hxg5 Kg3 69.Rf6 Ra2 70.Ne5 1-0`} />

My third meeting of the Steel City Ukuleles: finally ordered a new instrument

Thu, 19 Sep 2013 03:13:09 GMT

I've entered my ninth week of playing ukulele: almost two months now!

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my second meeting of the Steel City Ukuleles and why I decided to perform so quickly after joining and as a beginner to the ukulele.

Here's a report on my third meeting, in which Sunny led a varied playlist.

Musical selection

Sunny chose a variety of songs from various genres. Again, this stuff was basically new to me.

Fingerpicking

One of the songs had a short fingerpicking intro, so I was happy to try the easy pattern.

Singing

I am now mostly able to play through the chords and changes and improvise my own strumming pattern in most of the songs we go through, so I've been enjoying doing more and more singing in addition, although it still feels like talking and chewing gum at the same time.

Here's where the advantage of the repetitive structure of this kind of music becomes obvious: there are many opportunities to "correct" what you're doing on the ukulele while learning a song, and then eventually switch the focus to the words.

Sight reading and preparation

Because I've been busy with work and other things in the past several days, I only had time to briefly run over some of the songs on my own just before attending the meeting. I feel bad about not being maximally prepared, but sometimes that's just what happens. When I was a perfectionist in the past, I would prefer to not do something at all if I was not "fully" prepared, but now, I see that sometimes, at least, home "preparation" is not actually optimal anyway.

Being completely unfamiliar with these songs, yes, I could ideally do the research and look up performances on YouTube, etc. (and I did in past weeks), but even then, how we play this music often differs anyway from what one might find. We might be in a different key, have simplified or different chords, etc.

When playing in the Pittsburgh Recorder Society ensemble, I don't leave things to chance, but do practice parts ahead of time, but this is a different kind of music that is hard to do exactly that kind of preparation. In particular, the sheets we get don't have notes for the melodies, but just typically have text and then chord letters or tab symbols correlated loosely with the text, without any notation of duration. Basically, it's a lot of guesswork to figure out what to do with the printed information we are given! It's really best thought of as what music notation in the end is anyway: a lossy reminder of possible performance practice.

So I've found that other than scanning the chords and working on getting them and the changes, as technical preparation, the best thing to do is to just show up and learn on the fly, by ear, and jot down notes, and then go home and really work on the songs.

Ecofest gig

Sunny gave us more details about the logistics of our upcoming Ecofest gig that I signed up to take part in. We are going to receive nice little spiral-bound books containing the songs for performance.

Study

Since the last meeting, I've invested in three technique books for ukulele. It is time to get truly serious and start working on technique.

New instrument

Yesterday, I finally just put in an order online for a new ukulele. I am going for high quality right off the bat, because I know that I am going to be serious about the instrument. It will not collect dust. I hope it will last me decades! I'll report more when I get it. I hope it arrives soon.

Conclusion

I'm definitely getting serious about ukulele. I've invested not only in ukulele technique books, but also in a new instrument.

On not celebrating Constitution Day this year, 2013

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 12:42:26 GMT

For several years, I've made a habit of observing Constitution Day by attending the annual exhibit and lecture at CMU. Last year I reported on an interesting session about the very invention of Constitution Day.

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://events.web.cmu.edu/ecal/event/137831259599848837" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://events.web.cmu.edu/ecal/event/137831259599848837">This year</span>, the program for the event <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://cmlibblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/constitution-day-celebration/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://cmlibblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/constitution-day-celebration/">held at the Posner Center</span> at CMU read:

<blockquote> David Harris, distinguished faculty scholar and professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, will deliver a keynote speech titled "How Will America Be Remembered? A Constitution Day Journey Into the Future" at approximately 3:30 p.m. Light refreshments will be served. An original copy of the Bill of Rights will be on display. </blockquote>

I ended up deciding not to attend today, for several reasons. One is that I have a lot of stuff to get done at work right now. But even if that weren't the case, my heart was not into celebrating Constitution Day this year.

How will America be remembered?

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Edward_Snowden-2.jpg/199px-Edward_Snowden-2.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Edward_Snowden-2.jpg/199px-Edward_Snowden-2.jpg">[image defunct]</span>

Because the story is still far from over, I haven't said much on my blog about the events that have been unfolding for some months now since Edward Snowden exposed information about the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. He <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/12/edward-snowden-full-statement-moscow" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/12/edward-snowden-full-statement-moscow">explained his actions as justified by the violation of the 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution</span>:

<blockquote> The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice -- that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law. </blockquote>

When I do a Web search for "Edward Snowden" and "Constitution", I mostly find pro-Snowden articles that affirm his point of view of the NSA programs as being unconstitutional. Here is <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.newsworks.org/index.php/blogs/brandywine-to-broad/item/56244-nsa-leaks-by-edward-snowden-threaten-constitutional-self-government" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.newsworks.org/index.php/blogs/brandywine-to-broad/item/56244-nsa-leaks-by-edward-snowden-threaten-constitutional-self-government">one exception</span> you may wish to read.

I find it interesting that much of the media coverage of Edward Snowden's actions do not actually reference his claim of unconstitutionality, but focus on other matters, such as the nature of his education or possible ulterior motives for leaking, or whether his actions may prove harmful to national security or other interests. These may be interesting and important questions, but sidestep his primary claim and stated motive.

Too early to tell

I did not attend the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://wesa.fm/post/us-constitution-224-years-later-why-it-endures" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://wesa.fm/post/us-constitution-224-years-later-why-it-endures">David Harris</span>, although it might have been interesting.

I think Snowden's actions and their repercussions will add an extra twist to the age-old question of whether the Constitution is to be interpreted under "original intent" or as a "living document", and even whether the Constitution should be <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/lets-give-up-on-the-constitution.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/lets-give-up-on-the-constitution.html">abandoned</span>, if interpretations either way simply come to be seen as purely political game-playing to justify "constitutional" as simply meaning "what I like". The most interesting thing right now is that prominent voices on both the "left" and the "right" (the libertarian wing) have united in denouncing the activities of the NSA as unconstitutional.

This is not a political blog, and political theory is not my main area of interest or advocacy, but I thought it would be useful to make a few observations about current events for Constitution Day.

New goals for a new season of the Pittsburgh Recorder Society

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 00:40:25 GMT

I was delighted to pay my membership dues at the first meeting of the new 2013-2014 season of the Pittsburgh Recorder Society. I hadn't played recorder much since this July's Mideast early music workshop, because of my having taken up ukulele the day after I got back from that; in fact, apart from that week-long workshop, I had not attended any meetings of the Pittsburgh Recorder Society since April (since I had to miss the May one on travel), and although there are meetings all through the summer as well, they only take place in the North Hills, which is kind of far for me.

As with the opening of the last season, we have exciting new plans for this season. And I have my own new plans in addition.

Introductions

We have some new members, which is always great, so we went around briefly introducing ourselves.

Raising our level

What is really inspiring, though, is the large number of formerly "new" people who joined during last season and have stayed with the group, so that we are in fact growing in numbers. Not only that, we have all improved considerably in the past year. Our director Fred is so excited by how far we have come that he has plans for us to work on harder music and improve our individual technique and ensemble playing.

Today we started working on music by Bach and Buxtehude: some lovely contrapuntal pieces. I look forward to our polishing up this stuff and really doing the old masters proud!

Bass recorder

In addition to continuing work on my technique and musicality, I decided that for this season, I would like to do play more on bass recorder. In the past year, I've gravitated toward deliberately volunteering to play tenor lines, to experience the unique position of bringing out the inner voice as well as making it blend harmoniously with the others. For the new season, I have an interest in focusing on the bass line, to experience being the rock solid underpinning of ensemble music. So I told Fred on my plan, and he'll come up with some stuff for me to get into that.

Conclusion

I've been playing recorder for two and a half years now, starting in spring 2011. I am happy to be continuing on, with the companionship of everyone in the Pittsburgh Recorder Society! Making music together is really special.

Saying No: on not playing in the Pittsburgh Chess League this season for the CMU Tartans

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 04:14:55 GMT

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://twitchfilm.com/assets/2011/07/120889.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://twitchfilm.com/assets/2011/07/120889.jpg">[image: Chess]</span>

Later today, the first round of the 2013-14 season of the Pittsburgh Chess League will start, and I will not be there to play.

Here's why.

Last season

Last season, I played in the Pittsburgh Chess League as a member of the CMU Tartans and we won. As I mentioned, out of the six rounds our team played in (one round was a bye for each team), I ended up playing only in the first two of those rounds, the October and November. After that, I simply kept running into trouble:

One way or another, I kept on not being up to the prospect of spending up to five hours on a single chess game on a Sunday afternoon from 2 PM to 7 PM. Repeatedly, when asked whether I could play in an upcoming round, I felt guilty about saying that I would play only in case of an emergency.

Saying "No"

This fall, I made the tough decision to leave the Pittsburgh Chess League, telling CMU Tartans team captain Jeff some weeks ago that I preferred not to be on the roster this year at all, even as an alternate.

I've had a lifelong difficulty with saying "No", not only <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://zenhabits.net/say-no/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://zenhabits.net/say-no/">to others</span> but also to myself.

Heck, I even wrote a blog post well over two years ago about saying "No", but I don't also optimally apply to myself my own advice!

I've had a habit of taking on all kinds of obligations or activities that stretched myself thin, resulting in subpar performance and dependability, and meanwhile, anxiety, guilt, and shame. People deserve better than this from me. I deserve better than this from me.

Chess

I love chess, but it can be very time and energy-consuming, so I have to be careful about how much time I spend on it at all. This year, it turns out that I completely stopped playing chess in February, and just came back now in September, along with becoming a new contributor to the Chess Improver blog.

Actually looking at my calendar and my overall plans for the next half year, I decided that if I cannot be a dependable team member for the CMU Tartans (in terms of regularly showing up to play for the team as well as playing well for the team), then it is better not to be on the team at all.

Furthermore, I also decided that after the current Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament concludes in October (I just finished the first two of six rounds in the 15th Fred Sorensen Memorial), I will, unlike last year, not continue on in the following Tuesday night tournament (November-December), because based on how my schedule went in the past two years, those two months are very busy for me, and the last two years I barely stumbled to winter break alive, and performed terribly in the tournament last year, ridiculously losing two won games, and also performed suboptimally in other projects I was doing. I'm not going to let that happen this year. It is not only chess I am cutting out for November-December, but most likely some musical activities as well (yet to be finalized).

It was better for the CMU Tartans to find a reliable replacement for me than for me to be undependable for them. Luka has left town, and I have dropped out, but the team has managed to get Joe Mucerino on board, so I hope all will go well for the team in the new season of the Pittsburgh Chess League with the reduced number of members.

Conclusion

Saying "No" to others and to myself is very difficult. I enjoy new projects and challenges. But if doing too much means not doing everything optimally well, then what's the point? So I've taken a big step toward reclaiming my sanity by choosing not to be a part of the Pittsburgh Chess League this year.

Back to French dance: potluck and party

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 03:40:51 GMT

I went to a French potluck dance party at Lisa's. For the first time, I attended without Abby, because she was up at SNPJ for an international folk dance camp; actually, we had a fairly low turnout (I counted fourteen people) because some others who would have come to the potluck are at the camp with her!

It's been months since I was involved with French dance or music, because I gave all that up temporarily in order to focus on learning ukulele starting less than two months ago.

The last French potluck dance party I attended was almost four months ago. I really love this informal

Potluck

I made a huge batch of vegetables for the potluck.

My simple recipe:

three bunches of broccoli with florets and stems (sliced thinly)
extra virgin olive oil
Trader Joe's South African smoke seasoning
two tomatoes
one onion
one clove of garlic

Dancing

Here's a photo of some dancing in action.

I did not actually do much dancing this evening at all, because of my slow recovery from a really bad injury from a week ago. I only did one dance. My left arm, left hip, and right knee are in constant pain.

I did join John by playing flute along with him on button accordion. By the way, he's planning to order a new one with more rows and more keys to play in.

There were not enough women tonight for pairing up. It was joked that this is a "Pittsburgh problem", because usually when it comes to dancing, there are not enough men!

Conclusion

Although I could not really dance tonight, I appreciated the opportunity to socialize and make music, and not feel so lonely at home alone while Abby was out of town!

Finally playing Piazzolla's "Oblivion" on flute

Sat, 14 Sep 2013 03:49:09 GMT

Almost a year ago, I almost played Piazzolla's tango "Oblivion" on flute with piano accompaniment by Henry at a party but I ended up playing melodica instead of flute.

Having the opportunity to play with Henry again, this time I played it on flute, finally! I had found an oboe and piano arrangement which we used, sight reading it. I think the arranger filled in his own ornamentation into the melodic line. I only used that as a guide. Personally, when I play "Oblivion", I improvise my own embellishments on the spot, depending on my mood. I play it very freely: it cries out for self-expression.

(Update of 2014-10-23) Some other performances of "Oblivion"

In my blog post of 2012, I embedded a lot of my favorite performances I found on YouTube of "Oblivion". Here are some more.

Flute/cello/piano trio (Mathilde Caldérini, Zoé Karlikow, Aurèle Marthan)

Very beautiful performance, great unity and balance and expression from all three musicians.

7 flute choir

An unusual 7-flute arrangement, with all parts played by the same person, Manja Thessin! A bonus is that the video is a beautiful demonstration of tango dancing by David and Kim Benitez of Tango Movement

J'oublie (voice), Elena-Lydia Stamellou

A lovely, pure voice with piano accompaniment.

Piano, improvisational, Gila Goldstein

A gorgeous, floating performance, very free, with lovely touches in filling in inner voices and adding drama effectively through contrast, detail, and improvisation.

Guitar duo, Katrin Klingeberg and Sebastián Montes

What a partnership! A passionate performance with contrasting moods, immense focus, really captures the spirit of the piece.

Guitar solo, Ryuji Kunimatsu

Wow, one guy on guitar, all by himself, in his own arrangement, beautifully expressive.

Melodica and piano, one musician simultaneously! Haim Shapira

A novelty item, definitely. There are compromises from trying to arrange to play both melodica and piano at the same time, but this is a fascinating free arrangement.

Piano solo arrangement, Viktoriya Yermolyeva

A very passionate performance on piano by the arranger herself.

Digital piano solo (Roland FP4),

Really quite good, based on Yermolyeva's arrangement.

RIP Ray Dolby: yes, I still have cassette tapes!

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:43:54 GMT

Ray Dolby has <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/13/audio-pioneer-dolby-dies" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/13/audio-pioneer-dolby-dies">died</span>.

I know him for one thing, basically: invention of his noise reduction system, so valuable back in the days when almost of my music was on cassette tape (I had LPs also) and I was inseparable from my Sony Walkman.

I still have a cassette tape deck with Dolby B, C, and S. I don't use it any more because I have long since given away almost all of my cassette tapes, both prerecorded and recorded off radio, LPs, or CDs (before I finally got a CD player late in college).

Here are some of the few cassette tapes I still own, simply because I don't have LPs or CDs of these recordings by Sviatoslav Richter. I don't remember which music store I walked out of with these finds way back in the early 1990s! But it was a real treasure finding a variety of Schubert performances by Richter. For example, one of these Monitor label cassette tapes has an old performance of Schubert's unfinished C major piano sonata, D. 840 that differs considerably from his later performance that I have a CD of.

I did some research. Apparently the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.classicalmusicguide.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=35776" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.classicalmusicguide.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=35776">Monitor release is of a 1961 performance</span> and the later recording is from 1979.

I like both performances, but the extreme slowness of the later recording makes it more eccentric, if in some ways deeper. But they really are quite different.

Here is the 1961 on YouTube, sounding better than my noisy cassette tape ever did:

In any case, RIP, Ray Dolby: you improved the listening experience of countless cassette tape users for years!

My first post on The Chess Improver: The Value of Thematic Complete Games Against a Weaker Opponent

Thu, 12 Sep 2013 09:04:25 GMT

import ChessGame from '@components/embeds/ChessGame.astro';

Today is my debut as a contributor to the blog The Chess Improver, thanks to the invitation of GM Nigel Davies to join in the sharing of ideas and observations about improving at chess (and even more generally, other endeavors as well). I will be regularly writing about chess there instead of here.

Note that although the blog does not support comments, Nigel Davies hosts lively discussions about each blog post on Facebook through his account.

Both participant and observer

Since it turns out that I have just finished two of the six rounds in the current Pittsburgh Chess Club Tuesday night tournament, the 15th Fred Sorensen Memorial, I began my debut by using my first round game as material for a post to beginn a discussion about "learning from imperfectly played games that, however, illustrate chess themes well".

I will have a post up next week about my second round game of this week, which was quite interesting. I will not always be writing about my own games on the blog, of course. They just happen to be, right now, a timely source of relevant material, since I am in the middle of a tournament.

Previous chess writings

Since I have not played tournament chess since winning the 2013 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship in February, if you have discovered this blog only recently, you may be interested in exploring my previous chess writings.

(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)

One of the paradoxes for the intermediate level chess improver is that very often, focusing on studying well-annotated top-level games, such as in the excellent anthology The Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games, backfires. This is because the games are so subtle and dominated by sharp tactical turns, that the chess improver find its hard to apply the lessons to everyday practical play.

One good piece of advice that has often been given on this blog has been to study older games, such as those by José Capablanca and Akiba Rubinstein, in which the greats of the past faced weaker competition. But even this is not ideal, because "weaker" in this context is still stronger than the average club player today. I feel that what can be truly valuable is the study of games in which one can identify with the loser, but at the same time also aspire to be the winner (where the winner is not a super-strong Master or better).

Through a lower-level game, one can learn how to see through the eyes of the thematic play of the stronger player while learning how to avoid the faulty defensive play of the weaker player. It is instructive to study how to gradually press home a plan against a clearly weaker opponent, because in club chess, what I hear often after a game is "I knew I was better at this point but didn't know how to proceed". It is more important, at club level, to have a clear idea of how to transition well into the middlegame and endgame against imperfect opposition, than to know how to handle the best possible responses in some sharp opening line; if you don't know how to win against weaker moves and plans, how can you learn to win against strong ones?

I offer the following game, which I played this week in the first round of a Tuesday night tournament at the Pittsburgh Chess Club, as an example of this kind of instructive game, from the opening through the endgame. (The players were rated USCF 1703 and 2164.) The game illustrates the successful use of the Rubinstein Variation of the English Opening by Black, through the classic Maroczy Bind Pawn structure:

how to create the bind in the opening, characterized by the c and e Pawns
how to defend both the c and e Pawns against counterplay while continuing development into the middlegame
how to punish attempted too-late counterplay by winning material
how to finish off a won endgame (often just called "a matter of technique", but it's not over till it's over, especially in club play)

The lessons for White involve seeing:

missed opportunities to play more actively in the opening
the dangers of creating exploitable Pawn weaknesses on the Queen side
the folly of attempting "freeing" play too late, when the opponent has already prepared to handle it

<ChessGame pgn={`[Event "15th Fred Sorensen Memorial"] [Site "Pittsburgh Chess Club"] [Date "2013.09.03"] [Round "1"] [White "Brown, Glenn"] [Black "Chen, Franklin"] [Result "0-1"] [BlackElo "2164"] [ECO "A30"] [TimeControl "G/120"] [WhiteElo "1703"]

Nf3 c5 2. c4 Nf6 3. g3 d5 $201 { Aiming for the ambitious Rubinstein (reversed Maroczy Bind).} 4. cxd5 Nxd5 5. Bg2 Nc6 6. O-O e5 7. Nc3 Nc7 $5 { The Rubinstein, avoiding minor piece exchanges at the cost of a loss of time.} ( 7… Be6 8. Ng5 Qxg5 9. Bxd5 Bxd5 10. Nxd5 O-O-O $201 { Black is fine, but has allowed a trade of two minor pieces.} ) 8. d3 Be7 9. Bd2 $6 { Slow in this type of position.} ( 9. Nd2 { Standard and good, aiming for heavy pressure against Black's e5 Pawn by means of Nc4 and f4.} ) 9… O-O 10. Rc1 { Clearly aiming at Black's c5 Pawn.} 10… Be6 11. a3 f6 $5 { Thematic but loosening.} ( 11… Rc8 { Probably best.} ) 12. Na4 Na6 13. Be3 Nd4 { An important position. White can equalize here by means of many trades.} 14. Nd2 $2 { This passive move finally gives Black a better position.} ( 14. Nxd4 cxd4 15. Bxb7 dxe3 16. Bxa6 Bh3 $10 { The position is very simplified and equal.} ) 14… Qd7 $15 $201 { A dream position for Black.} 15. Re1 $2 { Passive, probably played to "prevent" …Nxe2+ or …Bh3, which were not real threats (yet).} ( 15. f4 $201 { White had to try this to gain counterplay against Black's attempted bind.} ) 15… Rac8 $201 { Black is catching up on fully thematic development.} 16. Nc3 $2 { Still passive without a clear plan.} 16… b5 $201 { Deciding to get aggressive and put White in a total bind.} ( 16… Nb8 $201 { Redeploying Black's worst piece was also good.} ) 17. Ncb1 $2 $17 ( 17. f4 exf4 18. Bxf4 Rfd8 $201 { Still great for Black, but at least White would be fighting.} ) 17… Rfd8 $201 { Black has achieved almost totally ideal development, with the exception of the Knight on a6, which will be redeployed shortly.} 18. b3 Nc7 $201 19. Bxd4 exd4 $201 { And Black has the Bishop pair as well as the thematic "bind" position with White's Queen side locked down and a Pawn at d4 discouraging e3 or e4 by White.} 20. a4 a6 21. Nf1 $2 $19 { More passive play.} 21… Nd5 $201 { Black probably has a positionally won game.} 22. axb5 axb5 23. e4 $4 $201 { Lashing out in desperation.} 23… dxe3 ( 23… Nb4 $201 { A computer-generated winning plan I didn't actually consider during the game, but effective because of White's broken Queen side, which will be lost in several moves.} ) 24. Nxe3 Nb4 $201 { White is going to lose the d3 Pawn.} 25. Bf1 Nxd3 $6 { Greedily taking the Pawn, but this was not actually the strongest move here.} ( 25… Na2 { Wins the exchange.} ) 26. Bxd3 Qxd3 27. Rc3 $201 Qg6 $6 { Consistent with my overall attitude from the opening, I decided to avoid a Queen trade. But it was best to just trade.} ( 27… Qxd1 28. Nxd1 Bf7 29. Rce3 Bf8 $201 { Black has a completely won game, only needing to make a passed c Pawn and see it through with the two Rooks and two Bishops.} ) 28. Qe2 $2 b4 29. Rcc1 Bxb3 $201 { Black has swallowed up a second Pawn and is totally winning.} 30. Nc4 Bf8 31. Nbd2 $201 { The only question now is, what is the best way for Black to finish off this game?} 31… Bxc4 { I decided to just simplify rather than retain the two Bishops.} ( 31… Re8 { Taking control of the e file was good.} 32. Qf1 Rxe1 33. Qxe1 Re8 34. Qf1 Ba4 $201 ) 32. Qxc4+ Qf7 33. Qxf7+ ( 33. Nb3 { Attempt at blockade was best.} 33… Qxc4 34. Rxc4 Rd3 35. Rb1 g5 $201 { Black is winning, of course. But it will take time to break through.} ) 33… Kxf7 34. Nc4 Rd4 $201 { White has a bit of a blockade going, but Black has plenty of time to activate the dark-squared Bishop and make it count.} 35. Kg2 Re8 { Basic endgame play: trade off pieces.} 36. Rxe8 Kxe8 $201 { All that is required now for Black is to get the King active and the Bishop active.} 37. Kf3 Kd7 38. Ke3 Kc6 $201 { Black's King is marching in.} 39. Na5+ Kb5 40. Ra1 Rd7 41. Nb3 c4 $201 { The end is so near.} 42. Nd4+ Kb6 43. Ne2 Bc5+ $201 { Black's Bishop is finally free!} 44. Kf3 Rd3+ 45. Kg2 Rd2 ( 45… Kb5 { It was already a good time to just continue marching.} ) 46. Kf1 c3 $201 47. Ke1 Kb5 48. Rb1 Kc4 $201 49. Rc1 g5 { Trying to be cute by blocking White from moving the Knight anywhere at all. Anyway, White is lost.} ( 49… Rxe2+ $201 { Sacrificing the exchange to immediately go for a Queen was already sufficient.} 50. Kxe2 b3 $201 { And Black will Queen soon.} ) 0-1`} />

Was it worth sprinting to a terrible fall to finish 25th in the CMU Pretty Good Race 5K?

Sat, 07 Sep 2013 02:01:27 GMT

On a pleasant Friday late afternoon, not too hot or humid, I ran my 9th CMU Pretty Good Race 5K (and this was Abby's 3rd).

Two weeks ago, I did the Run Around The Square 5K in my slowest time in 13 years. I was happy to be finishing a 5K race at all. I've improved some in fitness in the past two weeks, but not enough to make a big difference for today.

Like last year, I was going into this race not optimally fit. However, given that I just ran a 5K two weeks ago, I had a good idea of what I could do in another 5K, how hard I could push myself. Like I said last year, "It's not about how fast I went, but how much I gave of what I had".

I never expected just how much I would give this year.

Before the race

I walked over from my office across Flagstaff Hill to Schenley Park.

For some reason, Abby decided to use our dinky Razor kick scooter to come in from home for the race. Unfortunately, she showed up before the race with a bloody hand and knee, having had a nasty fall while using the scooter on the way to Schenley Park. Oops. She's been tired a lot lately (I previously mentioned her dangerous decline in fitness all year) and was regretting signing up to do the Pretty Good Race with me.

She tried to be a good sport despite the accident coming in.

Here I am in orange:

Weather conditions

Temperature and humidity were much, much better than last year. That promised a considerable time advantage relative to last year.

The plan

As with last year, my plan was to make the most of the final downhill part of the course, as well as go for a sprint to pass as many people as I possibly could during the final brief but terrible uphill to the finish line. I was going to have to pace myself intelligently to have something left for the end.

The race

I paced myself, not going too fast in the first half of the race. I almost entirely ran my own slow race, as there was nobody else really near my steady pace.

After turning around, I starting going hard downhill. I was worried that I didn't see Abby at all during the race. At some point, I passed her walking back to the start. She must have dropped out very early on.

I was pushing really hard in the final part of the race. Near the uphill finish, I saw a guy slowing down, and he raised his arms as though celebrating finishing. This gesture instantly caused me to go into a sprint more furious than any other sprint finish in my entire life. I made up a huge distance and reached the finish chute just a step before he did. And as I did so, the dry gravel and my leaning too far forward caused me to slip and fall, really, really badly. But I had finished ahead of the guy. Mission accomplished.

Injuries

I lay stunned and in terrible pain for a few seconds. I had to check whether I was seriously broken. It felt like I was not. I was rather injured, but miraculously, no broken bones. I had managed to break my fall not with my teeth or eyes or fingers, but with my left thigh, right knee, left forearm, left palm, and right palm. I was quite badly scraped and bruised.

I heard people asking me, "Was it worth it?" I didn't know how to answer that. I moved on, stumbling in pain as I tried to catch my breath. I had done what I do, give the race my all, and then some. I was gouged and bleeding, and my right knee had swollen up hugely almost instantly.

This wasn't the worst falling injury I've had in my life, but it's probably my worst since a fall off a bike (also spinning off loose gravel) twenty years ago.

Abby returned, and had to explain to the volunteers that she wasn't just finishing, but had dropped out earlier. While I was trying to clean myself up some, she said that she had fallen early on during the race and decided that that was enough and she wasn't going to finish the race. So this is her first Did Not Finish (DNF) in a race.

Feeling lucky

The main thing I kept on feeling while we walked back to my office and then back to my car (very slowly; everything around my right knee was just messed up) and went home for both of us to clean up from our injuries: luck.

It could have been much worse for both of us. My most severe damage was not even to my right knee area (even though walking was difficult) but really my left hand, whose heel of palm was basically scraped away and bruised and my wrist was messed up. But no broken fingers or teeth or wrists or ankles. Same with Abby: lucky us!

Was it worth it?

I finished officially tied for 25th place with the guy I actually beat, both of us registering as finishing in 25:28 in the official race results. Well, I ran 37 seconds faster than last year. That's not nothing, although two years ago I ran 24:36.

But I knew the time was not going to be great: I just ran 25:36 in Run Around The Square two weeks ago. The real point was that like last year, I gave it my all.

But was it worth getting injured for sprinting for no glory whatsoever? It's not like I was running for first place or something "important". Or is that the wrong way to think about it? Why is it worth trying your best for first place but not for 25th place instead of 26th place? Let's ignore the (unfortunate?) fact that in some circles, first place is associated with large monetary rewards, when pondering that question.

A different question would be, "If you knew you would get this injured from this sprint, would you have done it anyway?" I guess the question is "no". But how could I know? There is always risk. There is risk crossing the street, or driving on the turnpike. I've never fallen during a sprint before.

Another different question: "How will this accident change how you run in the future?" I suppose my answer is, I'll be more careful to keep my balance. But am I going to stop the sprinting at the end of a race? I don't see how I can. It is in those moments when I can barely breathe and the world is becoming a blur that I am living with most intensity and purity. These moments don't come often, but when they are available for the taking, why would I not accept these gifts?

I will keep sprinting. I will keep trying to beat whoever is beatable in front of me. That's part of the whole point of racing. I admit to feeling a little odd to being so serious about it when others do it much more casually (and it's their right to do so and they're probably smarter and more balanced than me, I concede). But I don't race often, so when I do, I try to make it matter.

So my response is: I will need to work on maintaining balance and running on tricky surfaces.

Also, Abby and I decided we should make sure to have a first aid kit around in the future.

The next race

My eleventh Great Race 10K is coming up. I want to do considerably better than I did last year.

Meanwhile, I have a lot of healing to do. I am more of a wreck right now than the post-race photos indicate. Things are all swollen and messed up and probably will be for an entire week or two. It's just amazing I haven't broken bones or ligaments.

Conclusion

Abby and I simultaneously had unfortunate falling accidents today. I was proud to have run as hard as I could given my fitness and will. I don't regret sprinting for 25th place, even if it cost me this time.

Meanwhile, we both need to heal.

My second meeting of the Steel City Ukuleles: why I already signed up to perform before being ready

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 02:40:45 GMT

I've entered my seventh week of playing ukulele.

Last month, I wrote about finally starting to learn to play ukulele and then attending my first meeting of the Steel City Ukuleles.

I just attended my second meeting after having improved a huge amount in two weeks (oh, the joy of being a beginner).

Adam led a great playlist of songs for us to go through.

Steel City Ukuleles T-shirt

The first thing I did upon arrival at the session was to pay for and put on the Steel City Ukuleles T-shirt that Sunny said was for sale at my last meeting. I picked the blue one (there is also a red one). Very nice, and I'm proud to be wearing it!

Singing

Two weeks ago, at my first meeting, I was only on my fifth week of playing the ukulele at all, and struggled to keep up with chords and their changes in real time while also strumming, much less singing, so I did very little singing (especially since I barely knew most of the songs).

This week, having some of the finger work more under control, I started trying to start singing along sometimes. One thing I forgot to emphasize about why I've always been attracted to the prospect of playing guitar or ukulele is that I like to sing, and the drawback of playing wind instruments (as I have spent the last two years playing recorders and flutes) is that I can't do that while also singing. And I love the idea of being able to accompany myself while singing, being my own harmonic and rhythmic support. (This is also a great thing about piano, but I have barely any piano competence, unfortunately.)

Music new to me and the transformation of taste

I'm learning all kinds of songs of all kinds of genres. This is a totally different world from what I'm used to. I feel myself undergoing a transformation the same way I did when I started playing recorder. Before playing recorder, I had relatively little interest in Baroque or Renaissance music. It was, frankly, "boring". But when forced to actually play it, I began to understand and feel it and enjoy the subtleties of expression, from the point of view of the performer (and even the composer). In fact, I would admit that as a result, I have come to enjoy playing music rather than passively listening to it.

I'm experiencing the same transformation of my perception and taste and enjoyment now. There's all this stuff that I haven't much listened to, much less played or sung, whether blues, soul, rock, indie pop, country. Not all of the songs we go through are exciting to me, but I've been impressed by how many have something that is catchy that I can enjoy and express. These are songs that in many cases, if I didn't actively strum or sing, would be boring to me.

Still need my own instrument

I'm still using the loaner banjolele, because the intonation of my Lanikai soprano ukulele is too far off (eventually I should figure out how to fix it).

I returned Linda's electric tenor and she lent me another instrument, an inexpensive concert ukulele (pictured):

It's been a good thing for me to try out different instruments, before I buy a concert sized ukulele of my own, which I should do soon, because just a week ago, I signed up to perform in a gig!

Small group and solo playing

What has been really inspiring and was seeing some of the members of the group volunteer to sing and play something they wanted to share with the rest of us. I enjoy appreciating the vulnerability and individuality of soloing.

For example, Heidi, Amber, and Sunny performed a song as a trio, with beautiful ukulele playing and singing in harmony.

I decided to perform before I was ready

Last week, Sunny put out a call for volunteers to perform for a gig in a month, at the second annual <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.wsccpgh.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.wsccpgh.org/">Wilkins Center Community Center</span> Ecofest.

I remembered something that has changed my life in the past couple of years: <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.stevenpressfield.com/2010/07/start-before-youre-ready/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.stevenpressfield.com/2010/07/start-before-youre-ready/">start before you're ready</span>. In this case, it meant that since there was an opportunity to perform in a low-key, low-stress environment, I should seize it even though I don't at all feel "ready". In the past two years, I have done dozens of things before feeling "ready", while in the last three decades, I accomplished very little in my life because I never felt "ready". I learned in two years that perfectionism is the enemy, and that you have to just go out there and do stuff, and ideally as early as possible, to get early feedback (external or internal) for rapid improvement.

So I signed up to perform in the Ecofest on October 5. If you live in the Pittsburgh area, I invite you to come see some subset of us from the Steel City Ukuleles perform at the Ecofest in Regent Square! I'll write up more details later.

Deciding to perform means committing to getting a lot better in a month, of course. It also means not slacking on getting my own quality instrument. Finally, it means devoting time to official rehearsals, time that will have to come out of somewhere. (The rehearsal dates have not yet been set.)

Conclusion

I'm starting to settle in on playing ukulele. In my seventh week now, I've gotten far enough to know for sure that I want to continue playing and get serious. To prove that I am serious, I am planning to perform already in a month.

(Update of 2013-09-18)

Two weeks later: a report on my third Steel City Ukuleles meeting.

OpenHack Pittsburgh: learning Elixir test-driven and package-publishing

Mon, 26 Aug 2013 22:09:00 GMT

It's been a long time since I went to an OpenHack Pittsburgh meeting. The last time was five months ago. On June 24, there was an OpenHack Pittsburgh held at 4moms, but I really needed to stay home and take it easy that evening, because of my busy schedule later in the week, including attending a PittJUG meeting and preparing a Pittsburgh Python talk.

This August meeting of OpenHack Pittsburgh was held at ModCloth, which I had never been to. It's in Crafton, which is a place I've never been before, nearly half an hour drive from Pittsburgh. Because of worries about driving there near rush hour after work, I probably would not have signed up to attend had it not been for <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://justinxreese.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://justinxreese.com/">Justin</span>, the organizer of OpenHack Pittsburgh.

What happened was that he asked for feedback about who was planning to work on what, and said he planned to learn some Elixir, a fairly new programming language built on top of the Erlang runtime. Since this language had been on my list of things to look into, I decided that learning loves company, so I proposed to learn some Elixir in a test-driven way!

What does that mean?

How to learn a programming language

I have written code in probably around fifty (50) programming languages. I'm not kidding, and I'm not proud, but this is simply a fact of my having done programming since 1982, thirty-one (31!!) years ago. Let's face it: languages come and go. I have personally sat at an IBM keypunch machine punching out cards for my COBOL and Fortran code.

As with human languages, the fact is that to be truly productive in a language requires much more than learning some syntax and semantics. It requires actually writing and running and fixing code, and in the context of a realistic project.

I've learned through trial and error that the most common ways of learning a programming language, like the most common ways of learning human languages (other than one's first language), are terribly inefficient and misleading, resulting in minimal competence. I mean, reading through books, typing into a REPL, submitting a single file to a compiler or interpreter, etc.

I feel that we should learn programming languages using a variety of approaches. Yes, the academic bottom-up semantics-based approach is critical in the long run, to avoid wasting a lot of time on pointless misunderstandings. Exploration in a REPL can be very rewarding. But I think what is often missing is the biggest possible picture: immediately seeing how to write a program that is integrated with a test framework, uses libraries, is exportable and publishable publicly as a library, can be submitted to a continuous integration server, is editable in a decent editor or IDE, etc.

Without seeing the biggest possible picture, one usually gets a horribly inaccurate picture of what it is like to program in a particular language ecosystem. (I will be writing more about this subject of pedagogy later.)

My proposal

The last couple of languages I have learned in recent years, I slowly came to work with in a more efficient way than in the past, because I focused on matters such as testability. In particular, as I grew to wholly adopt TDD when writing any code at all in any language, it became clear to me that the best way to learn a new language must be in a test-driven way.

Here's an analogy: I believe the best way to learn a human language is to dive into how to be able to converse in some coherent way right off the bat. Tim Ferriss and others have exploited this idea to drive the learning of what is most relevant in grammar and vocabulary.

In the past, I learned human languages in a terrible way, taking lots of courses, but never actually getting fluent in everyday use. This is how we tend to learn "foreign" programming languages. My proposal is that learning a new programming language should involve getting as quickly as possible up to speed on a minimum viable publishable library.

That the software artifact should be a library, and not just some executable program, is vital, because it means having to adhere by whatever standards apply to real-world API design in the language ecosystem, producing something that client code can import and call.

That it should be publishable is vital because it means adhering to standards of testing, of discovery through metadata, and enabling easy use by a client.

My concrete example with learning Elixir tonight

Prior background in Erlang and Elixir

I went to OpenHack Pittsburgh never having yet read any Elixir language material, never having written Elixir code, not even "hello, world". The only things I had done before tonight:

I first heard of Erlang nearly two decades ago, and when I saw it, I was turned off by the Prolog-style syntax, and it didn't seem relevant to anything I was doing at the time, so I ignored it.
I intended to learn some Erlang earlier this year, but made little progress before putting it aside: I went to the free book "Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!" and downloaded the code and got it to compile, but did not proceed any further.
I installed Elixir on my Mac using Homebrew.
I installed an Emacs Elixir mode.
I made a note of a free online book "Etudes for Elixir" and checked out the GitHub repository, but did not look at the book or code.

Find a testing framework

Upon arrival at ModCloth, getting pizza to eat, and plugging in my MacBook and connecting to the guest WiFi, the first thing I did was search for a testing framework for Elixir.

It's 2013, not 1993, so it is hard to convince me to invest any time at all in learning to operate in a language ecosystem that does not have at least a de facto standard testing framework. For every language that I currently actively use for writing serious programs, I operate with TDD. Some examples of languages and the test frameworks I currently use for them:

C/C++: googletest
Clojure: Midje
Haskell: HSpec and QuickCheck
Java or Scala: Specs2 and ScalaCheck
JavaScript: <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://pivotal.github.io/jasmine/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://pivotal.github.io/jasmine/">Jasmine</span>
Perl: Test::More
Python: pytest
Ruby: RSpec
Racket: RackUnit

Well, first Web search hit for Elixir and unit testing was ExUnit, so that was encouraging.

Justin was still stuck installing Elixir, so we started exploring Elixir together off my laptop.

One test file

The first thing I did after discovering ExUnit was to copy and paste the code for a sample test into Emacs and save it into a file test_hello.exs, see that the Elixir mode was working (with syntax highlighting), and figure out how to run the test: $ elixir test_hello.exs.

It worked!

Then we explored adding more tests, changing some assertions, and learning as went, by looking up the Elixir documentation. For example, Elixir uses an interesting callback mechanism for cleanly passing "setup" state to tests inside a single test case. Also, assert and test are syntactic macros, enabling them to do magic to analyze expressions, hence the support of natural assertion syntax (which I like a lot better than special syntax).

After writing some failing tests involving arithmetic and making them pass, I wrote a division by zero test. I was intrigued that not only did it fail, as expected, but also the compiler warned ahead of time that an exception was going to be raised. Nice. In any case, I learned how to make an assertion of the raising of an exception. This is very important. We should always pay attention to testing the sad paths.

We saw in the documentation for ExUnit that there was a way to mark a test case as being OK to run concurrently with others. Great! These days there is no excuse not to be able to run tests concurrently. So I wrote another test case, which I put in the same source file (for the moment), and I wanted to see for myself that concurrency was happening. I wanted to call some kind of "sleep" function. To do that, I did a Web search, and found that Erlang comes with sleep in the timer module. I found out how to call Erlang from Elixir, and it worked!

More than one source file

The next obvious step was to write a test for code that did not yet exist, but was to be written outside the test source file. For that, I had to figure out how to define a module and import it. OK, but then there's the question of file organization. Hmm.

At this point, the only reasonable thing to do (and which in retrospect should have been done first) was to find out what the "standard" way of organizing a project's source files is supposed to be, and what the standard way to build everything is.

A Web search quickly came up with Mix. Awesome, the Elixir people are serious about real software development! Mix turns out to be inspired by Clojure's Leiningen, which of course I use to start any new Clojure project. $ mix new hello did the trick, creating the scaffolding for a new Elixir project.

I refactored our existing test_hello.exs file into two files (one for each test case) in the test directory, then wrote a module hello.ex into lib. A failed test, then making it succeed, and finally I wrote my first non-test code in Elixir!

Running tests is very easy once you are using Mix. Just $ mix test does it.

Packaging for publshing

At this point, I decided I wanted to create an actual Elixir package to publish.

So I did a Web search to find out whether there was a standard repository and how to publish to it.

Here we go, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://expm.co/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://expm.co/">Expm</span>!

I installed the package manager, set up my user name and password, and went to work on a simple package to publish.

I saw that nobody had yet contributed an implementation of tau, so I quickly created a tau library with Mix, did $ expm new to create a package.exs template, filled it out, wrote an ExUnit test that passed, completed the README.md, and just as OpenHack Pittsburgh was officially closing for the evening, I successfully published my tau package!

Actually, I accidentally screwed up the first time, forgetting to change all the fields of the template package.exs and ending up published yourlib.

Oh, and I committed my project in Git and pushed to GitHub.

Some Haskell stuff

Steve McCarthy of <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.spacefinity.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.spacefinity.com/">Spacefinity</span> had announced, in the introduction at the beginning of the evening when each of us stood up to say what we planned to work on, that he wanted to do more with the Cabal package manager for Haskell, so I spent a little bit of time getting him going by pointing him toward a sample Haskell code repository I initially set up last year when some friends were interested in getting into Haskell; sadly, we've all been too busy for Haskell, so I've let the project rot, in the sense that my configuration file is not optimally organized and also there have been updates in the test framework world in Haskell since then.

Anyway, here's my "Project Euler in Haskell" repository. I plan to get around to improving it.

Thanks

Thanks to ModCloth for providing the space, pizza, cookies, and WiFi!

A big thank-you to Justin for providing the inspiration for me to try this experiment in learning!

And thanks to Steve McCarthy for getting me to drag up an old Haskell project and making me think that I should soon update it to be a better example.

Conclusion

Tonight was the first time I ever started learning a new programming language, wrote unit tests right off the bat with proper project organization and also published a library immediately.

Of course, there is much more to go in actually really learning and using Elixir, but as a first step in showing that Elixir has a viable ecosystem, I think the experiment was a success. My next steps in continuing to learn Elixir would include writing tests in conjunction with a deep dive into the actual semantics of the language. There is no substitute for the latter; the alternative is dangerously making assumptions based on superficial syntactic similarity with other languages (such as Ruby).

(Update of 2013-08-27)

One thing I didn't get around to was setting up Travis continuous integration. I believe this should also be part of the story in getting up and running in a new programming language environment.

So I did a Web search and figured out how to create a suitable .travis.yml. I committed and pushed to GitHub, flipped the switch in my Travis account, and you can see its passing status.

Reflections on my slowest Run Around the Square 5K in 13 years

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 16:45:47 GMT

This year was the ninth time I ran in the annual Run Around The Square 5K race, and Abby's third year in a row. The conditions were great: cool and dry, in contrast to the usual hot and humid conditions at this time of year. (Last year I reported on my eighth running of the race.)

Both Abby and I ran this race rather slowly, but were happy and enjoyed the day. Here's why.

Both of us coming back from setbacks

The first thing to note is that both Abby and I have been recovering from setbacks this year, as I reported two weeks ago after I ran the second GNC Live Well Liberty Mile 18 seconds slower than last year. That race had me vowing to get back on track, and the very next day I did begin getting back on track. The road back to a regular exercise routine has not been easy in the past two weeks, but I have very gradually ramping up on running as well as minimal strength training every single day since then.

Last year, I ran the Run Around The Square 5K in 24:35.6 and was pretty to have recovered from several years of decline in fitness and self-care, by running my best time since 2006. For this year, I wrote, "I don't know what goal to set for next year. I suppose I could set a goal of getting yet faster, breaking 24:15. That sounds reasonable to me. Going back down to 24:00 may even be possible. It's too early right now to tell. But one thing is for sure: I have no intention of slowing down from this year to next."

Unfortunately, I did not set a firm enough goal. I have learned the hard way that if you don't make a commitment (and then follow up with the discipline and sacrifices required to achieve it), then even in the absence of accidents, a maybe-goal is worthless.

This year, I went into the 5K race so untrained (two weeks of slowly ramping up before the race is not enough for any training benefits to kick in) that I basically knew that I was going to be super slow. I figured that since I lost 18 seconds in the mile, I would be happy if I lost only one minute in a 3K. So that was my expectation: finish around 25:36 this year.

Before the race

I decided that this was the race in which I debut my new orange running singlet, to replace my over-decade use of a blue singlet that Abby has gotten very annoyed with:

Also, note that since I bought a SPIbelt earlier this year, I now always run races wearing a SPIbelt to carry my phone. This is particularly convenient when running a race where you have to park far from the start line and want access to your phone after a race.

I wore my Vibram FiveFingers KSO Trek shoes again. Since last year's fiasco in which I injured my left foot from having the straps on my left foot too tight, I never again put the straps on too tight!

Hanging out before the race start in Regent Square:

Start line just a few minutes before race start:

The race

(Race results.)

Different race logistics

One very important change to the race, and one I greatly appreciated, was the staggered start. Faster runners were told to line up front and start up first. This is very helpful to control the congestion and confusion that happens in a large race when too many slower people start up front and have to be passed (including unfortunately young children that Abby and I have seen trampled on every year!). In particular, it is really tricky to be passing lots of people once in the trails of Frick Park.

First mile

Because of the ridiculous problems I created for myself by going too fast two weeks ago in the Liberty Mile, I vowed to go out at a reasonable pace in this 5K. I found this easy to do because of the staggered start, which meant that there were fewer people to have to accelerate past throwing off one's own internal speedometer.

The usual lot of young and old musicians were playing music along the course. What a great neighborhood tradition!

I still get confused seeing the champagne stop near the end of the first mile at the entrance into the trails of Frick Park.

I did the first mile in a leisurely 8:15 (compared to 7:18 last year).

Second mile

I did the second mile in 10:17 (compared to 10:11 last year). I did not feel too bad. I was running a bit conservatively, because my training runs had been so slow and short and tough for me in the past two weeks. I wanted to be in position to run really well the final downhill in the third mile.

Third mile

I let loose in the third mile. Because I had avoided going pukey in the second mile, I covered it in 7:06, actually a second faster than the 7:07 of last year.

Because of the staggered start, there was not bad congestion during the third mile, and I found it safe to pass people at will.

Final sprint

I didn't have a gut-wrenching final sprint. I wasn't even looking at the clock or my watch. This wasn't one of those races in which I put it all out there on the course. Instead, this was a race where I was grateful to be running at all, and had no expectations other than to finish strong.

So I finished in 25:38, just a bit longer than a minute over last year's 24:35.6. My slowest Run Around The Square 5K time in 13 years. But it was a clean finish, and I was so excited to simply be back and running faster than 26 minutes, at least.

After the race

Although I was not pukey, I was certainly breathing hard when I finished.

I went off to drink water and start eating some food.

Improvement

Then I went back to the finish line to wait for Abby to finish. I saw Todd and his wife Gabrielle hanging around. Gabrielle said she took my "advice" (from last year) to go all out to the point of feeling pukey. I admitted that this time around, I didn't follow my own advice. Gabrielle finished over 5 minutes faster this year than last year!! Todd finished over 8 minutes faster!! It's great to see people in their late 40s improve their fitness so much in a single year. I saw the couple running together a couple of times in Frick Park this year.

Decline

Abby finished. She was out of breath and pukey, but I was proud of her for finishing. Because of the tremendous decline in health and fitness she has experienced this year, I was not sure she would actually finish the race.

More food and refreshments

We lined up to sample more food and recovered. It was a beautiful day to be outside.

The hot dogs and beer line was particularly long, but we finally reached the tables.

Walking out of Frick Park back to the car

I couldn't help taking a photo of the sign for beer and champagne that was still up on the trail entrance as we passed by:

Concern about Abby

Although I was happy that Abby managed to finish the 5K race, I was very concerned about her overall health and fitness, which have continued to be poor this year since she broke her foot in February. Here are her Run Around The Square 5K times since she started doing it with me:

2011: 37:15
2012: 36:04
2013: 39:54

She was almost 4 minutes slower than last year. She's lost several years of fitness this year, and came in 105th of 116 in her age group. Again, we are grateful she is walking and running at all, but this has been a very bad year for her, and this impacts not only her own life, but ours more generally. We need to work on getting her back on track.

Goal for next year?

Right now, my real goal is to simply continue my exercise program and not break it again, and that includes the winter slump I usually enter. Last year, I had a slump in the final months of the year, and then woke up and started exercising again around New Year, and even signed up for the Pittsburgh Marathon as a way to force myself to stay active in the winter. I believe that if I simply avoid self-caused setbacks, I should be able to return myself to a decent level of fitness. I am not going to sign up for the Pittsburgh Marathon again. Almost certainly, however, I will sign up for the Pittsburgh Half Marathon! Last winter, I rather enjoyed training for and running the Just A Short Run half marathon. I reached good fitness through that, but squandered my fitness through overtraining and injury leading up to the marathon.

Races this year

In the shorter term, I have two races to run in the coming month: the CMU Pretty Good Race 5K and the Great Race 10K.

Last year, I did very poorly in the Pretty Good Race 5K because I was injured and exhausted, running 26:05. This year, I expect to do better than that. I'm not going to do the 24:36 of 2011, but given that I easily beat 26 minutes today, I will beat 26 minutes two weeks from now.

In the Great Race 10K last year, I was still in a state of exhaustion and undertraining, so I didn't even pay any attention to time goals, and finished slowly in 48:23. I see no reason why, if I continue improving my fitness in the next month (in contrast to last year's dreadful September), I should not be able to run under 48:00.

(Update of 2013-09-06)

See my report on running the Pretty Good Race 5K this year.

Conclusion

Run Around The Square continued to thrive and improve, and I'm grateful for both the registration cap (to maintain the quality of the event) as well as the staggered start. And all the sponsors feeding us afterwards!

Abby and I were happy to have finished the race, even if we are both less fit now than we have been in years. But I think this is a wake up call for us to get back in shape. For example, I miss the long hikes we used to do last year when we had the stamina to actually do and enjoy them. The example Todd and Gabrielle set as they massively improved their fitness in the past year is inspiring. Abby and I should be able to do this too, if we make it a priority.

Celebrating Claude Debussy's 151st birthday through unusual performances of Syrinx

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 03:49:25 GMT

There was much ado over Google's "celebrating" Claude Debussy's 151st birthday through a "Claire de Lune" doodle.

It turns out that I do totally love this piece of music, but it may well be true that many people do not know much about a lot of the other great music he wrote.

Syrinx

Anyway, I decided to celebrate the birthday in my own way. I chose Debussy's famous work for solo flute, Syrinx, as a starting point.

Two years ago, I already linked to a fine performance of it on flute by Emmannuel Pahud. There are many other good performances on flute, but inspired by Emily O'Brien's performance that I attended last year of Syrinx on tenor recorder, I looked for other non-flute performances of this music.

I found two intriguing ones to share.

Tenor recorder

One is another tenor recorder performance, by Kenjiro Hibi. This Japanese musician made it seem as though it were traditional Japanese shakuhachi music!

Trumpet

Then I found this amazing performance on trumpet, by Alison Balsom.

I found this through someone else's blog post on Syrinx for Debussy's birthday!

More on Syrinx

Here is some interesting discussion of <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.flutefocus.com/232-syrinx-by-debussy.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.flutefocus.com/232-syrinx-by-debussy.html">interpretation and editions</span>.

At some point, of course, I must work on this piece and play it on flute. But not yet.

Conclusion

I have a fascination with music played in a context other than the original, such as on a different instrument. It was fun discovering some performances of Debussy's Syrinx on recorder and trumpet.

RIP Marian McPartland of Piano Jazz

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 02:30:35 GMT

Marian McPartland, longtime host of NPR's "Piano Jazz" on the radio, has died.

I really enjoyed dipping into her radio program over the years, hearing her play hearing her guests play, listening to the conversations. The main impression I always had was alertness and warmth. RIP.

Another unexpected life change: one month of learning to play ukulele

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 01:26:10 GMT

Almost exactly one month ago, on Monday, July 22, I vowed to spend at least a couple of minutes a day for two weeks attempting to learn to play the ukulele.

Here is how the story began and how it has unfolded in the past month.

Jim Weirich on ukulele almost three years ago (December 2, 2010)

The first time I ever remember seing and hearing a ukulele up close was during a Pittsburgh Ruby meetup on December 2, 2010. Jim Weirich was a guest speaker. Before his talk, he and "The Searchers" (Jean Lange on flute, Colin Dean on trumpet, Carol Nichols on clarinet) performed the Ruby song, "Has Anybody Seen My Code?" (alternate lyrics to "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?"):

Immediately after this, I thought to myself, it would be fun to be playing ukulele and singing like Jim just did.

Discovering Jake Shimabukuro (February 2011)

Two months later, on February 5, 2011, I accidentally came across a popular video of Jake Shimabukuro playing tenor ukulele, "Ukulele weeps":

I was totally blown away by this performance, and was convinced of the limitless possibilities of the ukulele. I instantly decided that I wanted to learn to play the instrument. I had never played a string instrument before: once I had tried guitar for a couple of minutes and given up forever because it had seemed way too hard.

Quitting Chess

Now, at this point in my life, I was very dissatisfied by how I was spending my time outside of work. I had been playing tournament chess, but playing very poorly and without my heart really being in it in the past months of participation. I was feeling miserable about having two more rounds to play in the 2011 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship. (In retrospect, I should have simply dropped out rather than continue my misery. But I had this idea that I should finish out what I start. Sometimes that's true, but in this case, it clearly was not.)

The very same day I discovered Jake Shimabukuro, I sent the link to my friend Farokh, telling him, "I've been thinking about taking up the ukulele for a while now. I tried learning guitar some years ago but the instrument was too big for me, so I'm looking for a small stringed instrument I could play a variety of music on."

And I made up my mind on the spot that I was retiring from chess after finishing the tournament: the very same day I also wrote my friend Steve, "I have the idea of replacing chess with music seamlessly. If you recall, 2005 was supposed to be my 'year of music', but I started playing chess again after Christmas of 2004. It's time to retire."

What happened to the "year of music", 2005?

In August 2002, I bought a flute hoping to get back to playing the instrument, after not having done so in two decades, but I quickly gave up because it seemed too hard. This despite buying exactly one piece of sheet music with the plan to play it, "Après un rêve", which by the way I finally ended up playing a decade later, at a party last month.

In late 2004, I decided that in 2005, I would give one more shot at playing music.

"Unfortunately", on December 29, 2004, I went to a meeting of the Pittsburgh Chess Club for the first time, got hooked, and shortly after that, joined the club, and began playing in tournaments again for the first time in two decades. I spent a number of years making chess my main activity outside of work, until I met Abby in late 2006.

Flute had to wait.

Recorder vs. ukulele?

Back to February 5, 2011: this very day, I immediately told Abby that I wanted to play ukulele. She was skeptical, but had her friend Lynette lend me a soprano ukulele to try out.

On February 15, 2011, after the last round of the 2011 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship, I immediately "retired" from chess. (By the way, I "unretired" and returned to tournament chess in fall 2012.)

I immediately started to practice recorder regularly (because it seemed an "easy" gateway to playing any music at all without a steep learning curve: I was discouraged by my failure at flute years earlier), and also planned to start playing ukulele.

On February 19, 2011, I wrote Farokh about my progress: "After a couple of days of spending a minute or two trying to play the G7 chord on the ukulele, I can finally sort of do it, in isolation. I will keep toughening my left hand for some more days before trying to start real work on the ukulele. Meanwhile, today I took a break from the soprano recorder and started playing the alto, finally. Fingerings are the same, but the pitches are different, so it's pretty confusing. Obviously it's not a good idea to try to learn both simultaneously. The alto is harder to play for me because it's bigger, but I like the sound a lot more, and in the long run, it's more versatile, suitable for music the modern flute can play. So I may stick with the alto for a while before going back to the soprano. I'm very much enjoying getting back to music. It had kind of exited my life around five years ago (!!) since I got back into chess in 2005. I have now completely quit chess, cold turkey, to make time for music. Music is much more rewarding, in the end."

Recorder wins (March 2011)

On March 2, 2011, I finally ordered a soprano ukulele online, because the one lent to me simply had structural defects.

But I had the same frustrations as with the loaner ukulele. The instrument seemed very hard to play. On March 20, 2011, I went to my first meeting of the Pittsburgh Recorder Society. I was making progress with daily practice, and so I completely abandoned the ukulele. It collected dust for well over two years.

It turned out that I did continue with recorder, largely because I found the Pittsburgh Recorder Society and joined it, and I have been playing recorder ever since, even attending my first music camp less than two years later, the week-long summer 2012 Mideast Early Music Workshop, which focuses on recorders.

If there had been a Pittsburgh ukelele group at the time, the course of my entire musical life could have been altered: I would not have spent the last two years of my musical life on recorders, modern flute, Baroque flute, Irish flute, and tin whistle (years that I treasure, so I am actually glad that I gave up ukulele when I did!).

Steel City Ruby music jam (August 2012)

Fast-forward a year, to the first Steel City Ruby conference, where I knew Jim Weirich was going to be a speaker, and therefore that he was going to do a music jam. I brought my Irish flute, not really sure whether I was going to have the courage to join in, since I had only just begun music jamming.

I ended up completely chickening out and choosing to go out for lunch instead, and when I came back they were still playing and I watched. I silently vowed to myself that the following year, if Jim was coming to Steel City Ruby again, I would not chicken out.

Music from August-December 2012

I launched myself into the new local French music jam, going to my second one just shortly after Steel City Ruby, and then proceeding further, bit by bit overcoming my fear of being incompetent as a musician. The entire past year has been very rewarding for me musically, as I kept on practicing, playing, anywhere and everywhere, on recorders, flute, Baroque flute, Irish flute and tin whistle, melodica, voice.

Music from January-July 2013

Some of my newer musical activities this year: tango on flute, blues.

Back to string instruments? Viola da gamba (July 2013)

Last month, I went to the week-long Mideast Early Music Workshop for the second time. (I'm still finishing up the full report to post.)

The day I arrived at music camp, it turned out that the instructor for the class on "viol for the novice" was looking for one more person to show interest in learning viol (also known as viola da gamba), since there was only one student signed up at the time. (The viol is a fretted instrument that you play with a bow.)

I thought to myself, heck, I'll give this a shot. It would be a no-risk attempt to try again to learn the basics of playing a string instrument!

So I signed up. I was lent a treble viol.

It was crazy hard for me to learn how to bow without making horrible sounds, and hard for me to play the most trivial melodies by fretting while bowing. Neither I nor the other beginner after just a week felt ready to even play a simple melody in the final student concert. I had spent quite a bit of time practicing.

But I learned a couple of things from this experience:

If I really wanted to, I could play a bowed string instrument; my strokes and control were clearly getting better every day.
If I really wanted to, I could play a fretted string instrument; I was slowly becoming able to pluck out a melody.
If I really wanted to, I could learn to be competent at viola da gamba, just like all my other workshop companions who told me they had started as total beginners years ago.

It turns out that I'm not very interested in playing viola da gamba, compared to lots of other things I could be doing. But the confidence that I could if I wanted to was very empowering.

Guitar, ukulele

It turns out that in June, before my music camp, Farokh had started learning to play guitar. On July 22, two days after I returned from music camp, he told me he getting very serious about guitar. This was quite impressive because unlike me, he did not even have any musical background at all in K-12. I was deeply moved by Farokh's dedication and seriousness as an adult latecomer to music.

So on July 22, I replied to him, "I will pick up my ukulele tonight and give it a go. There's a new Pittsburgh uke meetup so if I can actually get going with it, there is a good place to continue."

Steel City Ukuleles

Yes, there is a Steel City Ukuleles meetup group. I have known about it for over a year, by accident from an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

So on March 28, I had written the organizer, "Hi, I just saw a local news article about the Steel City Ukuleles. I bought a soprano ukulele a year ago but have barely started learning to play it. I'm interested in getting going on it and maybe joining the group." I got a friendly response, but given that I could not really play, and that I was already very busy with my recorder and flute activities, I had no time to try again to learn ukulele from scratch.

There was no way I would attend the meetup until I was at least a beginner.

Practice

On July 22, I started "practicing" ukulele no more than five minutes a day (that's as much as I could tolerate without calluses on my left fingers), and just trying to make the most basic chords after C work (which they never had earlier): G7, F. I kept on smudging and buzzing.

On July 25, I was still having trouble getting an F to work. Farokh chided me for my feelings of discouragement on ukulele, saying he was making progress on guitar: "Have you practiced the F chord every day for weeks until you get it? If not, you haven't been sufficiently dedicated. This is how people learn to play guitar; it's like digging through a brick wall with a spoon! You need to build up your dexterity. It took me two weeks to play the G chord decently."

On July 28, six days after starting again with ukulele, and making tiny bits of progress, I wrote Farokh, "My plan with uke is to take just a few minutes a day for the next week or two, then reassess what next. I have to observe the advice I give everyone: something small every day for two weeks before giving anything up." In my experience, when learning something new, the first two weeks can be very, very discouraging, but if you quit before the two weeks are up, you may never know how close you were to making the breakthrough that everyone else who persevered can make.

On July 31, I was continuing to make progress, playing longer than five minutes at a time. Calluses started forming. Fingers became more precise. Still could barely actually play, but the improvement was real. I decided to aim to get proficient enough to attend the September 4 meeting of the Steel City Ukuleles. I did not feel I would be ready to attend the August 7 meeting.

But at least I used the trick of committing to the September meeting, by posting to the August event site introducing myself and saying I planned to come in September. I wanted people to know that I was just starting out and had a month to get ready. I also wanted people to remember that when I showed up, so that I wouldn't be just some random guy, but the guy who told us a month ago he was going to come.

Books

I started working through some books on ukulele. Progress through them was very difficult, because some of the books just went way too fast, without explanation. These concise books are worthless.

On August 3, I got hold of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Playing Ukulele". This was useful, but had confusing orders of presentation and omissions in explanation. Still, I managed to learn some more chords (while still not playing anything quite right) and some fingerpicking while at it. I hit a wall pretty quickly though. The book has a lot of really hard stuff in it, and could occupy me for a year or two, I think.

On August 10, I started working through "Ukulele for Dummies", and made good progress.

Three weeks up

After my three-week trial period of daily practice, I assessed my status.

Despite the ups and downs of practice, I knew that I had made tremendous progress. Sometimes I would plateau for two days but then suddenly "get" something.

I still had trouble with the most basic barre chord, but actually, when I counted, I had learned around twelve chords and could do some basic progressions in some keys. I was buzzing out less and my fingers were starting to go just where they needed to go (if the chord changes were slow enough). It was an amazing feeling, the feeling of being a beginner rather than being nothing at all (which was the feeling I had during the whole first week and part of the second week).

Ukulele calluses after one month:

Bad instrument?

But I was getting increasingly annoyed by the fact that my instrument seems defective. The A string is sharp when fretted. I still don't know what the problem is. I regret having bought this instrument years ago online, unseen and unplayed.

Steel City Ruby 2013, August 17-18

The first morning of the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://steelcityruby.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://steelcityruby.org/">Steel City Ruby</span> conference, as I was about to leave home, I suddenly had a thought. Originally I was going to bring my Irish flute to the conference, as I had last year, to join a music jam with Jim Weirich (a speaker again at the conference).

I tweeted, "Was thinking of bringing my uke to #scrc13 because of @jimweirich, but been learning it only 3 weeks, feel like imposter.". Jim replied, "oh yes! Please bring!"

So I did bring my ukulele. Early on in the day, it was announced that there would be a music jam on the second day of the conference. So the next day, I brought my ukulele in again. And so we had a music jam: Jim, PJ Hagerty, Carol Nichols, and me.

I was nervous, and couldn't keep up with everything, but had a great time. It also happened to be the first time I ever played ukulele outside of just practicing at home. We did Jim's Ruby song, the very one that I had seen him do almost three years ago at the Pittsburgh Ruby meetup, as well as his Lisp song, and a whole bunch of other stuff, like Hank Williams. (It's hard to believe, but I hadn't played music with other people in a month, since the Mideast Early Music Workshop ended, but I was really focused on personal ukulele practice like a monk.)

Some photos of us (sadly without Carol, who was sitting opposite the three of us):

<span class="image-defunct" data-url="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BR4fd0xCUAEwWRq.jpg" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="image defunct 2026-04-15: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BR4fd0xCUAEwWRq.jpg">[image: Looking for music to play]</span>

So I ended up playing ukulele with others sooner than I had originally intended or expected. Also, at one point I briefly swapped instruments with Jim so that I could feel what it was like to play a tenor. Surprisingly to me, although it was of course "big", it was not as unmanageable as I feared it might be. I always imagined that eventually I'd "graduate" to playing a tenor, after first playing soprano, then concert size, sort of like my progression on recorder of first soprano, then alto, then tenor, then finally bass.

Sunday: the day after

The very day after the conference jam session, I got email about the Steel City Ukuleles meeting on Wednesday. In my "planning", I had neglected to realize that the group met twice a month, not just once a month! So I didn't have to wait till September 4 after all. I felt I was probably already competent enough to function on Wednesday; I looked at the musical selections, and felt reassured that even if I still have problems with fast chord changes, I could participate without making a total mess of everything. So I signed up!

Monday: need better instrument?

I went to the local music store to check out concert size ukuleles, because if I need to get a better instrument, I think I might like that size better than the soprano. I have not made any decisions yet. I feel I need to improve further, to better understand instruments and try different kinds, before buying another one.

Wednesday: my first time at Steel City Ukuleles

When I arrived, Linda lent me an electric tenor for me to try out. I ended up playing it for the whole two hours because the intonation was good, unlike my soprano. For the most part, I did not have difficulty with the larger instrument.

Some photos:

As you can see, I ended up just leaving my soprano ukulele on the ground unused during this session:

As the meetup was winding down, because it got dark outside, and my fingers were tired, I captured some footage of "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" being done by the group:

How fitting it is that the very tune I first heard from Jim Weirich almost three years ago is the one to close out my first attendance of the Steel City Ukuleles!

What next?

A month ago, when I was only practicing ukulele five minutes a day, I was still doing some flute practice. But I have not been playing flute or recorder for quite some time now (last time was probably a week ago). I feel bad about this, but I seem to be in ukulele mode now.

I need to keep flute and recorder in "maintenance mode" rather than just abandon them entirely.

Meanwhile, it is of course very exciting to be a beginner at ukulele. To make massive improvements on ukulele, I must make it my musical focus.

Instruments

Linda warned me that her electric tenor ukulele has a high action. After playing it the next day at home, I realized that indeed it has a high action that shreds my left fingers. So it's not working for me.

Meanwhile, Abby yesterday brought home a concert-sized banjolele borrowed from a friend:

I've been using it to get the feel of the concert size while continuing to practice and learn, and so far it's been working great, giving me confidence that I should in fact buy a concert size ukulele.

(Update of 2013-09-23)

A month later, I actually did finally buy a concert ukulele!

Conclusion

It's been quite a journey, getting into music and into ukulele through seemingly chance and trivial events such as music at a Pittsburgh Ruby meetup and hearing about Jake Shimabukuro.

And I'm so excited that I'm playing ukulele now. It's a whole different music world for me. I'll write more about what I mean, as I continue to progress.

(Update of 2013-09-04)

Two weeks after my first Steel City Ukuleles meeting, I went back for more, attending my second meeting.

Pittsburgh Data Visualization: D3 and only D3

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 02:01:22 GMT

Patrick gave a presentation for the Pittsburgh Data Visualization Meetup on only D3, because there was interest after the previous meetup for more on D3.

Summary

Patrick started with a review of last time, on selections, data, callbacks, and transitions.

Then he went into the use of heat maps.

Finally, he went into forces.

I have to confess that I got lost in the presentation because of the volume of code presented and my unfamiliarity with the API. I believe that I've reached the limit of what I can passively absorb about using D3, and simply need to get down and dirty and create my own project.

I was also feeling really tired and on the verge of getting sick. I felt very cold in the room and did not have a jacket on me in the summer.

My lightning talk at Steel City Ruby 2013: "Reflections"

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 01:54:09 GMT

Below is video for, and a transcript of, my five-minute lightning talk I gave at Steel City Ruby 2013, which I reported on here.

My 5-minute lightning talk starts at 19:35 and ends at 24:37 in the full video below. (I couldn't figure out how to turn off autoplay when I initially tried #t=19m35s.)

I provide below my best try at transcribing my talk, which was given impromptu without any notes or slides. Unfortunately, I spoke very quickly and I can't figure out every word I said; if you find any glaring omissions or errors, please let me know!

Transcript

Hi, my name is Franklin, and I've lived in Pittsburgh fifteen years, and this is the largest audience of front of which I've ever spoken in my life! (Applause.)

I'm an extreme introvert, and I'm also shy, but last year, I came to Steel City Ruby Conf, and I saw people giving talks, lightning talks, and I was inspired, so I started talking at local meetup groups, and I decided I had to speak here, and the question was, what was I going to talk about?

Originally, I was going to title my lightning talk "Confessions", but somebody already had "Confessions", so I changed it to "Reflections".

So, how many of you have had RSI? How many of you have had RSI from spending too much time at a keypunch machine? (I raise my hand. Laughter.) Yes, well, the first programming course I actually took, I coded on punch cards.

I sat at IBM keypunch machines and typed, and got RSI. And I'm telling you this because I may not look that old, but I've been around for some time (laughter). I punched cards, I wrote COBOL programs, FORTRAN programs. We used cards and had to sort them, had to put in the compiler as well as the Job Control Language cards, put them in a deck, ship them off to some place where my teacher took them, and that's how we coded.

So, I have some reflections on that, given how long I've been doing this stuff. I still don't know what programming really is. And that's why I come to places like Steel City Ruby Conf, and go to programming meetups, and I do this for many different programming languages. I try to do things better, and what I like about the Ruby community is that people are open and welcome, and they are care about quality, about different ideas. And also about things that relate to living, not just about coding.

And so when I was looking at the program for this year's conference, I was thinking, "how can I contribute here?" I'm not primarily a Ruby developer. But it turns out that programming is about much more than particular programming languages. In fact, I like that at lunch today, and last year, I met people who talked about Clojure, about Python, about Scala, and other languages, and it's really great to have these conversations.

So, I've seen code using "goto", and seen books on "structured programming" from the 60s, when I was writing COBOL in the early 1980s. I think some of you here are younger and haven't had that experience of having to code with "goto". So, I saw that. I saw C come into play, I saw C++, the object-oriented revolution. I saw functional programming, and now concurrency, and it's amazing that things keep on happening. I think it's a great time to be a developer.

The last thing I want to say is, on the program there was a talk that was just given before lunch, and it was about depression. And that made a big impression on me. I've taken this moment to come out, as a 43-year-old, as having suffered from major depression, and really for about twenty-five years, I was unable to function. I even had to drop out of school twice, but I overcame that, and I think it's time to stop being afraid to talk about it. We need to share it with our friends and talk about what we've done to overcome it and how to get help. So that's my final reflection.

Reactions

Note that the talk about depression I mentioned was the morning talk by Greg Baugues, "Developers and Depression".

I was very moved that throughout the rest of the first day of the conference, people came up to me and thanked me for talking about my depression. Some of them said they were currently dealing with depression, or had done so. This only reinforced in my mind Greg's point that there is still a stigma about openly discussing depression.

Some historical notes on programming

I regret that I did not keep any of my old COBOL programs. I do have some old data decks of punch cards in my basement, but no code!

I believe that the textbook we used in my high school COBOL class in 1983 was Shelly and Cashman's "Introduction to Computer Programming: Structured COBOL". Basically all the programming books of the day for any language boasted of teaching structured programming. Given that, I was amused by the whole "object-oriented programming" fad in all texts in the 1990s. Marketing never changes.

To do

I still haven't told publicly the full story of my struggle with depression that finished its last chapter only late in 2004, when, after six years of therapy, I decided I no longer needed to see my therapist, and told her I was discontinuing my weekly visits to her I had been making since 1998. I expect to gradually roll out this story as I feel ready to tell it.

Steel City Ruby 2013: my second year and it radically changed my life again (part 1)

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 00:57:27 GMT

This year, I attended the second Steel City Ruby Conference, 2013. The first one, last year (2012), was a life-changing experience for me. To my surprise, this second one also ended up being another radically transformative experience.

This is part 1 of my report, covering the first day (Friday). Part 2, covering the second day (Saturday), was not published.

Videos are up!

Videos for all of the presentations of Steel City Ruby 2013 are available on Confreaks. I am embedding them also in my reports.

First things

I signed up to give a lightning talk

The very first thing I did, upon arriving Friday morning, was to sign up to give a lightning talk!! This was because I was so inspired by last year's lightning talks. I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to talk about, but I knew I wanted to say something about what I learned in the past year since the first Steel City Ruby, and how my life has changed as a result, so I wanted to write "Confessions", but someone had already written down a "Confessions" lightning talk title, so I changed it to "Reflections".

I signed up for the music jam

Since I had just recently started learning to play ukulele, I signed up to participate in Jim Weirich's music jam. Last year, I had brought my Irish flute, but was too scared to actually play, and just watched as everyone had fun. I vowed that this year I would actually play with Jim and others.

(Update of 2013-08-23)

I wrote in more detail about how and why I took up ukulele and how that has changed my life.

Carina Zona, "Handcrafting Community"

Carina Zona opened by asking "What is community?"

Good question: I've been wondering about that myself, since becoming part of various local "communities" in Pittsburgh in the past couple of years. What's the difference between a mere "network" and a "community"?

She noted that she is actually an introvert, so it's been interesting for her to be where she is now.

Carina said the communities involve "explicit values". I thought that was a great point. Random people gathering without explicit values don't really make a community.

The part of her talk that really encouraged me was when she urged the cultivation of "forkable" communities. This means being able to copy what works and take it somewhere else and develop it. I thought this was a great metaphor, because if I want to build a community, it doesn't make sense to just do it from scratch, but it makes sense to learn from what has worked elsewhere. In particular, the Pittsburgh Scala Meetup that I'm part of is still small and not yet, in my mind, the kind of established, explicit community that Pittsburgh Ruby clearly is. I have been wondering about doing something to build up more of a Pittsburgh Scala community.

I took from this tlak a lot to think about and act upon.

Julie Pagano, "I am a Front-End Web Dev (And So Can You!)"

Julie gave an interesting talk about front-end development, emphasizing that this is serious stuff. She made certain important points that I totally agree with: HTML and CSS are in fact programming languages in their own right, and should be thought of and used that way, with a mind toward design and semantics, and not just hacking around. CSS being kind of a crappy language, it's good to use something like SASS, which is better (for example, enabling the concept of mixins).

She talked about the asset pipeline, and emphasized that one should learn JavaScript, not just hack jQuery. She listed resources to learn and to adopt good practices.

All good advice for anyone doing front-end work!

Greg Baugues, "Developers and Depression"

Greg gave a talk that stunned me.

He talked about his personal struggle with depression (type II bipolar, specifically). Please watch his talk, the whole thing, whether you've dealt with depression or whether you know someone with depression (and learn about the sometimes very subtle signs of it, since as he detailed in his talk, depressed people do what they can to conceal their problem, out of shame).

I made a surprising decision after watching his talk. I decided that in my yet-vaguely-thought-out lightning talk, I was going to confess to having had a very dark period of depression in my life, a period that lasted around twenty-five years, robbing me of a vast amount of my life. I did not want Greg's talk to go to waste. I wanted to make sure that people at the conference knew that there are those of us who have these kinds of secrets, and that if anyone is having a problem and needs help, that there is no shame in seeking help, because my life was saved thanks to some important help. I will say more about this later.

Lunch

Before the conference, I had signed up to volunteer (as a Pittsburgh local) to take a group of people to lunch. I did this for two reasons:

I wanted to contribute this year by volunteering to help for lunch.
Last year, there was some overcrowding as too many people went to the same popular restaurants in the Strip District for lunch.
Selfishly, I wanted a food option I chose!

So I took people to Indian Spices downtown. It has a reasonable lunch buffet (Abby and I went there once), and more to my taste than getting sandwiches somewhere.

Lightning talks

I ended up being scheduled for the last time slot of lightning talks. I was very nervous, had no notes or slides, and decided to simply get up there and try to make some kind of narrative out of various thoughts that had accumulated in my head for the past year, as well as Greg's talk on depression.

Given the anticipation, I confess I could not pay that much attention to the talks that preceded mine!

Here are all of Friday's lightning talks. I've provided in a separate post a transcript of my lightning talk, "Reflections".

Angela Harms, "A Collaborative Approach to Making"

Angela Harms gave a presentation revolving around the distinction she made between "cooperation" and "collaboration".

She led the audience in a short guided meditation before proceeding further.

The important point she made about "cooperation" was that it is safe, and there is no risk, because you just show up halfway and the other person shows up halfway, and that's all that happens. In "collaboration" your goal is much higher, to be "fully invested".

The rest of the presentation involved quotes and references to authors and books and anecdotes I had seen before. But what resonated with me was this key distinction she made between "cooperation" and "collaboration". I thought of situations in which I have felt ashamed because I only showed up halfway. I have to think about how to change that: either show up all the way, or perhaps if I cannot do that, then step out so that someone else who can do more than me can step in.

Ashish Dixit, "How to be Productive on a New Team"

Ashish Dixit spoke about transitions as a programmer, bringing in his own story at Groupon. Some tidbits I took away from his talk: "learning all the things" is overwhelming, and working on bugs is a good way to learn about a system.

It was 3:30 PM. I have to confess that I was getting tired and the day was getting long!

Jim Weirich, "Friendly Flying Robots with Ruby"

Jim Weirich gave a demo of controlling a personal drone using a Ruby DSL he wrote wrapping around a C API. An elegant use of DSLs, definitely. One of the selling points of Ruby and Ruby culture is the creation of DSLs to make it easier and more fun to do programming that underneath can be doing low-level things, and it's great that people like Jim make maximum use of this capability!

Party

There was a party held at the Consol Center after the Friday sessions. I enjoyed socializing and eating appetizer-type food there. I was surprised and touched by how many people privately came up to me and thanked me for speaking up briefly about the depression in my past. Greg himself was present and spoke to me (he had not been present during my lightning talk but had heard from others about it).

I went home hoarse from talking so much with people about all sorts of things, ranging from financial investment (!) to the new programming language (in progress) Rust (which Steve Klabnik is all excited about) to my experiences this year having switched to Scala for almost all new work and personal coding.

Conclusion

I had a long and tremendously uplifting first day at the 2013 Steel City Ruby conference. My impromptu lightning talk ended up being a lot more personal than I had expected, but seemed to resonate with some people.

Power and the AOL public firing

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 02:48:43 GMT

By sheer coincidence, two articles came to my attention within a short period of time that seemed to go well together well.

The first: <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.digitaljournal.com/article/356229" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.digitaljournal.com/article/356229">"Power robs the brain of empathy"</span>.

The second: "Listen To AOL CEO Tim Armstrong Fire A Patch Employee In Front Of 1,000 Coworkers".

I'm not making a judgment on whether the guy deserved to be fired or whatever, just intrigued by the way he was fired.

Pittsburgh Java User Group: Java EE 7, 8, and beyond; or done?

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 02:18:11 GMT

The Pittsburgh Java User Group has not been meeting regularly for some time now. The last meeting was almost two months ago. I attended this one with the impression that it might well be my last attendance of the group, and even more, that it might be the end of the group altogether.

The meeting did nothing to change my intuition.

Presentation by Reza Rahman

Reza Rahman of Oracle, a "Java EE/GlassFish Evangelist" gave the presentation. His goal was to promote the new and exciting things coming up in Java EE, and try to get community feedback into what next.

He gave a retrospective on how surprisingly long ago Java EE came on the scene, a decade ago, and described the evolution over the years to improve developer productivity.

Also it was good to see that the new APIs have improved since the old ones, including "fluent" APIs, the fact is that everything still seems clunky and "old".

Furthermore, the Java community is still stuck with old stuff. He bemoaned the fact that the old J2EE is still most widely used.

And Java developers are still not keeping up to date with developments. He asked the audience how many had heard of WebSocket, and hardly anyone raised their hands. He asked who knew what "hypermedia" is, and nobody raised their hand. Wow.

The presentation went very long, to two hours. Near the end, he said that they wanted to know what people wanted next, but nobody really responded. He asked, "What do we need to do in the cloud?"

Conclusion

My overall impression was that I was done attending more PittJUG meetings. In any case, the main organizers have long since moved on to other stuff besides Java anyway, and gotten busy, and it has been hard to find speakers. More generally, those who attend have not seemed very excited and proactive about asking for speakers or topics to be covered.

I believe it's the end of an era. After all, I do not write any Java code any more, myself! I came to this talk about Java's future expecting it to be my last, and it did not disappoint.

(Update of 2014-06-10)

It's been almost a year since the last PittJUG meeting, as far as I know. So I think the group really is dead.

There has been talk of expanding the group to not just be about Java, but anything JVM-related (such as other languages compiling to the JVM, e.g., Scala, Clojure, JRuby). Nothing seems to have happened of that.

Why I was so happy to run 5 miles in 63 minutes today when I was doing it in 50 earlier this year

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 01:18:29 GMT

I went for a run in Frick Park, my usual 5-mile route, which I haven't done in a while. It took me 63 minutes. Earlier this year I was doing it in 50. My fitness is pretty low right now, as I explained three days ago.

But I'm happy to be on the upswing. I'm getting out there, not pushing too hard, but challenging myself. I have faith that I will get back out of my slump. I have done this before. Other people have.

Do you also have this experience of being happy to do something worse than you used to do it, because you're doing it at all rather than doing nothing?

RIP, Eydie Gormé

Sun, 11 Aug 2013 03:08:41 GMT

I learned that American singer Eydie Gormé just died.

I actually knew very little about her until reading about her death.

But she made a huge difference in my life!

Eydie Gormé and Los Panchos

I know of her only through her famous recordings from the 1960s of Latin music with Los Panchos. They recorded a number of classic boleros that constantly kept me company when I was doing ballroom dance over a decade ago.

In particular, I really enjoyed their performance of "Sabor a mî", my favorite bolero of all time, both to listen to and to dance to.

It was interesting for me to learn, just now, that her parents were Sephardic Jews, her father from Sicily and her mother from Turkey.

Should I thank people before they die?

It is always strange to me when people die and I realize I barely knew anything about them, but feel deep gratitude for how they've so much enhanced my life. This was the case with Eydie Gormé.

I've never been into fandom, but lately I've been wondering, in an era when it actually is much easier to contact "celebrities", whether sending a simple one-shot note to someone expressing gratitude, well before death, might be appropriate. Especially in the case of people who are actually not major celebrities (either because their prime time has passed or because their contribution is in a narrow niche). What do you think?

Emerging from my three months of illness, self-pitying, and self-loathing

Sat, 10 Aug 2013 12:39:23 GMT

Yesterday, I reported on my feelings after having a very painful and embarrassing performance in the Liberty Mile road race. I resolved to slowly return myself to health and fitness, starting immediately.

Recently, Leo Babauta wrote a great blog post that really spoke to me, "The Fear of Being Found a Fraud". Basically, he writes advice, but he's not perfect, and doesn't always successfully do what he preaches. I periodically have feelings like that, since I write about stuff too and also post "advice" links on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. What would people think if they knew I have been failing myself in the past three months?

Well, I have to be honest. There's no point lying. I sometimes know what's best and what has worked for me, but don't take my own advice. This in itself is not the big problem. The real problem is the second-order problem, which is that of believing that I'm not only imperfect (we all are), but sometimes ending also deciding to give up on myself. That's the worst thing.

For example, after health conditions disrupted my "normal" routines, I ended up not getting back on track when in fact I should and could have, through a gradual process. In a way, I was too proud to adapt to reality. I was willing to operate under a different, better reality, but given the worse one, I chickened out, and entered a downward spiral of bad habits.

Meditation habit, destroyed

For example, I restarted a daily meditation practice for the new year, and entered into a 100-day meditation challenge. I encountered setbacks in my first month, but kept bouncing back. I even continued into a second month.

But then things got worse, and as you can see in the archives to my blog, I never wrote a report for the third month. According to my <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://insighttimer.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://insighttimer.com/">Insight Timer</span> journal, I actually did meditate in March almost every day, so I could have written a blog post on that, but I didn't. That was a mistake. I have found that public updates on progress keep me more accountable to myself; this is why I have written so much about my personal musical activities: not only to share my journey with those who are interested (because they are friends or because they are themselves on their own journeys), but also to keep myself honest about where I've been, what I still need to do, where I intend to go.

In April, my meditation practice started to fall apart. I missed April 10 and 11, then 13, 14, 15, then 18, 19, 20, 20, 23, and the rest of the month. In May I was erratic, till after May 13, I completely stopped identifying myself as a "meditator" and quit. That's right: I felt so ashamed of myself that I did not meditate between May 14 and August 9 this year. Big mistake, this pointless shame, especially given that I know, empirically, that when I don't "have time" to meditate, something is wrong with my life!

Exercise

Also, my exercise schedule completely fell apart. "Normally", I run every other day and do strength training the other days. None of this has to be a super-long session. Just enough to keep me mentally and physically alert. My strength training has generally been just a simple half-hour "core performance" type of workout at home.

Well, I lost the habit, partially because marathon training caused me to cut back on strength training and because after the marathon, I took a break from running. The big lesson I learned here is that marathoning is very disruptive to my ordinary life, and I do not plan to ever do a marathon again in my life. But apart from that, I had non-marathon disruptions also, such as the skin rash after a hike that I've been dealing with.

What I did today

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Clean slate, forget the past.

I meditated this morning. And I will continue to make this a high priority and do it daily. I must make sure that if I slip, I simply get back on track, rather than feel shame or whatever. It must simply be a habit.

Since I ran yesterday, today was a non-running day. I decided that one way to prevent myself from completely slipping is to have a backup "very short" workout in case any kind of laziness or disruption causes me to think about just canceling a workout rather than do a longer one.

So today was my first experiment with a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://medium.com/editors-picks/e4975b151181" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://medium.com/editors-picks/e4975b151181">7-minute workout</span>. It's intense, but fast to get over with. I highly recommend checking it out!

Here are more links to this type of workout:

Journal paper
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://7minworkoutapp.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://7minworkoutapp.com/">Online app</span>
Lifehack article

Even if you're lazy, surely you have 7 minutes a day to squeeze in this little circuit. I did!

The future

Back to meditating every day, just 10 minutes a day.

And I'm going to take it easy to ramp back up to fitness. I know it's going to take months to get back to where I was earlier in the year. Patience is a virtue. I will start small. A little bit of slow running every other day, and the 7-minute workout every other day, to get started, before extending further.

Conclusion

It was time to stop my descent into endless self-pitying and self-loathing over all the misfortunes that have come my way in the past months. I'm taking my life back.

Getting up when reality punches you in the face: running the second Liberty Mile in Pittsburgh

Sat, 10 Aug 2013 00:49:35 GMT

Last year, I reported on the excitement I had running in and watching the first GNC Live Well Liberty Mile. I was so excited about running it again that late this May, having mostly recovered from my Pittsburgh Marathon disaster, I quickly pre-registered for the Liberty Mile for this year. I anticipated training to run well in this year's Liberty Mile, given that I was not really trained last year.

Unfortunately, this year I have been in very poor shape since the marathon, because of a whole series of health problems and disruptions in my life resulting from a skin rash I got during a Rachel Carson Trail hike in May. The upshot is that I have been running (and exercising in general) very little in the past three months. As the Liberty Mile approached, I wished that I had not registered for it at all.

So I faced a dilemma: what should I do about the race?

Deciding to run it

The good thing about the mile is that it's short enough that of course I can finish the thing. So I felt there was no excuse to just bail out and forfeit my pre-registration. I was going to run it.

The bad thing about the mile is that it is brutal to actually run fast. I have always felt pukey after running a mile as "fast" as I can.

In any case, I decided to still try to run the Liberty Mile as fast as I could, knowing that I would probably suffer for it.

In recent weeks I've been trying to go out periodically for short, slow runs, something like two miles at a time, to gain at least have some kind of conditioning. Also, earlier this week I put in some "fast" repeats of about 300m out in Frick Park: the only "fast" running I've done since April!!

But this whole week I was feeling bad, stress exacerbated by home repair disruptions with the contractors coming over.

Support from Abby

Last year, I went to the race alone.

This year, Abby offered to go downtown with me so she could watch the race and be with me. (In May when I was pre-registering for the race, she had just spent months barely mobile because of a broken foot and was simply not certain she would be able to even run a mile again by August.)

I really appreciated this because I felt rather vulnerable about this race. We planned to watch the first wave start, and then have me run my heat (again the "Unstoppable 40+" heat), then hang out afterwards and watch the elite heats.

We drove downtown and parked and walked to the packet pickup area in Market Square. I was pleased that it wasn't raining; it had rained earlier in the day, but that was all over.

Because we arrived later than other people, they had run out of Small T-shirts and so I got a Medium.

Changes in the course

I should note that the course was changed from last year. The change makes sense because it considerably simplifies the logistics. Last year, the course was a straight shot down Liberty Ave toward downtown. This year, the course was an almost-loop course, first going out on Penn Ave, then turning to head back in on Liberty Ave. The advantage is that the start and finish are close together, so it is much easier for people to plan to spectate or get back to their cars or whatever. I do like the concept of the straight downhill road course, but understand the logistical difficulties.

My plan was to do my best to avoid going out too fast, and try to push hard in the final downhill portion of the race. Easier said than done, because last year I certainly wanted to avoid going out too fast, but did anyway!

Before the race

I wore my Vibram FiveFingers Bikila LS shoes again.

At the GNC booth, I saw they were giving out free samples of energy bars and other stuff. I was feeling hungry, and although I know that it is best not to race having just eaten, especially unfamiliar foods, I took a GNC Pro Performance Pro Crunch Lite energy bar, and ate a couple of bites before giving the remainder to Abby to put away.

It was probably a big mistake to have eaten from the energy bar, because it didn't really agree with me. Oops.

Start and finish lines

We checked out the start and finish lines.

First heat (at 7:00 PM)

We watched as the first "fun run" heat went.

My race (heat at 7:20 PM)

I got to the start line and lined up at the back, where I knew I belonged. I was not sure that I would not be last place in my heat!

Here I am, looking as tired as I in fact was, still taking medication for my skin problem that is not completely gone (usually showing up as spots on my neck or hands and arms):

As the race began, I tried not to go too fast, but did. 1:34 for the first quarter mile, not good at all! Last year, I ran the mile in 6:39, and went out in 1:29 for the first quarter. This year, I was hoping to go under 7:00 at all.

I slowed down for the second quarter, then finally found a steady pace for the third quarter. During the final quarter, I saw the finish line and eventually saw the clock ticking up toward 7:00. I was furious that I might not be able to finish a 7-minute mile. I sprinted all out and didn't actually finish under 7:00 according to the clock (the official race results say I finished in 7:02), but my chip time was 6:56, so I actually did run the mile in under 7 minutes!!

My splits:

1:34 (went too fast)
1:56 (uphill, deliberately slowed down)
1:46 (steady)
1:40 (final kick)

More photos of the Liberty Mile

More photos of the entire event can be seen <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://petemadia.photoshelter.com/gallery/2013-GNC-Live-Well-Liberty-Mile/G0000gQc.MfyoOAE/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://petemadia.photoshelter.com/gallery/2013-GNC-Live-Well-Liberty-Mile/G0000gQc.MfyoOAE/">here</span>.

After my race

Afterwards, I felt really, really crappy:

In fact, for a full half hour after the race, all I could do was walk and sit around with Abby trying to feel less crappy. I have never felt so bad for so long after any race of any distance.

Reflections

Mentally, also, I was still very angry at myself: I came in 60th place out of 74, running a chip time of 6:56, a whopping 18 seconds slower than last year. That's a huge decrease in fitness for a mile.

My plan for this year, 2013, was supposed to be to get back into great health and fitness, "the shape I was in five years ago". It's why, for the new year, I got into climbing the Cathedral of Learning. It's why I got into running in the winter](/blog/2012/12/31/why-i-went-frick-park-trail-running-in-snowfall-for-the-first-time-in-a-decade/). It's why I decided to run the Pittsburgh Marathon. I blew it my overtraining for the marathon and then suffering freak skin problems after a hike that ended up seeing doctors something like five times, and being put on medication that messed with me.

I had a lot to be angry about. But after I recovered, I became calm and stopped being angry about being punched in the face by reality. I decided that it was motivation for me to turn my life around. I decided that I was going to get back into a regular exercise routine.

In just the past three months, I have lost all of my fitness of the past several years. But I have a plan to get back on track, starting tomorrow. I believe that for 2014, I can still get back into my 2008 shape. It's a matter of making it a priority, over all the other things I have been doing in my life.

Going home

After I recovered enough that I felt like eating and walking again, Abby and I went back to our car and we went home.

Only minutes after getting home did I realize that I had totally forgotten to stick around to watch the elite runners' races!! That was far from my mind when I was feeling nauseous and reflecting on my poor fitness.

Conclusion

The race was very well organized, and I'm thankful for the continuation of this new Pittsburgh tradition. Although I had a humbling experience in my heat, I totally want to be back for a third try at executing a good mile next year! And I am thankful that I actually ran it, because it gave me the resolve to regain my lost fitness.

A haircut leading to my playing "I'll Always Love You" on flute

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 02:17:12 GMT

I got a haircut from my barber Joe, whom I have been seeing for sixteen years now since moving to Pittsburgh. Unexpectedly, this led me to "discovering" a piece of music and going home to play it on flute.

I was happy to arrive with only one other person in line, just getting into the chair, because Joe has a policy of not taking reservations, and "if you leave, you lose your turn":

In practice, Joe usually takes 20-25 minutes per person, I figured on being out within 50 minutes. Since I was pretty exhausted because of a tough week, I took the opportunity to do some napping. In practice, I don't really sleep, but do get rest. Since Joe always has his oldies radio station on, I try to enjoy the music (which is not the kind of music I ordinarily listen to these days) and identify songs and singers I recognize.

Music

I heard someone sing a song that I recognized but had never truly known. I think it's a beautiful song, actually (from a melodic and harmonic point of view), although horribly cheesy if you pay attention to the lyrics.

I recognized the song as being in "I Used to Play Flute", although I did not remember the title. I did remember really enjoying playing it on flute.

So this evening, after dinner, I found the song in the book. It's called "I'll Always Love You". I played through the song with the CD track accompaniment.

I also looked for a sung performance on YouTube, and found one, by the musician who actually created it in 1987, Taylor Dayne:

I don't think this this is who I heard on Joe's radio station. Taylor Dayne sings more wildly than whoever was on the radio (or maybe in my half-asleep state, I wasn't paying enough attention). This is not the kind of music I was listening to in 1988, and I have to confess I cringed when watching this video, because although the performance is quite good, her style of singing is just not really to my taste! I prefer the song as an instrumental.

Tito Nieves

I was very amused to find a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.jukebo.com/tito-nieves/music-clip,i-ll-always-love-you,u8quz.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.jukebo.com/tito-nieves/music-clip,i-ll-always-love-you,u8quz.html">salsa cover of this song</span> by Tito Nieves. It's pretty good, actually:

<div style="width:480px;"><iframe src="https://www.ultimedia.com/swf/iframe_pub.php?width=480&height=385&id=u8quz&url_artist=https://www.jukebo.com/tito-nieves/music-clip,i-ll-always-love-you,u8quz.html&autoplay=0&mdtk=04516441&site=.fr" width="480" height="385" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" hspace="0" vspace="0"></iframe><br /><span style="color:#000000; font:bold 11px verdana;">See all </span><a href="https://www.jukebo.com/tito-nieves/music-clip,i-ll-always-love-you,u8quz.html" style="color:#000000;text-decoration:underline; font:bold 11px verdana;" target="_blank">music videos Tito Nieves</a></div>

Haircut photos

In any case, I was delighted not only to have gotten a haircut, but also learned something about a piece of music that had up till now only been a CD track and a flute part that I had played through months ago.

Before:

After:

Pittsburgh Data Visualization: D3 and R

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 02:19:55 GMT

Just a week ago, the Pittsburgh Data Visualization Meetup launched with a "meet and greet" that I attended. Today was our first actual presentation-based meeting, with speakers giving introductions to both D3 and R.

Location

The meeting was on the Pitt campus. Unfortunately, this meant no WiFi access, because guest WiFi requires a sponsor and is a hassle to set up. So this is not the perfect place to meet, but was available to Patrick in the summer.

About 15 people showed up.

Patrick on D3

By popular demand, Patrick gave an introduction to D3.

He is particularly interested in knowledge discovery in data mining. He gave an example of converting data from HTML to XML to SVG and then finally getting it into D3.

Although D3 is a JavaScript library, its API feels like its own domain-specific language with its own conventions, so there's a learning curve. Patrick gave a demo of hooking data up to D3 and then changing the data, and hooking up mouse events. He showed transitions for visualization when data changes. Apparently D3 does an efficient recalculation of what needs to happen when data changes.

He also showed a force-directed graph.

Rihanna on R

Rihanna spoke about her use of R for her work.

She has been using R for 13 years! She gave an overview of her work flow, which involves using a workspace and saving objects. She likes to get data from raw sources into R and use plots to look for patterns, spikes. Then she makes different plots in order to tell a story.

Conclusion

I found it very informative to hear about the work flows Patrick and Rihanna each adopted in order to find and report on interesting data.

The main drawback of this meeting was that it was very long, because of two talks crammed into one evening. Since this was just the first meeting, I suggested that shorter talks in the future would enable more time for unstructured discussion at meetings.

A new hike in Frick Park with Abby

Sun, 04 Aug 2013 21:00:55 GMT

It's August and Abby and I have been upset that, unlike all the other years since we've been together, most of the year has already gone by without our having gone on a substantial hike together. This is a big deal because hiking is one of the things that first drew us together and that we most enjoy doing together.

The reasons for this utterly unfortunate situation:

Abby broke her foot in February, at the same time she started a new job, and this totally threw both our lives into chaos. Her full recovery was very slow, and she has still not regained her fitness, and is not in any shape to do any of the Pittsburgh Hiking meetup hikes that we normally start doing in the spring and throughout the summer.
I got occupied with Pittsburgh Marathon training, then after the marathon, during a hike, came down with a skin rash that resulted in a lot of trouble for me despite multiple trips to the doctor and treatments, still not completely cleared up even today, and that resulted in my not only losing fitness but also being wary of going out on hikes.

Anyway, we decided that the past is the past, and we should start doing some smaller-scale hiking on our own, just to enjoy being out together again. Today we simply chose to do a little exploratory (for me, anyway) hike of Frick Park. The hike was probably just over 4 miles long (including walking to the park from home and back), so it was quite short, but it was good.

Here's what I discovered:

Showing me some trails

Basically, Abby showed me some trails she had discovered when taking her own walk in Frick at some point. These were not the trails I usually run on, but narrower, craggier, steeper trails that clearly are used by mountain bikers (in fact, one came our way during the hike).

Abby leading the way:

Some views:

Fungi:

A little bridge:

We ended up in Fern Hollow, familiar territory:

Do you see the spider web?

We went up the Falls Ravine Trail from Fern Hollow, and then Abby showed me a small trail that leads back up to "civilization", emerging behind a bench near the meadow across from the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.pittsburghparks.org/frick-kids" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.pittsburghparks.org/frick-kids">Blue Slide Playground</span>.

This meadow is popular for sledding in the snowy winter, but right now it is popular for some kind of medieval play fighting:

Conclusion

I was very happy to be hiking with Abby again, even if "only" in our backyard park and for a short distance.

Pittsburgh Ruby/Python social and some observations about our polyglot world

Sat, 03 Aug 2013 02:17:42 GMT

Programming meetups aren't just about presentations and coding. Abby and I joined others in meeting up for dinner for a joint Pittsburgh Ruby and Pittsburgh Python social and enjoyed relaxing and socializing outdoors in Bakery Square. Although it perpetually looked like it was going to rain, it turned out we weren't really rained on.

Carol, Andre, and Abby:

It was fitting that there was a joint social for two language communities, because we live in a polyglot world.

Despite my original intention not to engage into any tech-related conversation, I couldn't help remarking on my current polyglot responsibilities at work at CMU on the METAL project!

Our polyglot world: Ruby, Python, Perl

I mentioned having to cobble together Ruby, Python, and Perl code recently in an NLP project to process Farsi text into corpora to analyze. We used a Ruby gem Virastar in our pipeline, a Perl script for a Farsi stemmer, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://perstem.sourceforge.net/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://perstem.sourceforge.net/">Perstem</span>, and a Python script for normalization.

(Update of 2013-12-04) C++, Scala, MongoDB

The work project ended up becoming even more polyglot than I expected.

I also used a C++ tagger, TurboTagger from <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/TurboParser/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/TurboParser/">TurboParser</span>.

I wrote Scala to execute and monitor the pipeline, because it turned out that component bugs and timeouts (from infinite loops sometimes) had to be dealt with: the original shell script pipelines did not handle any of that at all. Also, the vast amount of data meant that parallelizing was critical. The Scala ecosystem has turned out great for me. I didn't use Akka actors for this task, just futures and parallel collections.

I also used MongoDB because it is quite a natural fit for document-oriented storage and querying as an intermediate stage I can inspect before the final stage of conversion to Sketch Engine format. And I happened to just finish a free online MongoDB course which has been useful. In my Scala code, I used the official Scala driver Casbah.

Why MongoDB? I needed to track the transformations, and experiment with different parameters while also fixing bugs and rerunning stuff. Because there is so much data and sometimes something crashes in the pipeline, I decided to save all intermediate results in a database in order to avoid repeating work.

Finally, I used Scala to generate corpora for importing into <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/">The Sketch Engine</span> for our Farsi linguistics experts to analyze. Scala's parser combinator library came in very useful, and I represented each stage in the pipeline as a transformation of a custom AST designed to finally serialize well to the Sketch Engine "vert" file format.

It was pretty important to work with ASTs, since we actually got text in a variety of formats, which I parsed to a common AST in order to push into the pipeline.

Whew!

(Update of 2014-06-10)

A description of some of this <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://springfield.metaphor.cs.cmu.edu:8080/MetaphorViz/About.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://springfield.metaphor.cs.cmu.edu:8080/MetaphorViz/About.html">METAL project</span> work is in the paper "The CMU METAL Farsi NLP Approach".

Pittsburgh Node Meetup: Optimizing development workflow with Grunt

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 01:29:45 GMT

I am not a Node developer. I've only used Node to play around with JavaScript, not for any real work or personal projects (yet). The last time I used Node was two months ago, for a talk I gave at Pittsburgh TechFest 2013 in which I wrote JavaScript code running on Node, but did not actually talk about it, and only mentioned that I had written it and put it up on my GitHub repository for the talk.

That is why it took me so long to attend my first Pittsburgh Node meeting. I was simply curious who was involved in the local Node community and what tooling they were using. The meeting was about <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://gruntjs.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://gruntjs.com/">Grunt</span>, a Make-like task runner. Nate Good of ShowClix presented.

Attendance

There was a fairly large group of people who attended: around thirty. Node seems to be popular in town.

The talk

Overall, Grunt seemed like Make or Rake. You can use plugins and define your own tasks. So there seemed nothing special about it, other than it is a useful tool corresponding to similar tools for other language ecosystems.

Conclusion

Since I don't really use Node, I went to the meetup out of curiosity more than anything else. I will probably not attend again. There seemed a lot of enthusiasm though.

Pittsburgh Data Visualization Meetup: inaugural meet and greet

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 03:42:33 GMT

There is a new Pittsburgh Data Visualization Meetup and I attended the first meeting, which was a meet and greet at <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.fuelandfuddle.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.fuelandfuddle.com/">Fuel & Fuddle</span> in Oakland.

My interest in data visualization

Data visualization isn't something I've done much of, but is something I'm interested in, both for work and for my own personal project ideas. For example, I have amassed a lot of personal data about the races I've run and the chess games I've played.

The only thing I've done for visualization at work is generate static images using <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.graphviz.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.graphviz.org/">Graphviz</span> to display, in human-friendly form, grammatical relations that are otherwise represented using a text format; this text format is usually automatically generated, but sometimes has errors that humans have to fix. It is hard to either see or fix such errors from the text representation, so the visual display helps a lot. Unfortunately, right now our program only generates a static image, not an interactive and editable representation of each graph, so the user who sees something wrong has to edit the text and regenerate the image to verify the correction visually. Ideally we would like to make the program more interactive, but this task is not performed very often, so I had gone with the simplest possible solution.

Summary of meeting

This being the first meeting, we all introduced ourselves and chatted over dinner. The creator of the new meetup is Patrick Dudas, who is involved in all kinds of cool projects in collecting data (such as scraping Twitter) and visualizing it.

People talked about the kind of work they do and the tools they use or would like to switch to using. There was a good variety of people from different disciplines, from science to business, all with a need to create useful visualizations to analyze and report on data.

Libraries and languages mentioned included D3, ggplot, R, Python, and Tableau. There was particular interest in more effective use of D3 and R. Patrick promised to lead a session on D3 soon.

Conclusion

It was good to see a new meetup revolving around a need and a discipline, visualization, that cuts across different disciplines and programming languages.

I miss playing chess at the Pittsburgh Chess Club

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 01:03:33 GMT

I haven't played in any chess tournaments since winning this year's Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship: I had too many other projects I wanted to work on.

But I've been missing chess in the past week or so. I can tell because I've been playing chess against myself in daydreams. I think I need to start playing again.

I stopped by the Pittsburgh Chess Club to check out the action. Henry was playing against Ed Dean; I wanted to say hello, but he didn't even see me during the several minutes I was present watching people's games. He was so focused and deep in thought, never looking up!

(Update of 2013-07-31)

Henry actually ended up winning the game, in a big upset!

It's funny, he's beaten Ed Dean twice now, while I have never beaten Ed, and Henry has never beaten me.

All India: great new Indian restaurant in Pittsburgh

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 02:22:09 GMT

I have a new favorite Indian restaurant in Pittsburgh: All India in Oakland on North Craig Street.

Being a fan of Indian food, I've tried basically all the Indian restaurants in the city for over a decade in Pittsburgh. Many are not worth mentioning at all. Some I have enjoyed to a degree, but none have really excited me.

Until now.

The relatively new All India is now my clear favorite. Recently, I went with some friends there for their lunch buffet, and it was great. A large selection, very fresh and tasty. Nice interior with pleasant furniture and settings.

I'm not really a restaurant reviewer, so I apologize for not being more specific.

I took Abby there for a dinner date tonight. Unfortunately, I accidentally cracked apart a tooth in a freak accident while on my second plate, so we had to leave early. But we will definitely go again.

My first plate, which I finished:

Pittsburgh Ruby lightning talk night: RVM, business logic with Rails, IRC, rspec-given, Vagrant

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 20:53:00 GMT

The Pittsburgh Ruby meetup held a lightning talks session.

Originally, I was not going to present anything, since I did not feel that I had anything exciting to quickly share (I have not been doing much Ruby programming lately at all other than debugging my Octopress-generated blog), and don't like talking just to talk.

But at the very last minute, just half an hour before the meeting, I noticed some developments in the world of RSpec announced on Twitter by Jim Weirich, and I got excited enough that I decided to talk about his rspec-given, which was just released at version 3.0.0.

Colin, on `rvm_recommended_ruby`

Colin briefly talked about how he likes to automate things, and therefore, in the context of using RVM, created rvm_recommended_ruby.

Jon, on business logic in pure Ruby

Jon gave a short summary of his <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jonathandean.com/2013/07/business-logic-in-pure-ruby/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jonathandean.com/2013/07/business-logic-in-pure-ruby/">blog post</span> on not putting all business logic into Rails models, but instead, decoupling from ActiveRecord and Rails altogether. This is a theme that has risen a lot in recent years in the Rails community.

Carol, on how to use IRC to get help

Carol talked about how to use IRC to get help when working on projects.

Me, on `rspec-given`

I talked about cool features in rspec-given.

rspec-given has actually been around for a while, but I had not used in the past. I plan to use it in the future.

It provides Given, When, Then, and And for writing specifications.

Also, now there is Invariant, which I think is a great addition to RSpec, enabling an easy way to check invariants as part of every example.

Finally, I love the new natural assertions, the ability to write stuff like

Then { stack.top == :second_item }

instead of

Then { expect(stack.top).to eq(:second_item) }

while RSpec automatically generates useful messages on failure.

Colin again, on Vagrant

Since all the lightning talks were done in less than half an hour, Carol called for more volunteers to talk about something. Colin ended up impromptu talking about his use of Vagrant to create development environments.

There was particular interest in how to share files with the host file system. Vagrant makes this easy.

Vagrant is great. Use it.

Ruby meets Python

Carol reminded everyone that coming up is a Ruby/Python joint social.

Conclusion

A relatively short Pittsburgh Ruby meetup, and with a smaller crowd than some others in the past, but a fun and instructive one.

Don't forget, Steel City Ruby Conference 2013 is in a month! I'm excited to attend again.

Pittsburgh JavaScript meetup: functional programming

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 22:37:00 GMT

Because the topic of the featured presentation by Richard Ashkettle was functional programming, I made sure to attend my first meeting of the newly revived Pittsburgh JavaScript meetup. (This was actually the third meeting of the revived Pittsburgh JavaScript group, but I hadn't been able to make it to the first two.)

I'd met Richard earlier, a month ago at Pittsburgh TechFest. He does not claim to be an expert at functional programming, but is enthusiastic about concepts and techniques that he can and does apply to improving software quality in many dimensions. Since I have been a functional programming enthusiast and practitioner for twenty years, I had these goals in attending his presentations:

evaluate what Richard and others have done with, and think is important about, functional programming
offer a few corrections, elaborations, suggestions as appropriate for the situation
gather information on how I may be able to effectively explain functional programming to those who are new to it

History of the Pittsbugh JavaScript meetup group

Two years ago, in 2011, I had attended the first incarnation of the group faithfully, attending several months of meetings before it disbanded when the founder left Pittsburgh. I learned quite a bit from those meetings.

Two years is a long time in the world of JavaScript. Looking back at one of my blog posts reporting on the old JavaScript meetup group, I am amused by how anachronistic that feels to me today, as in my mention of Sproutcore, which I never hear about any more.

Up front: my take on the secret of JavaScript

Here are some observations (not novel) I have about JavaScript, to set the stage for further discussion:

JavaScript is full of horrible, disgusting Bad Parts.
JavaScript has only one shiny Good Part: it has first-class functions.
People manage to get a lot of amazingly cool and important stuff done using JavaScript, so take it seriously.

Comments on Richard's presentation

Immutability and "functional languages"

Richard talked about immutability as being part of what "functional programming" is about.

Yes, it is, and in addition, common best practices in many programming languages these days argue for favoring immutability. I want to emphasize that you don't have to go full-blown into a specialized "functional language" in order to take advantage of immutability as desired: for example, this tip has long since been known as at least a "design pattern" in the Java world, in the Ruby world, and basically everywhere else.

Richard suggested that "functional languages" don't allow mutation. By my definition, this is not actually true. I didn't raise an objection during the talk because I didn't want to sidetrack it, but here I have space to elaborate a little. I would argue (but that would have to be another blog post) that the cleanest, most intuitive and novice-accessible "functional languages") are those in the ML family originally developed in the 1970s and lives on today's popular, industrial-strength dialects of Standard ML, OCaml, and F#.

ML fully supports mutation, through reference cells.

Personally, because of notions like this, I've been thinking that maybe it would be best if we all stopped using the term "functional language", because it has sadly become misleading and ambiguous. In particular, people instantly think "Haskell" when they use the word "functional language", when in fact Haskell is a very unusual, unique language (and ecosystem) among languages that one could call "functional".

Expressions, functions, evaluation, and values

As Richard put it, "favor expressions evaluating to a value". The focus of functional programming is on returning a value, from an expression that includes function calls, rather than munging some mutable global state, or modifying state through a reference passed into a function as a parameter.

Recursion vs. looping?

Richard noted that one characteristic of functional programming is the use of recursion instead of looping. He gave examples of writing tail-recursive functions.

One nitpick (which again, I did not bring up during the talk): recursion and looping (as in through "normal" constructs such as while and for) are not actually opposed. I will write a blog post later about why conventional looping is best thought of as a derived construct built on top of recursion, and why it might be best to consider conventional looping to be a historical accident and mistake (but a very useful invention given the historical circumstances).

Efficiency of recursion?

Also, people brought up the topic of efficiency. I have learned over the years that for many people, the word "recursion" seems to immediately trigger the word "efficiency". Richard did a great job in mentioning that <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:proper_tail_calls" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:proper_tail_calls">EMCAScript 6 is going to have proper tail calls (also called tail call optimization)</span>, which will make tail recursion equivalent to ordinary looping in terms of space usage. This is hugely important news, of course. This mandate shows how serious JavaScript is about embracing functional programming.

Recursion for parallelism

But beyond the issue tail recursion, I felt I had to point out that recursive algorithms can offer actual speedup. The classic examples, of course, are the parallel speedups of divide-and-conquer algorithms such as quicksort that use recursion. If you expressed the algorithms by removing the recursion (with a hand-rolled stack as often taught in courses), you would destroy the inherent parallelism. So in the world of parallelism, you want your code to stay naturally recursive! As parallel computing comes to JavaScript, keep this in mind!

Higher-order functions, first-class functions

Richard: "A function is an object".

It's really as simple as that. Functions can be created, stored, passed around. Functions can return other functions.

It's amazing, but I claim that this is JavaScript's one Good Part, its killer feature that surprisingly many languages don't have. And it's the one feature that is used all the time, not just in esoteric code. From the very beginning, JavaScript had first-class functions, to support callbacks for client code in Web browsers. and Node server-side code is nothing if not a whole bunch of function (...). Without closures and first-class functions, JavaScript would have been completely useless. Thank goodness Brendan Eich was inspired by the Scheme functional language.

No methods!

JavaScript not only provides full-fledged functions, but ironically, its weirdest feature, the prototype-based inheritance instead of class-based inheritance, inadvertently has prevented "interference" from the conventional class-based object-oriented world, which is mostly based not on functions, but on methods that interference with functions because they are meant to replace functions (since according to "pure" object-oriented thinking, functions are evil and computation should involve method calls on objects). JavaScript does not (really) have methods; it only simulates them, by storing bona fide closures into fields of (map) objects. For example, if you use Ember, the following code illustrates how the building blocks of typical JavaScript programming involve creating lots of functions: valueWillChange and valudDidChange are just functions. They are not special things, "methods".

App.PersonView = Ember.View.extend({
  valueWillChange: function (obj, keyName, value) {
    this.changingFrom = value;
  }.observesBefore('content.value'),
  valueDidChange: function(obj, keyName, value) {
      // only run if updating a value already in the DOM
      if(this.get('state') === 'inDOM') {
          var color = value > this.changingFrom ? 'green' : 'red';
          // logic
      }
  }.observes('content.value')
});

Examples

Richard gave some standard examples of using higher-order functions such as map and filter and foreach as provided in various popular JavaScript libraries such as Underscore.

As a matter of style, he recommended against long, obscure one-liners that involve chaining. I agree. For readability and testability of pipelines, I have found that it is good to break things up into intermediate steps. (Just recently, Tim Lesher also recommended against stupidity masking as excessive cleverness in his Python lightning talk about functional programming with itertools.)

Monads?!

Regrettably, Richard brought up the term "monads". I'm close to thinking that this word should be banned, because too many confusions about them have ruined the word. I have yet decided what the best alternative phrase might be. Maybe something like "computational context"?

Ironically, Richard admitted he was going to abuse the word, and for the sake of example, he said, he was going to say that "jQuery is a monad". I didn't want to derail his talk, and since he admitted the abuse, I decided there would be a better time to address this topic.

It was interesting to me, however, that he gathered that the interesting thing about jQuery, and why he wanted to call it a monad, was the chaining of calls in jQuery. I need to think of a good way to deal with this intuition when I get around to explaining monads.

Partial application and currying

Richard explained both partial application and currying, then he wondered when one would in practice write a curried function.

I said (but not very convincingly, I think) that you would write a curried function if you knew you would otherwise have to manually do a bunch of partial application. I have to confess that was a weak answer. I think the practical situation in JavaScript is that full-scale up-front currying is not useful.

Libraries

Richard recommended checking out the following libraries, especially Lo-Dash, which he judges to be faster than Underscore:

Underscore
Lo-Dash
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/">Functional JavaScript</span>

Questions and answers

There were many interesting questions raised after the presentation.

Introducing functional programming into a team environment

Someone asked Richard a good question about whether it's appropriate to, say, start using Underscore at work and expecting other team members to learn how to use it. Is it fair to expect others to learn a new way of doing things that might seem weird?

My point of view is that there's nothing specific about functional programming when it comes to questions like this. The same question comes up when evaluating a particular programming language or a particular MVC framework or a particular version control system, and the answer involve considering all the different realities of who is comfortable with what, whether it is worth learning something new, what the advantages and disadvantages are, how much the decision will affect delivery of business value.

Growing parameter list for a function vs. passing in a big object

One concern brought up is that if you're programming in a functional style, you can end up being faced with ever-growing parameter lists for a function to pass in everything that it needs. One solution is to create a big object to stick everything into it that might be needed (for example, a configuration object instead of separate flag parameters). Is this overkill?

Also, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://tonylukasavage.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://tonylukasavage.com/">Tony Lukasavage</span> emphasized that his concern was in the context of the need to evolve an existing API without breaking customers' client code that uses it.

My first note would be that API design is tricky and checking out some resources on API design is very helpful.

Regarding parameter lists, Richard noted that you might have a design problem if you have a function that needs to know about so many things it depends on. You may want to refactor the function (of course, in the context of evolving a mature API that customers depend on, it may be too late, unfortunately) and the data structures passed in. For example, if you have a number of functions that all take as parameters a firstName and lastName, then maybe you want a single name parameter instead.

I suggested also that if certain flags are not always needed, then instead of a huge configuration object, how about simply having separate but related functions (in a language supporting overloading, you could provide overloaded functions, although the topic of overloading is another large one to discuss later), each of which takes only the flags the client cares about. Of course, as some people pointed out, then you might end up with annoyingly long and specific function names.

Nobody said designing an API is easy.

Do I actually do functional programming?

One question I got, since before the meetup, I had indicated having experience with functional programming, was basically, do I actually use it in JavaScript and elsewhere. The answer is, yes. As I've mentioned, you don't have use a special language in order to program in this way, although it's much easier and more efficient to use a language that is tailored to support it. Most of the code I've written in the past fifteen years has attempted to be primarily functional in style, whatever language I'm using for work (mostly Java, Perl, Python, and recently Scala). I don't do this out of some kind of ideology, but because it works well in getting stuff done. Before adopting a primarily functional style of programming, I spent years working in traditional imperative and object-oriented styles, and empirically, that was less pleasant.

Do I do functional programming in JavaScript?

I have not actually done any JavaScript programming for work since doing some UI prototyping two years ago. I don't know when I'll return to doing front end work, but meanwhile, I am interested in doing some Web browser stuff for personal projects, so I try to keep up to date on developments in the JavaScript world.

One thing that has been interesting that I need to check out is the rise of functional reactive programming (FRP) libraries for JavaScript, such as Bacon.js. FRP was originally invented in the 1990s by Conal Elliott in the context of Haskell, but almost twenty years later, has finally spread well beyond that now to mainstream visibility and use. For example, Microsoft has thrown its weight behind Reactive Extensions (Rx), which started out in the .NET world, but Microsoft then ported it to JavaScript, C/C++, Python, and Ruby.

Conclusion

I was happy to see interest in functional programming in the local JavaScript community. Richard gave an introductory talk on it that I thought was very useful as a starting point for those who are new to it. I made note of some omissions or inaccuracies in order to improve my thinking about how I can contribute in the future to improving people's understanding and application of functional programming principles.

More summer musical partying, and another ten-year-old dream fulfilled!

Fri, 05 Jul 2013 03:25:39 GMT

Abby and I went to a party at Gina's. We hadn't been over in more than half a year.

We had a great time, sharing a ton of food (I made a cabbage dish of my own invention that included onion, garlic, olive oil, cumin seeds, thyme, lime juice, salt and pepper) and hanging out inside as well as in the backyard.

I somehow started an arm wrestling competition with the guys, and then we challenged each other to pullups and chinups too.

I also ended up playing three games of speed chess at a time handicap (my 3 minutes to his 10 minutes). I barely managed to win all three games. The final game should have been a draw, but I won through a swindle.

Music

I told Henry I was much improved musically since we played together two months ago. A lot of things have been falling in place for me. Of course, this only makes me be more ambitious about music to play, and in return, get humbled yet again by how much more improvement is left for me!

Telemann's flute sonata in B minor, TMV 41:h4

One piece we tackled was Telemann's flute sonata in B minor, TMV 41:h4. I had only actually gone over the first two movements, so we were both sight reading the last two. That was something of a wreck for me, but gives me homework to do: originally I had not actually planned on learning the whole sonata, now I want to!

Bach's flute sonata in E major, BWV 1035

Another piece we did was Bach's flute sonata in E major, BWV 1035, which I have already mentioned my obsession with in a blog post over three months ago.

Note: I am still not playing this on Baroque flute or modern flute, because of the difficulty! I have been working with a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.universaledition.com/Sonata-F-major-BWV-1035-for-treble-recorder-basso-continuo-Johann-Sebastian-Bach/composers-and-works/composer/32/work/4801" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.universaledition.com/Sonata-F-major-BWV-1035-for-treble-recorder-basso-continuo-Johann-Sebastian-Bach/composers-and-works/composer/32/work/4801">recorder transcription for F major</span>.

Because I have actually been playing more of this sonata myself in the past months, I have come to change my mind about performances I listed in that blog post! There is nothing like actually studying and playing a piece of music to change one's perception of it.

My favorite performance so far I've found on YouTube is by Wilbert Hazelzet on Baroque flute. It's split over two parts:

Anyway, Henry and I ran through the sonata. Again, I had not actually ever run through the final movement, so it was an embarrassing sight reading scramble for me. But he really enjoyed the last movement, and I did too, and realized that I wanted to actually study and practice it. It's funny how I came to enjoy this movement much more after having tried to play it.

Gabriel Fauré, Après un rêve: fulfilling my ten-year-old dream

After all the Baroque stuff, I decided to play something different with Henry. I pulled out my modern flute, and we did Fauré's song "Après un rêve" in a flute and piano arrangement that I bought in 2003.

Here's a story I have never told anyone until now.

I bought that score because I was in love with the song, but never imagined that I would be able to sing it properly. So I thought to myself that if I ever played flute again (recall that the last time I had touched flute was twenty years earlier, in childhood), my goal would be to at least be able to play this one song on flute reasonably close to how I feel it should be played or sung. (There is also a second piece for flute that I wanted to play as well. I will reveal it once I have actually played it with someone.)

Ever since I got back to flute almost two years ago, "Après un rêve" has been on my mind as well as on my shelf, and as a measure of progres, I have actually periodically pulled it out to try to play it. For well over a year, I could not play it anywhere near how I want it to sound. Here's a piano accompaniment track I've been using in the past months:

Eight months ago, I fulfilled a childhood dream, by throwing myself into singing, and in fact, one song I did sing was "Après un rêve"! I still don't sing it as well as I'd like, and will continue working on singing it, but singing in general has had a tremendous positive transferring effect on my flute playing! I am now almost able to play "Après un rêve" how I want (the remaining difficulties being cleaning up the high passages in the arrangement as well as controlling the breath there as well). In any case, I went and played it with Henry for the first time, and it wasn't horrible. In summary, ten years after I bought that score with wishful thinking, I made my dream reality.

By the way, here's a nice performance on flute that inspires me:

Roland de Lassus, as recorder duets

The surprise of the day was when, after watching me mess around with bass recorder, Henry got the idea of playing recorder duets with me. I hadn't known that he played recorder. He said he could play recorders in C (soprano and tenor), and since I didn't have my tenor on me, I gave him my soprano recorder. He picked up a book and went through it to find some early music duets that we could do on recorders. We did some with soprano and bass, then I switched to alto and we did soprano and alto for the rest we found in the book. It was immense fun!

Conclusion

I feel blessed to have the opportunity and inspiration from Henry to continue improving at playing music, and stretch myself further. I have come so far in the past two years.

Second year at July 3 music party: still only listening without playing

Thu, 04 Jul 2013 02:10:07 GMT

Last year Abby and I went to a July 3 music potluck/party at Susan's for the first time. We attended again. I brought my flute.

Again I enjoyed hearing two groups of people playing music. I am not so much into the "old time" music, however, which the group outside in the backyard was playing, so I hung out inside instead, where I liked much better the blues guitar and ukulele and singing and piano. I would like to join in one day myself, but today did not feel up to it. I never took out my flute; it didn't seem appropriate for any of the music anyway.

(Update of 2014-07-04)

At my third year of this annual party, I actually played both piano and ukulele!

Why I hate calling myself "pragmatic" but do

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 02:57:55 GMT

For many years, I resisted calling myself "pragmatic", even though the evolution of my personal philosophy as well as my concrete actions have for much longer been one that broadly should be called pragmatism.

The thing is that for much of my life, I was not a pragmatist in any sense of the word. I think it was only about twenty years ago that I began my journey toward some of the characteristics of pragmatism, both in the broad popular sense and in the philosophical sense, and it was only in the past couple of years that I've finally embraced the adjective as an accurate description of my attitude toward not only philosophical issues (about which I will not say more in this post), but also to living and decision-making.

I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of pragmatism, because for some reason, I was born with a propensity for everything that is not pragmatic. I've taken the official Myers-Briggs Type Indicator a couple of times, including the MBTI Step II, and each time I come out as INFP, which some call the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.personalitypage.com/INFP.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.personalitypage.com/INFP.html">Idealist</span>, ha! (Note: I don't actually take the MBTI terribly seriously, but mention it because a lot of people know about it.)

False "pragmatism"?

The main reason I resist the word "pragmatic" is that all my life, I have seen it used by people to justify anything in the world they do, usually in conjunction with calling critics "idealistic" or some other such name. The word therefore not only lost its meaning for me, but even acquired a negative connotation.

Very often, for example, someone in power will use the word "pragmatic" in order to shut out dissent and maintain the status quo, as though considering "other" ideas or implementing them is by itself suspect. My personal definition of "pragmatic" includes objectively weighing costs and benefits, opportunities and risks. So when I hear someone emotionally and angrily calling himself a "pragmatist", I completely discount that person, whether it's a politician justifying not taking a stand or whether it's a bureaucracy unwilling to experiment with some changes.

Also, I have found that a lot of people who call themselves "pragmatic" have a very cynical view of human nature and don't believe in people, don't believe in possibilities. So "pragmatic" for them means not speaking up about injustice, discouraging their children from pursuing some "impractical" talent, etc. For me, a real pragmatist wouldn't be negative all the time about change or risk, but would confront it head on and look at all sides, not just the side that conveniently maintains the status quo.

We see people lie and cheat all the time in the name of pragmatism, justifying what they do by simply stating that everyone else is doing, that you can't beat the system so you should learn how to win for yourself within it, etc. I think it's a dangerous slippery slope if you rightfully see and acknowledge the negatives in the world but then decide that the correct thing to do is always to just play along. Is this "idealistic"? I don't think so. I think the pragmatic thing to do is to pick your fights, rather than not fight at all.

Idealism

Another reason I have resisted the word "pragmatic" is that I was once academic-oriented. It turns out that I was very badly suited to academia, in large part precisely because I have pragmatic interests and priorities that I finally concluded are hard to shoehorn into an academic environment. But a lot of people I do respect for the quality of their work and their desire to change the world for the better are in fact academic in nature, and are idealists fighting the good fight. I respect this so much that I wanted to be one of them. So it was one of those situations in which I lacked the courage to be my true self. I faced a lot of cognitive dissonance when I was in academia.

In fact, I'm writing this post because sometimes I wonder whether I still "pass" as an idealist, even over a decade after leaving academia permanently. I decided it was about time for me to officially come out as a pragmatist.

Conclusion

Everything that I think and do these days comes from a pragmatic point of view, and so I've decided to embrace that rather than half-hide it.

nil, non-determinism, exceptions: a journey in debugging the software that generates my blog

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 18:15:00 GMT

I mentioned in my initial post for this blog that I have had some problems with the software I use to generate my personal blog, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://octopress.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://octopress.org/">Octopress</span>, and was thinking of migrating to a different platform that might in some ways be more robust to such problems. I ended up not doing so, and I still stand by that decision, but I just yet again ran into a problem with Octopress.

Here I report on how I figured out the problem and begin a conversation about the nature of error handling and API design.

A disclaimer

I want to emphasize that although I will be critiquing some code, I do not mean to imply that I am a perfect programmer or that this software is of really poor quality. I have written software in the past that has crapped out with null or nil errors. In addition, the fact that I basically trust and use this software to drive my blogs is a reflection of the fact that it mostly works. Almost all software that has been written, is being written now, and will be written in the future has bugs. Every day we all trust and use software that we know has bugs. And this blogging platform I use is the product of many, many volunteers who contribute to the world through open source through the goodness of their hearts. I happily use this software, warts and all, and am grateful to everyone who works to maintain and improve it!

Blog generation

The problem arose when I tried to generate my personal blog. I got a nil failure.

Here's the error message (I have omitted the 46-line stack trace):

      Generating... Liquid Exception: undefined method `sub' for nil:NilClass in atom.xml

This is, unfortunately, an example of an error message that is next to useless, and should never appear. I have stated that we as programmers should not generate useless end user error messages, and of course, in context, I am an end user of the blog generating software I use.

Debugging and finding the root cause

Thanks to all the Ruby libraries being open source and installed on my machine, by using the stack trace and debugger, I figured out the immediate cause of the stray nil.

It turns out that Octopress uses Jekyll, which uses pygments.rb to do HTML highlighting of code blocks. (I use Octopress precisely because of its built-in support for code block highlighting.)

The bug is that the code in Jekyll that does syntax highlighting using Pygments makes an assumption that the return value of Pygments.highlight() is never nil:

              @renderer ||= Class.new(Redcarpet::Render::HTML) do
                def block_code(code, lang)
                  lang = lang && lang.split.first || "text"
                  output = add_code_tags(
                    Pygments.highlight(code, :lexer => lang, :options => { :encoding => 'utf-8' }),
                    lang
                  )
                end

                def add_code_tags(code, lang)
                  code = code.sub(/<pre>/,'<pre><code class="' + lang + '">')
                  code = code.sub(/<\/pre>/,"</code></pre>")
                end
              end

Well, it can be nil and was for me, and therefore add_code_tags was calling code.sub() with code being nil.

The bug exists in all the more recent versions of pygments.rb, including 0.4.2 (which is used for my personal blog) and 0.3.7 (which is used for this blog) and the latest released version, 0.5.1. The bug was actually reported by someone two weeks ago, and I added extra commentary, but it has not yet been fixed, so I plan to contribute a fix and submit a pull request.

Whose responsibility to check for `nil`?

Whenever there is an error, one has to ask whose responsibility it was to

detect the error
handle the error

I think it is poor practice to engage in random and spotty "defensive programming" that checks for nil here and there, willy-nilly, just to avoid a big program crash. There should be clearly delineated boundaries of error handling.

In this case, it is surprising that a syntax highlighter for some text could return nil. One would think that if a syntax highlighter got confused, it could return the text verbatim, for example, without any special formatting. (By the way, don't get me started on the abominable use of HTML string hacking in this code instead of, say, building a proper HTML AST; I'll write about that topic later.)

Documentation of API

Unfortunately, the documentation of the Pygments API was incomplete in lib/pygments/popen.rb, where highlight is defined:

    # Public: Highlight code.
    #
    # Takes a first-position argument of the code to be highlighted, and a
    # second-position hash of various arguments specifiying highlighting properties.
    def highlight(code, opts={})
      # If the caller didn't give us any code, we have nothing to do,
      # so return right away.
      return code if code.nil? || code.empty?

      # Callers pass along options in the hash
      opts[:options] ||= {}

      # Default to utf-8 for the output encoding, if not given.
      opts[:options][:outencoding] ||= 'utf-8'

      # Get back the string from mentos and force encoding if we can
      str = mentos(:highlight, nil, opts, code)
      str.force_encoding(opts[:options][:outencoding]) if str.respond_to?(:force_encoding)
      str
    end

A problem with dynamically typed language culture

The documentation doesn't actually fully specify what the arguments can be, and does not specify what the result should be either! This is a glaring drawback of most code that I have seen in dynamically typed languages such as Ruby. People don't document exactly what can come in or out. A newcomer to a code base (such as me in this situation) cannot just read off the types and know immediately what is going on and what has been promised and what is delivered by a function. As a result, the code reader has to play compiler and read a lot more code to try to figure out what is going on.

In principle, someone writing code in a dynamically typed language could provide very helpful comments that amount to informal type annotations, but in practice people do not. I have found in my two decades of programming that human psychology trumps theoretical possibility any day. If something is optional, people won't do it, unless there is a very strong de facto community standard. (It turns out, for example, that what I really admire about the Ruby community is that for some reason, there is a very strong de facto community standard of doing at least some unit testing as part of the whole development process. I find this sadly missing in some statically typed language communities.)

In code in a statically typed language such as OCaml (or Haskell or Scala), I would expect to see:

let highlight (code : string) (opts : my_map) : string = //...

and expect that the return value should be a String, or

let highlight (code : string) (opts : my_map) : string option = //...

to indicate that the return value could be either Some(formatted_code) or None.

`nil` all over the place

Reading the Ruby code, I saw that the situation is even more complex than I thought:

      # If the caller didn't give us any code, we have nothing to do,
      # so return right away.
      return code if code.nil? || code.empty?

Wow: code can be nil, in which case nil is returned.

All code that can return nil should document this fact so that the caller knows what to do. Ideally, the writer of pygments.rb should have documented this fact, and then the writer of Jekyll would in turn have added nil checking in its rendering code.

Furthermore, it turns out that mentos() can return nil on a non-nil code string! This was a surprise to me.

`nil` is not even the real problem here: non-determinism is

mentos() is not very well documented. Until I read this code, I didn't realize that pygments.rb actually embeds a call to the Python interpreter to execute the Python Pygments parser to do the real work! In lib/pygments/popen.rb:

    # Our 'rpc'-ish request to mentos. Requires a method name, and then optional
    # args, kwargs, code.
    def mentos(method, args=[], kwargs={}, original_code=nil)
      # Open the pipe if necessary
      start unless alive?

      begin
        # Timeout requests that take too long.
        timeout_time = 8

        Timeout::timeout(timeout_time) do
          # ...[I omitted some code]
        end
      rescue Timeout::Error
        # If we timeout, we need to clear out the pipe and start over.
        @log.error "[#{Time.now.iso8601}] Timeout on a mentos #{method} call"
        stop "Timeout on mentos #{method} call."
      end

    rescue Errno::EPIPE, EOFError
    stop "EPIPE"
    raise MentosError, "EPIPE"
    end

It turns out that fundamental problem is not nil so much as non-determinism: my computer was under heavy load when I was generating my blog, and therefore the timeout kicked in and caused a failure to communicate with the Python process and therefore for nil to end up being returned. This non-determinism is worse than nil. I think that in a situation like this, an exception is called for. highlight() should actually raise an exception, which would then be propagated to Jekyll, which could give a useful error message about the timeout. I think this is a better design than return nil (or if using a statically typed language, a None).

I was also disappointed that logging was used in this code, indicating that it was known that bad things could happen, but the logged information was not used in generating a useful exception.

Amusingly, upon discovering the logging code, I used it, setting the magic environment variable MENTOS_LOG (from reading the code) to a file, so that I could see what happens, and verify that the timeout happened:

# Logfile created on 2013-06-29 10:26:19 -0400 by logger.rb/36483
I, [2013-06-29 10:26 #13799]  INFO -- : [2013-06-29T10:26:19-04:00] Starting pid 16533 with fd 10.
I, [2013-06-29 10:26 #13799]  INFO -- : [2013-06-29T10:26:19-04:00] Out header: {"method":"highlight","args":null,"kwargs":{"lexer":"console","options":{"encoding":"utf-8","outencoding":"utf-8"},"fd":10,"id":"TVQSJNBV","bytes":147}}
E, [2013-06-29 10:26 #13799] ERROR -- : [2013-06-29T10:26:27-04:00] Timeout on a mentos highlight call
I, [2013-06-29 10:26 #13799]  INFO -- : [2013-06-29T10:26:27-04:00] Killing pid: 16533. Reason: Timeout on mentos highlight call.
I, [2013-06-29 10:26 #13799]  INFO -- : [2013-06-29T10:26:27-04:00] Killing pid: . Reason: Exiting

Testing

It turns out that there is a place where the intended behavior is in a sense documented: the unit tests in test_pygments.rb:

  def test_returns_nil_on_timeout
    large_code = REDIS_CODE * 300
    code = P.highlight(large_code) # a 30 mb highlight request will timeout
    assert_equal nil, code
  end

The test creates some huge string in hope of triggering a timeout, and then asserts that the result should be nil!

OK, fair enough: assuming that the Jekyll authors knew of this intention, then it was Jekyll's responsibility to test for nil in the call to Pygments.highlight().

The test is not very satisfactory because it artificially tries to generate a timeout. Instead, one could do some mocking or refactoring of mentos().

`nil` is still not OK; but are exceptions OK?

So everything is OK, now that we can take nil to mean a timeout, right? No, actually, highlight() can still return a nil just because code was nil. It is bad to bin random different failure modes into one return value. Personally, I would choose to enforce that the input code is never nil and that the output is never nil, and that an exception is raised if there is a timeout.

An alternative is to not use an exception, but use a union success/failure type instead. This is the route that <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://blog.stackmob.com/2013/03/why-we-avoid-throwing-exceptions-at-stackmob/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://blog.stackmob.com/2013/03/why-we-avoid-throwing-exceptions-at-stackmob/">StackMob uses for its Scala code</span>. Other Scala developers such as Jessica Kerr have been arguing against the use of exceptions also.

Google's systems-level statically typed language Go deliberately does not even have exceptions, and therefore mandates a style of error handling that involves returning a success and failure everywhere.

I think there are situations for exceptions and situations for reifying errors as ordinary values in a success/failure object. I will explore this topic further in this blog. Note that even in the Haskell community, there is continued debate over how to handle errors; a famous post compares eight different ways to handle errors in Haskell. There is no consensus because there are a lot of tradeoffs involved when it comes to error handling.

My fix

For now, before I propose to pygments.rb that an exception be raised (this would be least intrusive to Jekyll, whose source code would not need to be changed for the exception to propagate usefully), I simply hacked 8 to 80 to avoid a timeout!

(Update of 2013-12-18)

The pygments.rb library has finally been updated with a MENTOS_TIMEOUT environment variable.

This is obviously a short-term hack, and I don't see how a typical Octopress user would even find out about this new environment variable, but until I implement a better solution and submit a pull request to the pygments.rb team, I have no right to complain!

(Update of 2014-08-08)

I submitted a pygments.rb pull request to fix a regression bug in which any use of MENTOS_TIMEOUT caused an instant type error:

/Users/chen/.rubies/ruby-2.1.2/lib/ruby/2.1.0/timeout.rb:76:in `timeout': undefined method `zero?' for "100":String (NoMethodError)
    from /Users/chen/.gem/ruby/2.1.2/gems/pygments.rb-0.6.0/lib/pygments/popen.rb:220:in `mentos'

(Update of 2015-01-28)

It took over 5 months (!) for my pull request to be looked at, after I begged that the bug be fixed because it was a show-stopper for anyone using the environment variable MENTOS_TIMEOUT. A problem was found in my fix for the case where the environment variable is nil (ugh, I didn't check the nil case: it's so easy to forget about nil cases), but I resolved it, and finally my fixed pull request was merged into pygments.rb version 0.6.2. Thus ended a two-year journey to finally fix a cascade of show-stopping type errors.

The final diff involved trying to parse a string into an integer and catching the exception if any:

-        timeout_time = ENV["MENTOS_TIMEOUT"] || 8
+        # Invalid MENTOS_TIMEOUT results in just using default.
+        timeout_time = Integer(ENV["MENTOS_TIMEOUT"]) rescue 8

Conclusion

I've used my recent frustration at being unable to publish my personal blog as a vehicle to begin a conversation about error handling and the issues of API design and documentation in the face of errors. I hope you enjoyed the ride.

We should not create this kind of terrible error message for the end user

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 23:44:00 GMT

I have a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone. I recently encountered a problem: auto-updating of apps failed with this terrible error message:

<blockquote> Application cannot be installed in the default install location. </blockquote>

Also, a lot of time and bandwidth was each time spent on re-downloading the app and then failing, with no way to gracefully recover.

If you search the Web for this unpleasant error message, you will see hundreds if not thousands of confused end users like me asking on various forums how to deal with this.

I feel pretty bad about this situation, both as a programmer and as an end user.

As an end user

As an end user, I know very little about smartphones. I am not currently a mobile-device developer. I just want things to work, and I have never read the huge manual that came with my phone. If there is an error in my operation of the phone, I want some kind of useful guidance (ideally very specific and tailored to a common use case known by the vendor), not a mysterious generic error message.

As a programmer

It turns out that there is internal device storage and SD card storage, and if you run out of space somewhere, an error can happen, and that there is a default install location for apps. The gory details for developers are here.

Clearing some space and also moving a large app to SD card storage solved my problem.

So why that terrible error message? Why not just tell the end user exactly what is going on? Why not something like:

<blockquote> The application X could not be installed at (device storage | SD card storage) because you don't have enough space. You can try clearing more space, or go to your application settings to move it to (SD card storage | device storage). </blockquote>

The application should know exactly what is going on, and not only that, should be able to suggest a course of action based on all the relevant variables, such as how much space there is in different places, how large the application is, etc.

Why?

I haven't seen the source code that generates the existing error message, but as a programmer, I can guess what might be happening.

I have been as guilty as anyone else of not providing good end user error messages in software I have written. It is very easy to do the following sloppy things instead:

Throwing exceptions that contain no useful information except some string
Not handling an exception close to where useful recovery can actually happen

It is superficially "more work" to throw an exception that includes all relevant information, and for handlers to also do something intelligent rather than just pass the buck all the way to some top level catch-all handler.

Also, why should the phone download the whole app and then fail, if there is actually enough information to guess that the whole update might fail? Surely there is information about how big the app is, before downloading it?

And what's with the default concurrent downloads of many updates at the same time, which greatly increases the probability of failure of all of them, when serializing the downloads results in less use of temporary space?

Conclusion

We programmers clearly are not conscientious enough about error handling and reporting. I believe that today, more than ever, we have a responsibility to handle failure gracefully in software. I believe that failure should even be considered to be the default expectation, rather than success, in order to create reliable software. As Dick Wall said at the recent 2013 Pittsburgh TechFest, it's not enough to design and code and test primarily for the "happy path".

There are ways to do error handling better, but they require serious thinking up front. This is a large topic we will be exploring in depth on this blog.

(Update of 2013-06-27)

By sheer coincidence, a great interview on human-centered design arrived in my RSS feed. Check it out.

I will be the first to admit that I don't know much about UX or human-centered design. I just have some intuitions as an end user. I think we developers should learn more about this stuff in a more formal, serious way. And it's just a matter of thinking about the ultimate end user. Even if we are not programming for the ultimate end user, we are at least programming for other programmers. If we are writing an API, the principles that guide human behavior must still be valid, even if programmers are an unusual subset of human beings! We write code not primarily for computers but for other human beings (including our future selves).

Pittsburgh Python: night of the favorite module

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 22:50:00 GMT

The Pittsburgh Python User Group had another "favorite module night". I enjoy this format because I get to learn about what people find useful, so that I may perhaps use it myself!

How I benefited in the past

For example, one of these "favorite module night" sessions was where I learned about Kenneth Reitz's requests library. Very often it is easy to not be aware of the rapidly changing ecology of very useful libraries in a programming language ecosystem outside of the official "standard library", especially when using a language that is not one's primary working language. For example, Python has never been one of my primary working languages, so I'm not as up to date on what all the best tools are to use. But just a couple of weeks ago, I had to do some work with Python, and requests came in very handy.

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://ipython.org/notebook.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://ipython.org/notebook.html">IPython Notebook</span>

Josh Adelman opened the show-and-tell with a demo of <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://ipython.org/notebook.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://ipython.org/notebook.html">IPython Notebook</span>. This is a truly fantastic interactive environment for developing code while creating a full document for publication and sharing. He uses it not only for research but also for his students to use in his teaching.

If you've used Mathematica, the concept is similar to that environment.

I'm also excited that IPython Notebook has been the direct inspiration for similar projects for other languages, e.g., Scala Notebook for Scala in development.

Josh gave a link to this cool blog that uses IPython Notebook.

Sentry and Raven

Nick Sloan presented on Sentry, a service for collecting errors in your program and notifying you of them, and Raven, the official Python client for Sentry. Sentry is actually open source, so you could host it yourself, but paying for the hosted service provides conveniences.

Using Sentry is no more than using ordinary Python logging after calling a setup function. The ease of use made it sound like a winner.

docopt

Joe Esposito presented on docopt, a library for command line parsing. The interesting thing about it is that it implements an external domain-specific language for describing command lines: you write a usage message, as a string, and docopt parses it in order to deduce what the expectations and constraints are. This is a very ambitious approach, contrary to the usual internal API-based approaches, some of which are sophisticated and implement an internal domain-specific language.

Of course, Joe contrasted this library with one of the standard command line parsing libraries for Python, argparse, which is lower-level so that when you use it, the high-level end user usage is not as immediately readable.

There were a lot of good questions about docopt since it seemed magical. I've decided to write more about all this in a separate blog post about command line parsers.

hypothesis

I gave a short 5-minute presentation on hypothesis, a library in development for doing property-based testing, inspired by QuickCheck and ScalaCheck. As I have done recently when giving a much longer talk on property-based testing using ScalaCheck, I focused on motivating the use of property-based testing as an addition to example-based testing.

Materials for my lightning talk are here, and my few slides are below:

`itertools`

Tim Lesher talked about itertools, a very useful part of the standard library that provides support for efficient functional programming idioms. Part of the efficiency comes from the use of iterators in order to avoid constructing intermediate lists; this is a way of simulating the lazy sequences that are standard in languages such as ML, Haskell, Scala, and Clojure.

Tim noted that although itertools is powerful, "don't be stupid": don't write obscure-looking code with it just because you can.

Josh noted that the documentation for itertools is great, with recipes that show you not only how to do things, and also with code for the equivalent more complicated code that you would have to write if you didn't use itertools. I agree that the documentation for itertools is a model of high-quality documentation for a library. Check it out, and use it!

`argparse`

Craig gave a little presentation on argparse, the aforementioned standard library for command line parsing. He noted it was ironic that he had prepared to speak on it before Joe independently decided to talk about docopt. (Actually, I like argparse and had considered talking about it before Craig submitted it already.)

One feature he uses from argparse is the ability to create mutually exclusive groups. There was a question of whether this is supported in docopt.

As mentioned earlier, I'll write more about both argparse and docopt in a separate blog post.

The Python Standard Library by Example

Someone shared not a "favorite module", but a favorite book, "The Python Standard Library by Example". I'm happy he did, because it is in fact an excellent reference for anyone using the Python standard library, with concrete examples that you can take and use. Too often, I have found that standard documentation is too terse.

The book is based on "Python Module of the Week", which is a great online resource.

Introductions for new people

An important part of the vibe of the Pittsburgh Python User Group is how it tries to get everyone actively involved in the local Python community.

There is a tradition of periodically having everyone introduce themselves, to counter the tendency sometimes in these kinds of groups for people to attend a meeting out of curiosity and then silently leave and perhaps not come back, out of intimidation or not knowing how to benefit or contribute. I know I have done that before, especially when attending the meeting of a group where I didn't really know anybody ahead of time and still knew very little about the topics discussed by the group (such as when I joined the Pittsburgh Ruby group as one who had barely used any Ruby).

Since so many people showed up, and a lot seemed to be new faces, we had a round of introductions. I hope we'll continue to see some of these new faces in the future!

Conclusion

Thanks again to Google Pittsburgh for hosting the Pittsburgh Python User Group meeting, and Steve Gross of Google for being the guy who makes it able for us to meet there!

Announcing a new blog: "The Conscientious Programmer"

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 21:06:21 GMT

I have created a new blog devoted to computer programming, called The Conscientious Programmer.

I will continue to post here on all non-programming topics!

Pittsburgh Java User Group: Building and Evolving a Java API

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 21:49:00 GMT

The topic for the featured presentation at the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://java.net/projects/pittjug/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://java.net/projects/pittjug/">Pittsburgh Java User Group</span> (PittJUG) was "Building and Evolving a Java API", presented by Eric Stein of Fulminatus Consulting. I was excited to attend because API design is difficult but important, and today more than ever, because of the trend toward integrating many services to build an application, and toward providing such services (both externally and internally).

(For past reports of mine on PittJUG, see the PittJUG archives in my other blog.)

The presentation was very good. (Eric's slides are available here, but as always with slides, be aware that it is just an outline, as good slides really should be, and the actual presentation and group discussion had all the substance.) Note that although some of the specific recommendations and examples are Java-specific, the entire area of good API design is general and is applicable no matter what programming language you are using.

However, the presentation also filled me with a combination of sadness, because our computing profession could have done better up front to make good API design much easier in various ways. On the positive side, it's better late than never.

A report on the presentation, with my commentary:

API design for whom?

Whenever doing something at all, the question "for whom?" should always be asked and answered. Eric observed that APIs must meet the different needs of different users, so it's useful to identify three specific end users with different needs, and look at the situation from each of their points of view:

API owner
specification owner
logging owner

His inclusion of the "logging owner" was intriguing because the point of view from someone whose job it is to wade through logs is often slighted. But in light of ever more complex applications as well as errors and the need for recovery and quick turnaround in fixing them, I believe that Eric is right to argue that logging should be seriously designed, to "tell a consistent story". I am taking this advice to heart.

Design process

Eric advised that design should start with use cases. And client code, from the perspective of the end user, as well as tests, should be written up front. He didn't use the term, but this is test-driven development (TDD), which in my mind has been an unfortunate term, because it is really test-driven design, which happens to have the nice effect of kick-starting development as well. (I'll be writing more later on this blog about TDD; I no longer start a new project without a TDD mentality and process, so productive and efficient I have found it.)

One thing that Eric said was to start with the most important cases first, not the easy cases. Very good advice: I have learned the hard way that it is easy to pat yourself on the back and start with easy cases to feel like you're making progress, but this often leads to hitting a block when getting to the hard cases, and then having to do some major redesign at that point. I've found that if something is really important, it needs to be addressed immediately, and often will drive the design of the components required to make the important hard case work. (I'll be writing more later on this blog about "the hard case", especially in the context of "sad paths" that are critical.)

Stability

Stability is the big difficulty in API design. It's really daunting, actually, to think of the idea of "write once, support forever", but people get very unhappy, rightfully, if they start using your API and then things break on them after it changes.

Simplicity

Eric argued that a good API should be easy to read as well as easy to write. This is all about human psychology.

Also, he noted that a side effect of his recommendation to write client code and tests first is that you get to see the point of view of the client, and can use this experience to weed out, for example, APIs that require a lot of annoying boilerplate code.

Subclassing

There was a lot of good material covered about the dangers of exposing or mandating or allowing subclassing.

I agree with Eric about the dangers of subclassing. The ability to subclass existing classes is the single most abused feature of object-oriented languages, and when it comes to API design, the problems are even more magnified because of the needs for API security and evolution. Almost always, you want to use composition, not subclassing. I'm pretty annoyed that composition, which was well-understood in the 1960s and 1970s, ended up being "forgotten" in some circles. Eric gave the classic example of a totally disastrous API resulting from the Java library originally coming with a Properties class that was a subclass of Hashtable.

Immutability

Immutable objects have huge advantages over mutable objects.

This is something has been known by the functional programming community since Lisp in the 1950s and [ML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)) in the 1970s and [Haskell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)) and [Erlang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)) in the 1980s.

But better late than never.

My example: Apache HTTP Components

I have observed that APIs in such languages as Java and Ruby have more and more gravitated toward the use of immutable objects. A very good pattern I have seen is to use a builder (which has internal mutable state) to finally build an instance of an immutable object. Just recently, I was using the Java Apache HTTP Components library and moved from the stable version (4.2.5) to the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-dev/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-dev/">beta version</span> (4.3-beta2) (because of bugs in the stable version), and happened to notice that a whole slew of methods I was calling were deprecated in favor of a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.apache.org/dist/httpcomponents/httpclient/RELEASE_NOTES.txt" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.apache.org/dist/httpcomponents/httpclient/RELEASE_NOTES.txt">new builder-based API</span>. Excerpts from the release notes of the beta:

Support for Java 7 try-with-resources
Added fluent Builder classes
Deprecation of preference and configuration API based on HttpParams interface in favor of constructor injection and plain configuration objects
Reliance on object immutability instead of access synchronization for thread safety

It was very good to see that decades-old lessons about good design are finally making it into important Java libraries!

Types

A lot of what Eric talked about had to do with types: type safety as well as the ramifications of types when evolving an API.

`null`

Several of his examples (see his slides) involved the problem of null, Hoare's billion-dollar mistake, which I gave a little talk about last year. Basically, null is a hole in a type system, and as a result, in Java one has to compensate by documenting in comments (but not having type checked) when and where something could be null or could not be, so that API clients know what to pass into methods and what to expect in return.

Java is not hopelessly behind: Java 8 has the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://download.java.net/jdk8/docs/api/java/util/Optional.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://download.java.net/jdk8/docs/api/java/util/Optional.html">Optional<T> class</span> to help programmers transition away from using null. C++14 has a proposal to add to the standard library std::optional<T>.

Admittedly, these are late patches that do not actually prevent continued use of null (ideally, a programming language should simply not even have it; languages such as ML and Haskell from the 1970s and 1980s happily did without this terrible construct), but these are definitely steps forward. New languages being designed and implemented today from a clean slate have no excuse to perpetuate this billion-dollar error: for example, Rust does not have null.

Strings

Eric noted that use a string is throwing away type safety.

I think the use of strings everywhere is a disaster second to that of using null. The problem is that strings have to be parsed for information. And many people do not actually correctly do such parsing and validation, hence the prevalence of injection attacks.

Even apart from security, the manipulation of strings that actually are supposed to have an intended structure is a major cause of late-caught runtime errors, and of programmer confusion. For example, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://blog.lunatech.com/2009/02/03/what-every-web-developer-must-know-about-url-encoding" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://blog.lunatech.com/2009/02/03/what-every-web-developer-must-know-about-url-encoding">this report on URLs</span> has been recirculating lately, because of errors in both libraries and client code when dealing with URLs as strings rather than as strongly typed data.

Booleans

Eric observed that even booleans are an API design smell: booleans are a special case of an enumeration of possible states. What happens if you want to add a new state but your old API used booleans?

Exceptions

Eric recommended unchecked over Java's checked exceptions.

Sadly, in my Java programming in the past decade, I've had to deal with the fact that Java made a big mistake by introducing checked exceptions in the first place; the ramifications were not thought out then. Note that C++11 has finally deprecated exception specifiers, and exceptions in ML have always been unchecked since the introduction in the 1970s, while Java ignored two decades of experience and went ahead and bolted on checked exceptions.

Not strings!

Eric advised that all failure data should be included in a thrown exception. Too often, we see exception throwing code that just throws a string message. Then the catcher has to try to parse this message for important data (which may not even be present in the string). If you're going to throw an exception, write a class and stash away important information, not a string message.

A short note on primitive obsession

My friend Adam who also attended the PittJUG meeting noted that what we're basically talking about is primitive obsession. The larger lesson here is that when designing robust, clear, and safe APIs, using primitives is often a mistake. Everything in the problem domain should really be modeled as its own type, not as a primitive.

Evolution of an API

The trickiest thing to get right is making an API so that it can evolve in the future without breaking backwards compatibility. This compatibility can be of different forms:

behavioral
binary
source

Eric talked a lot about weakening or strengthening contracts. There is a lot of hairy stuff involved, including knowledge of Java compiler internals. I think this is a space where more research is needed for the future in order to get the formal semantics of API evolution done right.

japi-checker was mentioned as one tool that one can use for Java.

Resources

In the context of software development in Java, it is impossible to avoid mentioning Joshua Bloch's early book (subsequently revised for a second edition), "Effective Java". It is a daunting book, over 300 pages long, but it is an indispensable reference for anyone caring about good programming in Java. Eric called it the "gold standard".

Check out his links to other resources on his slides.

Package design

A question came up about Eric's recommendation of using package-private visibility and his observation that a lot of people don't know about package-private, and don't design packages.

Modules

My observation is that people don't design packages because they're not actually modules. Java was invented without a module system, although Java 8 originally was slated to finally include a module system in the form of Jigsaw, which was, however, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/project-jigsaw-delayed-until-java-9-198007" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/project-jigsaw-delayed-until-java-9-198007">delayed to Java 9</span>. Meanwhile, there is OSGi.

I don't like sounding like a broken record, but Standard ML came with a module system in the 1980s, and there has been further work in the area of module systems, including first-class module systems that go beyond stratified module systems. The reality is that Java was born in the 1990s an "old" language, with no positive technical innovations, that feels more like a language from the 1960s.

Conclusion

Eric Stein gave an excellent talk about API design, both from the broadest perspective, focused on human beings and clients, and down and dirty with Java language features to avoid or use carefully.

Addendum: my involvement with Java

I had a chance to review some of my feelings I have had about programming in Java myself. I've been a member of PittJUG for well over a decade now. I first signed up on the PittJUG mailing list in June 1999. I have not always been a regular attendee of the meetings: after some initial years of interest, I stopped attending for some years, and became regular again in 2009. So I've been around Java since it was a very young language, and all the while knowing of all the problems with the language. So why did I chose it as my main programming language a decade ago, and why have I stuck with it for so long, until last last year, when I decided to write no new Java code, and move on to Scala? I will explain my decision-making in a forthcoming blog post.

(Update of 2013-07-05)

An interesting presentation on APIs in the enterprise came my way.

Introducing this new programming blog

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 09:40:00 GMT

Hi. My name is Franklin Chen. I already have a personal Web site and blog.

But I ended up only writing a little bit about programming on that blog.

So I decided it was time to start a separate blog to devoted entirely to computer programming. The problem with the all-in-one personal blog was that I ended up never really working up a momentum to post the kinds of articles I wanted to write about programming.

Why "The Conscientious Programmer"?

At some point in the past year or two, I reflected on how I could best summarize my attitudes and aspirations as a programmer, as someone who loves programming and also works as a professional software developer.

I came up with the decidedly non-sexy term conscientious programmer. It is also a term that requires explanation, because you could easily interpret it as having a connotation that is moralistic, pretentious, or boring!

It is impossible to summarize in a sound bite what I mean by the term, so I have created this blog in order to continually illustrate, by example, the kinds of technical and other issues that come up in software development that I grapple with.

However, since a sound bite is required in some circumstances, here's what I currently have:

<blockquote> I am a conscientious computer programmer, committed to designing, building, and testing correct, efficient, documented, maintainable software that meets users' real needs. </blockquote>

My material will come from my own experiences (successes and failures, past and present) as well as from those of others. See the About page for more sound bites about what this blog will be about.

Let's start immediately with my personal experience from just the past couple of days!

Future topics

But first, here is a little sample of topics I will write about in the future:

positive and negative experiences with statically typed languages
positive and negative experiences with dynamically typed languages
the good and bad of the polyglot programming world
what is object-oriented programming anyway?
what is functional programming anyway?
Agile notions
test-driven development, behavior-driven development, other testing topics
static analysis
code performance
human performance
controversies over the adjective "pragmatic"
how much theory should one know or use?
how to teach
how to learn
how to focus and not be a dilettante
how to spread ideas
is syntax important?
are macros a good idea?
are unsound type systems justified?
what is a type system anyway or what should it be?
monads
editors and IDEs
are software patterns a mistake in disguise?
software evolution and maintenance
planning for the future vs. getting it done today
role of emotion in decision making
what is "community"?
politics of open source vs. free software
open standards
questions of diversity in our profession
education

The dilemmas I encountered when deciding to create this blog

I already encountered a dilemma some years ago when I thought that I should have a personal blog to regularly post to. I had messed around with Blogger and WordPress and they were not at all suitable for me. Luckily, I discovered <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://octopress.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://octopress.org/">Octopress</span> and it got me going very quickly. I'm still using it.

If all were going smoothly with the personal blog, then I probably would not have any dilemma when deciding to create the new blog; I would just use exactly the same Octopress platform.

Or would I?

Desire for novelty: good or bad?

I am not immune to the thrill of novelty. I am not an extreme early adopter, but I also do not entirely subscribe to the philosophy <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/if_it_ain%27t_broke,_don%27t_fix_it" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/if_it_ain%27t_broke,_don%27t_fix_it">"if it ain't broke, don't fix it"</span>. I like opportunities for doing something differently and better than in the past, but I like to evaluate these rationally. This is an example of what I mean by "conscientious programmer": always be aware of risks and tradeoffs when making any kind of decision.

One thing that is sometimes forgotten in the rush to make a decision is that it is premature to immediately start making lists of risks and tradeoffs. First, you have to step back and figure out what the real goals are. Many projects fail because the assessments and the followup actions were correct, but toward the wrong goal. Solving the correct problem is more important than solving the wrong problem correctly.

In the case of choosing which software to use for my new blog, there were actually several considerations.

Unstable branch of Octopress

Octopress's stable master branch is a continuation of version 2.0. At some point for my personal blog, I got excited about trying out the unstable 2.1 branch because of various improvements. I migrated over, and periodically endured a surprising amount of pain. It wasn't just because I had to manually move files around and resolve merge conflicts and refactor my config files, but also bugs kept popping up, and I had to spend time fixing them.

In retrospect, it was a mistake being an early adopter of branch 2.1. I stopped pulling and merging over a month ago, when it became clear that the migration to <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jekyllrb.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</span> 1.0 was causing major refactorings by the developers of the Octopress 2.1 branch that were breaking everything on my blog.

It would not have been a mistake if my goal were to help test and develop Octopress. That is a noble goal, because Octopress has been a huge positive contributor to the world of blogging, as a static site generator that is programmable and comes with a good default theme (which I still use). But my real goal is to write and post content, not spend my time fixing or configuring Octopress.

Coming back to Octopress `master` branch?

The official recommendation of the Octopress team right now (as of two days ago, June 22) is to use master, because once 2.1 is cleaned up, it will actually become 3.0 and there will be a tested migration path from 2.0.

I confess to having a psychological resistance to "downgrading", for this new blog, from my 2.1-based setup on my personal blog, but this is exactly the moment when it is necessary to remember that I want to be a conscientious programmer.

Switching to a new blogging platform?

The idea also occurred to me to use a completely different blogging platform. <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/">Hakyll</span> has always seemed appealing to me, because it is driven by Haskell (Octopress is driven by Ruby). I prefer programming in Haskell to programming in Ruby, both because of the static type safety and because of the expected considerable performance improvement in site generation (right now, full generation of my personal blog takes a very long time).

But after looking at Hakyll, and being tempted to get into it, I decided that my real goal is not to spend a lot of time hacking Haskell as a personal side project, and creating cool themes and features for Hakyll, but to get a blog up and running so that I can focus on content for the blog. <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding">Bikeshedding</span> is not what I'm here for.

So I used Octopress again for this new blog.

By the way, if you are interested in using Octopress, here is a great <span class="link-defunct" data-url="http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/applications/getting-started-with-octopress/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/applications/getting-started-with-octopress/">tutorial</span>.

Flexibility

Another thing I try to remember is to avoid getting backed into a corner when it comes to decision-making. I like to think about the future as well as the present. What if...?

I know that if I wanted to, in the future I could switch blogging platforms at will, by doing some programming. The decisions that I am making now are not irreversible. Using a programmable static site generator means that I have full control over paths, styles, generation of RSS feeds, insertion of JavaScript-based features (such as the Disqus commenting system), etc.

Thinking up front about the future and how it might be different and what I might need or want to do in the future is not just idle daydreaming; I find it an essential final step in making a decision now and focusing on action now, with the peace of mind that I no longer have to worry about the future because I already have a Plan B. We must always assume possible failure and future change. But we don't have to panic about it.

Conclusion

I've started this new programming blog, using the stable master branch of Octopress. I hope we'll share some interesting experiences here!

Pittsburgh Scala meetup: Introduction to Actors Systems

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 03:10:20 GMT

Josh Suereth spoke again at the latest Pittsburgh Scala Meetup event.

He gave an introduction to actors using Akka. I'd attended a version of his introductory talk over a year ago, actually, when he gave it at the first Pittsburgh TechFest, so it was basically review for me.

However, the discussion during the presentation and afterwards was what the meetup was really about, and I found that really useful.

Sadly, I still have not yet written a real actor-based software system yet.

Hiking in Boyce Park

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 01:32:24 GMT

Abby and I did a tiny short hike together in Boyce Park. We've barely done any hiking at all this year, because of her accident breaking a foot and my doing the Pittsburgh Marathon and then getting poison ivy on a hike I did with a friend last month.

We thought we'd combine a hike with a trip to Monroeville to Patel Brothers to buy Indian groceries and then eat at <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.udipicafepittsburgh.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.udipicafepittsburgh.com/">Udipi Cafe</span>, so we did.

It was good to be out together again. We miss hiking so much.

Boyce Park

Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival 2013: dancing salsa to Eddie Palmieri

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 02:57:23 GMT

Abby and I went downtown in Pittsburgh to check out the great Eddie Palmieri and his salsa orchestra, one of the main attractions of this year's Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival. Although I have a number of Eddie Palmieri's music recordings, this was the first time I saw him live.

We arrived later than intended, so the place was already packed. There were guards for a taped-off seating section in front of the stage, apparently reserved for VIPs. However, we were asked if we were dancers, and we said yes, so they let us into the dancing area, which was already pretty packed with hardcore Pittsburgh salsa fans.

Some videos

You can see some of us local dancers here (Abby and I were dancing further from the stage):

More footage here from another source here:

I admit to being slightly disappointed (but not surprised at all) that Palmieri and friends did not display as much jazz virtuosity as they possess (and which you can find in their more "Latin jazz" vs. "salsa" work). They played tamer improvisations, as they were playing primarily for dancing here.

Crowded

Because it got more and more crowded, and also the music was rather loud anywhere near the stage, at some point we left the designated dancing section and exited. We continued dancing for a bit on a side street off Penn Ave. Eventually we had enough and decided to wander off to Point State Park for a cool-down walk and to check out other acts for the Three Rivers Arts Festival (which the jazz portion is a subset of).

Point State Park

The fountain:

A curiosity that we saw at the bridge to Point State Park was <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://changjinlee.net/floating_echo/index.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://changjinlee.net/floating_echo/index.html">"Floating Echo"</span>, a translucent floating Buddha as public art:

Conclusion

It was good to get out there and dance with Abby. I had been feeling really tired all day, but insisted on getting out of the house and was glad I did. I felt it was particularly important to do something with Abby this weekend, because last weekend, after Pittsburgh TechFest and my health problems that led to going to urgent care, I had to bail out of a planned hike together on Sunday, and Abby went to the "Getting wet at Ohiopyle hike" alone, without me, her first hike of the entire year (because of her breaking her foot in winter).

Celebrating National Running Day quietly in Frick Park

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 02:19:02 GMT

Last year, I made something of a big deal of celebrating <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.runningday.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.runningday.org/">National Running Day</span> in Schenley Park in Pittsburgh, for sentimental reasons. This year, I celebrated more quietly, by simply running one of my standard easy runs, a 5-mile run in Frick Park.

I have nothing to say, other than I'm happy to be out there running.

Luna Mono Sandals

I wore my Luna Mono Sandals, which is much thicker (12mm) than the Luna Venado Sandals (7mm) that I wore a lot last year. The Mono's thickness makes it feel much different from the Venado: welcome cushioning, but at the expense of ground feel and flexibility. It's all about tradeoffs.

Some photos from the run

Some thoughts on starting to give talks a year ago

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:49:02 GMT

One challenge always, in giving a technical talk that is of limited length (in this case, no more than an hour long), is that of how to be helpful to an audience of mixed background knowledge, and in particular, when planning a talk that is geared toward giving an accurate and appealing taste of the gist of some ideas.

I started giving talks only last year, and I have been learning more and more about how difficult the task is to reach people, to be helpful in giving an introduction, a survey, that aims to help them solve problems in their life. In my opinion, that is the only valid reason for me to give a talk. I don't do this because I greatly enjoy it (in fact, I used to be petrified of public speaking, and I'm still quite a nervous novice about it), and I don't do it because I want to be a showoff who spews information that nobody can either understand or use. I think about the talks that I go to (quite a few) and which of them I took something from (and sometimes very profoundly change how I live my life and work practices), and which left me cold, and I am trying to turn that around and somehow "give back" in a similar way. This is a role I have not taken in the past, but I have been truly inspired by the example of people in the local Pittsburgh programming communities.

Pittsburgh Tech Fest 2013: my talk "Stop Overusing Regular Expressions!"

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 03:48:22 GMT

At Pittsburgh TechFest 2013 (full report here), I gave a talk for a one-hour time slot before lunch.

This was my first talk at a conference in three years, and only my second at a conference in my life! I feel that I have much improved as a presenter since then.

Here's how it went.

Presentation

My presentation was "Stop overusing regular expressions!"

Here is my abstract as submitted to Pittsburgh TechFest: <blockquote> Regular expressions are very commonly used to process and validate text data. Unfortunately, they suffer from various limitations. I will discuss the limitations and illustrate how using grammars instead can be an improvement. I will make the examples concrete using parsing libraries in a couple of representative languages, although the ideas are language-independent. (I'll try to squeeze in, say, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Scala.)

I will emphasize ease of use, since one reason for the overuse of regular expressions is that they are so easy to pull out of one's toolbox. </blockquote>

Revised

Just on Wednesday, I had given a version of this talk at the Pittsburgh Scala meetup, but revised it considerably based on feedback and my own impressions.

Slides and code

The material for the talk as given is at this tag of my GitHub repository.

My master branch of the GitHub repository will always have my latest revisions. I expect continue to add more code in different languages, for example.

After

I tried to minimize discussion of the final Scala code slide, which in one page creates a full parser for "toy JSON" into a tree of Scala objects, because I intended mainly to give this as proof of concept, not to get into explaining the funny operator overloading that makes the parser so concise, but this seemed to be an issue anyway. I now lean toward thinking that in the future, I need to create a parallel slide that replaces the operators with standard method names instead.

Why did I use Scala for example code anyway? A major reason is that it is indeed very concise, and yet fully statically typed. I could fit all each of my Scala code examples on a single slide. I did that with Ruby also, up to a point. Writing the classes in Ruby (or Python, Java, etc.) would have taken pages of boilerplate, as opposed to using Scala's case classes. (Of course I wasn't going to use ML or Haskell at all in the talk for this audience.)

I was surprised to learn how quickly I had finished my presentation (around 45 minutes), given that I had actually added many slides after my Pittsburgh Scala version (which had lasted around the same time). I think it could have been because of the following:

Having practiced the talk once, I was more fluent and stumbled less, and explained some things better.
My additional transitional and motivational slides were clarifying, and reduced confusion that I had to address in my earlier version.
I still get the impression that when I speak, I get overexcited and talk too quickly!

Attendance

Turnout was small, around eight people, but enthusiastic. Half the people I already knew, but the other half were new to me.

I have some hypotheses about why attendance was relatively low (I think most of the talks I went to had 20-40 people):

Several people actually told me they would have attended my talk, but they too were giving talks or there were others that just happened to have higher priority.
The topic is more specialized and yet abstract than others: conceptual rather than devoted to "how to use library X in language Y" or "how to improve your career.
I have no name recognition outside of Pittsburgh, and I submitted a completely non-self-promotional, vague bio; I will definitely fix this in all future talk submissions anywhere.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who came to the talk and asked questions and got discussion going! I appreciate having had the opportunity to share my experiences and recommendations at a conference.

Ha, I was happy that Josh was able to come to my talk, since he missed the Pittsburgh Scala meetup on Wednesday!

Report on the second Pittsburgh TechFest, 2013

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 02:06:17 GMT

Last year (my report here), I attended the very first Pittsburgh Tech Fest, held at LaRoche College.

My second year

I was very excited to attend it again this year, with a twist: I reported last year that I was inspired by seeing people I know giving talks, and two months later, after the very first <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://steelcityruby.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://steelcityruby.org/">Steel City Ruby Conf</span> decided to finally start giving talks myself, starting with user group talks. When the organizers of this year's Pittsburgh TechFest put out a call for presentations four months ago, I knew I wanted to submit some, and so I did. My talk "Stop overusing regular expressions!" was accepted!

This year I had a goal of enjoying the conference even more than I enjoyed last year's, and I succeeded!

Speakers' dinner the evening before the conference

All speakers were invited to a speakers' dinner for the evening before the one-day conference, so I eagerly attended, in order to see some old friends as well as meet new people I hadn't met before. That was fun. This was at Fox and Hound Bar and Grill on McKnight Road. I had to fight through considerable rush hour traffic (and also feeling rather ill: more on that later) to get up north out there from the city, but made it. Tortilla chips, veggie trays, baked potatoes, chicken wings: not my usual diet, but those who know me know that I actually love this stuff, ha (thirty pounds ago I ate like that more often)!

The always eerie thing is meeting people in person finally that you've mainly "known" from Twitter or email. For example, last year, when I was far more shy, I never actually met the founders of the new conference and talked with them. At the speakers' dinner, I finally met Eric Kepes and Dave Hoerster, for example!

Last year, I basically made myself invisible and kind of only hung out a little bit with some people, whom I already knew! My experience at Steel City Ruby Conf completely altered how I feel I should relate to people, not only in programming conferences but in life. I'm still slowly getting out of my shell that I basically lived in for four decades, but I know I've made some real progress in the past year.

Breakfast the day of the conference

Unfortunately, because I was in a rush, I did not eat any breakfast before leaving home. Somehow, I had assumed there would be breakfast provided at the conference (in the form of bagels and fruit, something like that). I was wrong. There was just juice, coffee, tea. Luckily, I had an emergency energy bar in my bag, and ate it.

Others I talked to were also confused by the lack of food. Maybe in the future it should be made clear whether there is any food provided at the beginning of the day.

Keynote

This year, the keynote speech was by Dick Wall, whom some of you may know from the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://javaposse.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://javaposse.com/">Java Posse</span> podcast, others from the Scalawags podcast that started half a year ago (Scala fans, you have to watch this: it also features Daniel Spiewak and Pittsburgh's own <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://jsuereth.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://jsuereth.com/">Josh Suereth</span>.

Dick gave a passionate, personal, entertaining, and thoughtful talk urging all of us to adopt a mindset of taking risks and embracing failure, just as he has in his professional life: he has worked at many companies, including Google and small startups, and his own currently, Escalate, which is devoted to Scala training and mentoring.

Some lessons from Dick

Some of the lessons Dick imparted, while putting up slides of some pretty epic failures (software or otherwise, including mountain biking, which he does):

Do not overplan; be prepared to adapt to the present situation.

If something is not working, don't continue just because you have invested in it already (sunk cost).

Do something new and valuable; for example, don't write yet another CMS, because people have already done it.

The worst thing to do is to "waste engineering effort".

Fail early, never in production! Example: the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster.

If you fail repeatedly at something, maybe it's time to stop it and move on.

Honest communication is key. Often, late failure happens because someone was afraid to honestly speak up about design flaws, and often this is because there is a culture against such honesty.

Don't focus on happy path testing, but on the sad path: think up front about how something can fail, before even coding.

You can't know whether you've succeeded or failed unless you have defined concretely what success means in a given context.

The software craftsmanship movement, which focuses on quality, is well-meaning but often results in people afraid to try new things (such as learn and use a new language) because they are afraid of writing "bad code" at first. It's OK to start out by writing bad code.

One way of failing early is to push failure to compile time (he briefly gave a plug for Scala's type system as one way to do this).

Overview of sessions

As with last year, or actually far "worse", there were a huge number of sessions and limited time slots. I counted six major time slots, with an average of nine sessions during each, so anyone who attended a session in a given time slot basically had choose one out of nine. This is pretty wild. (Depending on logistics, hopefully next year the conference can move to a two-day format.)

Consistent with my philosophy in the past year of conference attendance, I chose to seek out talks that fulfilled the following criteria:

topics revolving around philosophy, experience, wisdom rather than technical tutorials
speakers not from Pittsburgh and whom I do not already know
stuff I'm very interested in that benefits particularly from a guided intro versus looking up a tutorial online

Sessions I attended

Messaging with RabbitMQ (Handerson Gomes)

Actually, I already know Handerson from Pittsburgh meetups. But, as he offered for his session a sequence of lightning talks on RabbitMQ, I thought I would learn something.

Unfortunately, after his first couple of intro talks, I was feeling so sleepy and ill (more on my physical condition at the end of this report) that I had to bail out and take a nap. I napped for about half an hour, much needed before the second session. Then I realized I wasn't just sleepy, but also starving, and found a vending machine and got more food! Meanwhile, I immediately logged into my health care provider's Web site and submitted a request for a doctor's appointment on Monday.

It's Cool, Nobody Else Knows What They're Doing Either (<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.jaredthenerd.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.jaredthenerd.com/">Jared Faris</span>)

This was an interesting philosophical discussion about career and personal development, much in the lines of the keynote speech by Dick Wall.

Jared said that to really learn, we have to challenge ourselves. We have to go beyond our comfort zone. How far? He suggested that we should take on stuff that we're 80% sure we can do: if we are too ambitious and commit to something we feel only 50% sure of, that is too risky, because then we might just fail without really learning something from the experience.

Some lessons from Jared

Ask for help. Jared related that in the past, he was too proud to ask for help because there's sometimes an implicit gamesmanship among us software developers: we don't want to look dumber than our friends, and we fear rejection. But he learned that asking for help was effective, because in the long run it means getting better faster, rather than flailing alone. Stop trying to impress people.

The way to stretch yourself is to build a base of what you do know, so that when you go beyond that, you have the tools to move to the next level.

Be "honest but confident". Do not fear the art of self-promotion: if you hold back on speaking up for yourself because you don't know it all, then you'll lose out to someone who does speak up.

Stop overusing regular expressions! (me)

I could not attend any of the interesting sessions in the third time slot because I was giving a talk.

Here's my report about my talk.

Lunch

Lunch was of the usual La Roche College cafeteria high quality, nutritious and filling. (And I also ate some cake and pie as well, ha!) This time I socialized more, sitting with some people I knew (but not so well) and people I didn't know. It was great.

I skipped the lunchtime vendor talks. They might have been interesting, but I needed a break from sitting around in talks, and certainly did not feel like taking lunch outside to eat alone while listening to someone talk! There seemed to be a sizable audience for the one outside the cafeteria, however, so I'm happy they found it useful!

Redesign is not a four letter word (Adam Kalnas)

So this was a short (30-minute) talk about redesign. Although Adam works in the .NET world, the lessons he learned and shared with us are not platform-specific. He described how an architecture at Omnyx was redesigned successfully. The steps included

Writing pinning tests for a system that had no automated tests at all.
Creating an abstract interface for an existing layer.
Rewriting code to go through the interface API.
Creating a parallel implementation for the interface.
Using feature toggles to keep both implementations in the code.
Finally switching off the feature toggle and deleting the old implementation.
All the while adding more TDD tests.

It was a really nice story of how a really gnarly legacy architecture was successfully brought into the world of cleaner interfaces and automated tests.

Node.js Design Patterns for the Discerning Developer (Aaron Cois)

I am fairly new to the Node.js world, having first heard of it two years ago at a March 2011 meeting of the Pittsburgh jQuery meetup in which Todd Eichel introduced Node to the group.

I don't currently actively use Node except, amusingly, as a vehicle for testing non-client JavaScript code for my own purposes.

Aaron basically talked about how to deal with the whole "callback hell" problem when dealing with the asynchronous APIs of Node. There was hairy looking code that he transformed or wrote wrappers for in order to make less hairy, but to my eye it was still hairy. I have forked his GitHub repository for the talk and hope to go through the code more closely.

Scaling out with Akka Actors (<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://jsuereth.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://jsuereth.com/">Josh Suereth</span>)

I'm still not an active Akka user, although there is something I believe I could use Akka for fruitfully at work, to considerably improve some efficiency (but in practice, nobody is complaining about the speed, so as a practical matter it has been of no priority to scale out the task in question), and also some personal projects.

Josh has been promoting Akka for some time: it was at last year's Pittsburgh TechFest that I got my first real introduction to it. Since then, Josh has given more advanced talks on architectures using Akka, as Akka continues to improve and provide more features.

I learned quite a bit from this talk about scaling out (vs. scaling up): the focus on topology, the adding of new actors whenever you want to handle some transient state or manage other actors. It's really a different way of thinking than "ordinary" programming and is perhaps more faithful to the original concept of "object-oriented" (being focused entirely on being asynchronous and passing immutable messages) than what has been considered object-oriented in the past couple of decades.

For more details, check out his slides and code at his GitHub repository. Note that the code for the clusters talk is on the clusters branch.

I am definitely going to start using Akka this year. I think the time for actors has truly come.

After

Dave Hoerster gave the closing speech, thanking all the many sponsors who supported the conference. It was definitely really cool how many sponsors there were. He also noted that there may be an attempt to scale up to a two-day event, which would be really cool if it can be made to happen.

There were raffle prizes. Amusingly, the vast number of people randomly chosen had already left the premises (hey, it was a long day), so it took a while to give everything away (although some prizes were marked to be emailed to those who were no longer present).

After the official conclusion of the conference, some people gathered in groups to have dinner together. I wanted to join Josh and Dick, but knew that I was feeling really miserable and had to go home to shower and sleep.

What next?

I will apply the lessons I learned from all the talks and conversations I participated in.

One thing I've done is forked a bunch of GitHub repositories for talks that people have posted online (and not just talks I went to) that seem like useful places for me to concretely learn and explore further. Ideas are fine, but working code is working code!

Thanks

I'm really grateful not only to attend this conference, but also speak in it, and learn a lot of things, meet new people (and add their blogs to my RSS feeds as well as follow them on Twitter), and share ideas with everyone. I thank the organizers who put in even more work than last year, because of so many more attendees and speakers! I thank the speakers whose presentations I attended (and those I met whose presentations I would have wanted to attended if not for the time conflicts) for sharing their knowledge and experience. And La Roche College was a good venue (and I noticed that this year there was not the temperature problem of last year, when it was just way too cold in the rooms).

I hope to come to another Pittsburgh TechFest in 2014. Of course, I would submit some talks for it, and come up with helpful topics that are of increasingly more general interest and use.

Note on being sick

I've been sick for a week with contact dermatitis, which I thought I got from poison ivy, but may have come from somewhere else. I was hoping it would clear up on its own, so that I could avoid taking drugs, but I felt increasingly worse yesterday (the itching was very unpleasant and made sleep very difficult), and then during the conference, got even worse. I went home and immediately fell into a nap from exhaustion. When I woke up, I was feeling really terrible. I clearly needed immediate treatment. Abby had come home and told me she was going t take me to the local UPMC Urgent Care center. So we went, and I got a truly painful steroid shot in the hip. It didn't take long before I started feeling better, with relief from itching, so that I could at least sleep.

I decided that Dick Wall's advice of not failing repeatedly applied to me. I have failed late and too many times by not going to a doctor earlier. I have reasons (some really terrible experiences with doctors earlier in my life who really botched things up big time, and also I generally don't like getting shots or drugs), but reason has to kick in. I should have gone to a doctor last week when I started having real problems, or even better, gotten my neck rash checked out three weeks ago when it first appeared. I don't like to admit my stupidity and stubbornness, but this is "honest communication". I am publicly admitting that I made my own life miserable for weeks, as well as Abby's, and also my fellow conference attendees who had to put up with my marred appearance and energy level (when I explained I wasn't feeling well, people admitted to not wanting to ask me what was up with my neck and skin in general). It wasn't reasonable for me to resist seeking immediate medical attention, and in the future, I will not only use this as a specific learning experience (check myself after any bites or rashes, and immediately have all affected clothing items washed), but a more general one about admitting failure early rather than hoping something going bad with my body will just get better.

I have had a habit of pushing myself too hard (really messing up not only my Pittsburgh Marathon, but also a Rachel Carson Trail hike where if I had not been so fatigued, I would have paid more attention to plants brushing against me or the like, and even my 9-mile run last Saturday that proved too taxing given my incomplete recovery from both of those. Pushing too hard is just stupid, and I know it. What's the worst thing: doing something stupid even though you know it; at least if you don't know it, you can be forgiven.

(Update of 2013-06-02)

The next day, I was feeling much better, but it's clear that full recovery will take a while. I will continue taking steroid pills and applying steroid cream as needed to relieve the itching. I hope that in two weeks I'll be all good again!

(Update of 2014-06-05)

A year later, I reviewed this post just before my third Pittsburgh TechFest, in 2014, where I am to give another presentation.

It turned out that my health suffered tremendously for months. I reported on that in August 2013.

If you've attended Pittsburgh TechFest or will do so this year, I'd like to hear your thoughts about what you've learned and used, or hope to!

100th anniversary: remembering the first time I heard Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring"

Thu, 30 May 2013 02:52:45 GMT

There's been a crazy amount of media coverage about the 100th anniversary of the performance of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" that caused riots (what great publicity then and even now). I've been bombarded with a lot of commentary. Some of it was interesting and insightful, but eventually I got tired of reading any further.

I decided to go back to the source, and listen to it again, and also actually watch it for the first time ever!

My first time

I totally remember the first time I ever heard excerpts of "The Rite of Spring".

It was in a music class in college in around 1989 or 1990.

I was taking a two-semester music theory course sequence for non-majors. The instructor at one point played back for us excerpts of this music.

It was very startling music to me, very harsh and chaotic and confusing. I couldn't say I hated it, but I certainly did not enjoy it at all. I had a rather conservative musical taste in college.

But you know what, I was quite stimulated in that our instructor didn't require us to love it, but just put it on, showed his enthusiasm, and analyzed what was going on in some of the music, such as the changing irregular meters; the random accents; the bizarre orchestration; the deliberate violation of conventional harmonic voice leading.

Noticing some of the structural characteristics of the music didn't always make them less harsh on my ear, but at least let me understand that this wasn't just noise but was really thought out for a purpose.

I didn't voluntarily listen to this music again for another quarter of a century, but those excerpts still stuck in my mind.

Today, a quarter of a century later

Ballet

The main thing I decided was to actually watch the music as intended for ballet.

YouTube made this easy. Here's the Joffrey Ballet:

I will confess that watching the ballet made the music much more engaging, because of correlations with action, and especially the drawn out repetitive nature of the music get boring for me in the absence of "something" going on, a story.

I was struck by how much I enjoy this music now. The textures Stravinsky creates are fresh and transparent, gorgeous even. The music emerges as though from the world itself. Many moods are portrayed, from the mysterious to the somber to the creepy to the deadly to the ecstatic.

It's clearly not something I'd listen to every day, but I would happily revisit it now and then as I would a favorite film. This music lights my brain on fire!

Computer animation

The other thing I did was check out a computer animation of the score by Stephen Malinowski, thanks to an NPR blog post I saw mentioning it.

I loved it! Being able to see all the parts and how the voices flow with or against one another gave me a real thrill, an added dimension to just listening. You can see what is regular, what is irregular, what is sheer freedom.

Selected commentary

I said I quickly got tired of reading commentary. Nevertheless, here are some interesting links:

Alex Ross's blog
"Why jazz musicians love The Rite of Spring"
"The Cocktail Party Guide to Igor Stravinsky"
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://soundcheck.wnyc.org/2013/may/14/rite-spring/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://soundcheck.wnyc.org/2013/may/14/rite-spring/">Leon Botstein</span>
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1275660.ece" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1275660.ece">Robert Craft</span>

Conclusion

It was interesting to revisit strange music after a quarter of a century to find that my musical enjoyment had changed considerably. When I was in college, I thought "The Rite of Spring" was weird; now, I think it is a work of amazing beauty, expression, and creative freedom. Wow. And that was a hundred years ago. How could music ever be the same again after that!

Pittsburgh Scala Meetup: my talk "Stop Overusing Regular Expressions!"

Thu, 30 May 2013 02:37:07 GMT

So two days ago, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://jamieforrest.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://jamieforrest.com/">Jamie</span> sent email out to the Pittsburgh Scala meetup group saying that our planned speaker Barrett, who was to have talked about his experiences using Akka, was not going to make it, and asked if anyone else could talk about something.

I suddenly stepped in as a substitute speaker

Since I was already supposed to give a talk on Saturday at the 2013 Pittsburgh TechFest, and was in the process of finishing my work on it, I volunteered to give an early version of my Pittsburgh TechFest talk at the Scala meetup, since I actually happen to provide Scala code in the talk. Ha, this meant giving two talks in two successive meetings, because at the last meeting, I gave a talk on property-based testing using ScalaCheck.

Presentation

My presentation was "Stop overusing regular expressions!"

I will emphasize ease of use, since one reason for the overuse of regular expressions is that they are so easy to pull out of one's toolbox. </blockquote>

Attendance

Turnout was small: five people other than myself. By the way, we've discovered unsurprisingly predictable pattern: roughly half the people who RSVP "yes" on the meetups show up.

Slides and code

The material for the talk as given is at this tag of my GitHub repository.

My master branch of the GitHub repository will always have my latest revisions.

(Update of 2013-06-01)

I made substantial revisions in the presentation and code before Pittsburgh TechFest. I recommend looking at the latest version. Details in my report on my talk at Pittsburgh TechFest 2013.

After

There was great feedback after the talk. Some material I went through took quickly, without a smooth transition to relate ideas, and my final page of Scala code that contained dense use of all kinds of operators and idioms was something I stumbled through trying to explain, even as I was feeling that explaining it was a tangent from the main points of the talk.

There was casual discussion of Scala and other topics after the talk as well. I was pretty excited to hear about how useful Akka has become in solving important problems.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who came to the talk! I enjoyed sharing my experiences and recommendations, and engaging in discussion about the topics, and getting to make a mental note of things to change in my delivery, slides, and code for Pittsburgh TechFest on Saturday.

Thanks to Justin for arranging a meeting place for the Pittsburgh Scala meetup at M*Modal, and thanks to M*Modal for providing the space!

And thanks to Jamie again for creating the Pittsburgh Scala meetup group, and TypeSafe for being a sponsor now, thanks to <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://jsuereth.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://jsuereth.com/">Josh</span> (who sadly did not make it to this meeting).

Learning the Congo de Captieux traditional French dance

Sun, 26 May 2013 03:29:20 GMT

Abby and I went to a French dance potluck party hosted by Lisa that included a special dance workshop on "Congo de Captieux" taught by her and a visitor, Lynn. This is a set dance for groups of four dancers (two couples) that really moves along and gets you sweaty! Here is a sample of what it looks like (not of us):

We haven't been doing French dance or music lately because of lots of things going on (including Abby's breaking her foot in February; she can finally do a bit of dancing again), so it was good to be back.

The dance was pretty complex to learn, but it was fun to finally be able to get through the steps, because the coordinating the interleaving continuous motion was strangely satisfying and thrilling!

Why I will always pronounce "GIF" like "gift" and not like "Jif"

Sat, 25 May 2013 01:40:22 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

Recently Steve Wilhite, the creator of GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), tried to settle once and for all the age-old (well, 26-year-old, since the invention of GIF in 1987) question of how to pronounce "GIF", claiming that it is <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://howtopronouncegif.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://howtopronouncegif.com/">pronounced as "jif"</span>:

<blockquote> "The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations," Mr. Wilhite said. "They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story." </blockquote>

Of course, whole "debate" is kind of silly, because it doesn't really matter how it's pronounced.

Or does it?

My first memories of GIF

I was in college in the late 1980s when a friend of mine first introduced me to the world of GIF files. Since he pronounced "GIF" like "gift", I followed suit. Other friends also pronounced it that way, and I simply assumed that was "correct".

Mispronunciation?

It was in the early 1990s when at my first job, I noticed that a colleague of mine pronounced "GIF" like "Jif" instead. I was stunned, of course. Meanwhile, at this very time, there was an uproar over the patent enforcement by Unisys on the LZW compression algorithm used by GIF. I was outraged by the development myself, and chose to <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html">minimize use of the GIF format</span>; I used JPEG and the new PNG formats instead for any new image file creation.

It was around this time that I learned that the official pronunciation of "GIF" was supposed to be "jif".

But I didn't care.

I knew that there were people pronouncing it either way, and I was already used to one way, and nobody was enforcing the "correct" way, and I was rarely even saying the word any more, since I was not using the file format for personal or work purposes. In the past two decades, I don't believe I've said the word more than a dozen times, but each time, I stubbornly used the "gift" pronunciation.

Ownership?

If everyone were saying "jif" all the time, I would have changed my pronunciation. This is how language works. The point of language is to communicate with others, and if nobody knew what I was saying because I was pronouncing a word wrong, then I would have to change my pronunciation.

It means little to me what the inventor of the word intended, because language serves everyone who uses it meaningfully, not just the inventor.

When you create something, you don't own it any more. It belongs to the world.

This is considered by some to be a controversial point of view, but I think it is philosophically correct as a starting point of discussion. Yes, sophisticated systems of property rights have been created and do serve a useful purpose, but always in context of the fundamental outlook, and as a constraint in the name of greater benefit to society.

The continuing debates over American copyright and patent laws, for example, illustrate that these laws are not set in stone but are a result of discussions and compromises among different interests and philosophies.

It is ironic, of course, that more people seem to care about the pronunciation of "GIF" than about the old patent controversy surrounding the format. Then again, as a limited monopoly, the patent on LZW did expire in the US in 2003 (and elsewhere in 2004).

Ownership of language?

If you are reading this and are French, I'm curious what your view is of ownership of language, because the Académie française has officially controlled the French language since 1635, and there is no analogous institution in the US.

Authorial intent?

The debate over "GIF" may seem trivial, but I think it is a good starting point for those who are interested in issues of ownership and authorial intent, as applied to many more important issues, such as "correct" interpretation or use of literature, of music, of law. I have been particularly interested in this debate in the context of music, and my attitude comes from grappling with Charles Rosen's writings over the years; as you can imagine, debate over "composer's intent" can get very heated.

Conclusion

Dictionaries of English today accept both pronunciations of "GIF". Furthermore, some informal polls I have seen even come up with the result that most people who participate in such polls favor my pronunciation. So I will continue using my pronunciation.

But really, it doesn't matter how you pronounce "GIF". The existence of alternate pronunciations of words is not a threat to language. "Either", "tomato", "GIF": let's call the whole thing off!

Reflections on Richard Wagner's 200th birthday: beautiful music without a future

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:14:55 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

A couple of days ago, I was driving and had the radio on and heard Richard Wagner's prelude to act 1 of his opera "Die Meistersinger", and was transported into the lush musical world that is so uniquely Wagner: seductive orchestral colors, chromatic harmony, melodic motifs, fine storytelling, stirring climaxes, and in this particular musical excerpt, ironic yet clever use of counterpoint. I had to pull over for a while to finish listening to the prelude and fully enjoy the guilty rush of emotional excitement in this fun but over-the-top piece. Why the guilt?

Controversy

The controversial music composer Richard Wagner was born 200 years ago. In keeping with the media's love of arbitrarily nice round numbers and anniversaries, there's a lot of commentary about celebrations of his birthdays or reasons not to celebrate. Here are just a few articles that came up during a Web search:

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/germany-celebrates-200th-birthday-of-composer-richard-wagner/2013/05/22/b8f93924-c2b2-11e2-9642-a56177f1cdf7_story.html?tid=pm_entertainment_pop" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/germany-celebrates-200th-birthday-of-composer-richard-wagner/2013/05/22/b8f93924-c2b2-11e2-9642-a56177f1cdf7_story.html?tid=pm_entertainment_pop">"Germany celebrates 200th birthday of Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer"</span>
<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/05/22/barbara-kay-if-you-must-listen-to-wagner-do-it-in-private/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/05/22/barbara-kay-if-you-must-listen-to-wagner-do-it-in-private/">"If you must listen to Wagner, do it in private"</span>
"Whistling in the dark on Wagner's 200th birthday"
"Dear Richard, I need to tell you something"
"A Wagner birthday roast"

None of this commentary actually addresses my mixed feelings about Wagner.

Wagner's anti-Semitism?

Much of the commentary touches upon Wagner's anti-Semitism and Adolf Hitler's use of Wagner in Germany for Nazi purposes. I will not be discussing these (important) issues because others already do, and because I tend toward the view that people are imperfect and I would like to be able to assess their important and good work even if they could be judged as unpleasant or downright evil.

Love the music, hate the man?

However, I also do not agree with the sentiment of "Let's learn to love the music, yet still hate the man". I don't think there is a total separation between Wagner's music and everything else about him. In Wagner's case, in particular, he specifically designed his music around a certain philosophy about the world, about art. And that is what I really find interesting and unsettling, somewhat along the lines of Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of his one-time friend, "The Case of Wagner" and "Nietzsche contra Wagner"

Music and philosophy

Wagner's philosophizing about the nature of and purpose of music embraced the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, the "total work of art", that would unify all the arts, hence his development of his form of opera, the "music drama", whose purpose was to unify music, poetry, theater in a grand and serious spectacle to inspire the audience. He proposed the Zukunftsmusik, or "music of the future".

Modernism?

In Wagner's day in the late 19th century, there was fierce rivalry among the German Romantics on the direction of musical evolution. Roughly, there was the camp of Johannes Brahms (whose birthday I celebrated a few weeks ago, considered "conservative", and the camp of Wagner, which considered itself "modern". Aspects of this "war" seem quaint and exaggerated now, and Brahms has been re-evaluated in <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/29/arts/old-brahms-a-modernist-in-more-ways-than-one.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/29/arts/old-brahms-a-modernist-in-more-ways-than-one.html">recent</span> decades, and the big tent of Western art music has historically learned from both camps' methods and sensibilities, but Wagner, at least, took very seriously his own self-importance and self-promotion as an artist/philosopher.

An interesting question to me is, what is Wagner's relationship to modernism, both in the musical sense and in the more general sense, typically applied to the late 19th century and early 20th century trends in literature, art, architecture, and society that are still relevant today?

Tristan

The harmonic and other innovations of Tristan und Isolde in 1865 (it is arguable that Franz Liszt was the real innovator first) can be considered the beginning of modernism in music (in the sense of dissolution of Western tonality). Check out this performance of the beginning of the prelude to act 1 along with a score annotated with harmonic analysis:

Here's my favorite full performance of the prelude as well as the final sung Liebestod, by the great Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting and Kirsted Flagstad singing. It truly blew my mind when I first discovered and heard this music while in college.

Who claims modernism?

But the modernist Second Viennese School under Arnold Schönberg liked to claim Brahms as one of their own, and in even more revisionism recently, there have been attempts to situate <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/modernism-after-wagner" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/modernism-after-wagner">Wagner as the inspiration for modernism in the larger sense</span>.

(A few of my notes about Schönberg here. Also, it is too large a topic for now, but I plan to write more later about modernism and postmodernism and post-postmodernism in music, in the context of today's music and in my own experience of music, whether listening or performing.)

Wagner's legacy

I believe Wagner failed, that his philosophy was a dead end, and that his music was a dead end.

This despite the fact that, of course, he changed the course of Western musical history, both by provoking the modernist backlash against his theatricalism and chromaticism, while paving the way for, say, Mahler and Bruckner.

I have enjoyed and continue to occasionally listen again to marvelous music by Wagner, but not in the way he intended. I have never attended a performance of one of his operas. I have only seen (on TV or video) or listened to bits of his operas that are sung (rather than purely instrumental excerpts). Two decades ago, I did try to watch the mammoth Ring cycle broadcast on TV by the Metropolitan Opera over four long evenings, but my attention span allowed me to only drift in and out of consciousness periodically during that attempt.

Perhaps most damning of all is that shortly after that TV experience, I rather enjoyed listening to Lorin Maazel's album, "The Ring Without Words", basically showing that for me, Wagner totally failed as a philosopher, because I like his music best without the "poetry" (his lyrics, which he wrote himself, don't make much sense to me) and without the on-stage drama.

Even then, I cannot listen to his music much without feeling unclean. There is a sense in which I cannot separate his music from his philosophy and his wider artistic and cultural aims. Even if he had not been an anti-Semite, there should be controversy over him and his legacy. There is a sense in which I agree with some of the old-fashioned concerns about his music: "Wagner as mental health menace?". In Nietzsche's words, Wagner and his music are decadent.

(Update of 2014-07-13)

RIP, Lorin Maazel.

Music is powerful

But it's pretty delicious decadence. Last month a friend splurged on going to the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://ringcycle.metoperafamily.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://ringcycle.metoperafamily.org/">Metropolitan Opera's performance of the Ring</span>, and I decided to indulge in listening to Siegfried's funeral march in Götterdämmerung. As usual, the experience left me in tears. Wagner, master psychologist, master manipulator of emotions, master composer, weaving the leitmotifs, summing up the whole tragic story of the Ring:

And for sheer hypnotism, listen to Furtwängler again, with the prelude to act 1 of Lohengrin. Close your eyes, turn out the lights, and listen. Beautiful.

More hypnosis: prelude to act 1 of Parsifal. I've chosen an old Furtwängler performance again:

Back to Die Meistersinger

Finally, to end where I started, with the prelude to act 1 of Die Meistersinger that I happened to enjoy on the radio, here is Furtwängler again, conducting a performance of it live. Warning: this is a video of a live performance in 1942 in Germany with swastikas in the background, so you may not wish to view this.

Yes, this video is totally creepy, but I thought it would be appropriate to close on this jarring note. Die Meistersinger was, after all, Wagner's telling of a story to glorify old Germany, and was a favorite opera of the Nazis.

(And the subject of Furtwängler, a conductor I have many mixed feelings about, will have to wait for another blog post as well.)

Conclusion

I cannot help but admire and be affected by Wagner's music, but at the same time feel that his entire philosophy and aim was bankrupt. I've touched on only a little bit of how I have come to feel this, since the larger issues go beyond Wagner, but I don't yet have complete thoughts and rationales to offer at this time. As with the towering figure of Beethoven, his musical and cultural legacy is still controversial.

Postscript

I decided I wanted to end more positively. My favorite piece of Wagner's is one that was actually always intended to be purely instrumental and is self-contained, not just an excerpt: the Siegfried Idyll. Oh wait, again we all subvert his intention anyway, because he composed it for his wife Cosima's birthday (what a beautiful present to wake up to in the morning) and only ever intended it to be performed privately!

Furtwängler again:

(Update of 2014-07-11)

I just saw yet another article about Wagner and anti-Semitism. The topic never goes anyway, and I don't think it should. That said, I don't personally have anything to add to the discussion, but offer the link if you feel you need to engage further.

(Update of 2015-01-14)

I saw yet another (and excellent) article "Wagner and the Jews".

Voting in the face of election apathy

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:17:44 GMT

Those of you who follow my blog know that I have been conflicted about voting, but go and do it anyway, most of the time, e.g., in November 2011 for the municipal election and in November 2012 for the general election, when I felt there were some politicians very important to vote against.

Apathy or ignorance?

In April 2012's general primary, however, I was sufficiently apathetic that I didn't bother voting, although Abby did. For that election, it seemed to me that the winners were all going to be obvious no matter what I did, and there were no close races where I really cared about who won. I feel that in the absence of an informed opinion, the only rational and moral thing to do is to stay out. It is unfashionable in our society to admit <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/the-power-of-i-dont-know/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/the-power-of-i-dont-know/">"I don't know"</span>, but if I truly don't know, then I see no point in participating.

Primary elections are particularly problematic for me, because I simply oppose the concept and also resent being forced to register for one of the two major American political parties.

May 2013 municipal primary: choosing mayor!

But this year's Democratic primary is critical, because it will basically determine who becomes the next mayor of Pittsburgh, given that a Democrat will win in the general election in November. And since Luke Ravenstahl decided to step down, there is a possibility of real change.

So I was pretty excited to vote today to make a difference (I hope). This will be the first time I have voted for a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://triblive.com/politics/politicalheadlines/4052165-74/percent-mayor-turnout" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://triblive.com/politics/politicalheadlines/4052165-74/percent-mayor-turnout">mayoral candidate in a primary</span> in my 15 years as a Pittsburgh resident. For once there may be a crack in the rusty Democratic political machine here?

<span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/polls-open-for-primary-election-688496/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/polls-open-for-primary-election-688496/">Voter turnout today has been crazy low</span>. There was no line whatsoever when I went to vote or when Abby went. I've never participated in an election, I think, with such low turnout.

Maybe this low turnout will end up being a good thing. If people choose not to vote because they don't have informed opinions, then it means that I and the surprisingly large number of people I know who also voted for the same guy I did will win! (That said, it's sad if <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/Best-of-the-Burgh-Blogs/Pitt-Girl/June-2013/Why-You-Must-Vote-in-Pittsburghs-Mayoral-Election/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/Best-of-the-Burgh-Blogs/Pitt-Girl/June-2013/Why-You-Must-Vote-in-Pittsburghs-Mayoral-Election/">only 2 percent of us decide the mayor</span>.)

Media coverage

I avoided most media coverage of the election (hard to avoid everything completely, admittedly) until I had already voted. (Yes, that includes ignoring the basically meaningless "endorsements" of the Post-Gazette and <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://triblive.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://triblive.com/">Tribune-Review</span>.

Then I enjoyed reading this little look at what's been going on with the mayoral race. And tomorrow I am back to ignoring the news.

Also, I had to recycle probably 30 or so paper flyers during election season. What a waste. And summarily delete dozens of robocalls on the answering machine. Note to everyone who sent me junk or left junk messages on my answering machine: I did not read a single thing you sent, or listen to a single word you spoke; your junk only made me angry and at least partly less likely to vote for you, if I caught your name and remembered it. Pathetic. I realize this crap works on some people, but I'm afraid it doesn't work on me: I'm not going to believe that your opponent eats children for breakfast, no matter what large fonts you use.

Conclusion

In a moment of relief from apathy and cynicism about politics, I eagerly voted today. I hope I'll get to see whether I was justified.

Attending a meeting of the Washington DC Recorder Society while visiting

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:40:00 GMT

While in Washington, D.C. with Abby to visit new nephew, I took time out to attend a meeting of the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://metosrv2.umd.edu/~baer/WRS/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://metosrv2.umd.edu/~baer/WRS/">Washington Recorder Society</span>. It's a much bigger group than the Pittsburgh Recorder Society! We broke up into many subgroups and I joined a couple of other people to play together. I enjoyed the hospitality and refreshments.

Google I/O 2013 Extended: Pittsburgh

Thu, 16 May 2013 03:44:47 GMT

Last year I attended "Google I/O Extended: Pittsburgh" for the first time. This year, I decided to attend again.

I was shocked by some aspects of my experience.

Format changes from last year

I was disappointed that there were no live sessions being held this year; in place of that, there were some live demos and the opportunity to play "Ship Wars".

I was not interested in the game, and ignored it.

I stopped by the demo stations but did not find them very interesting or useful.

Since I already got the tour last year, I had no need to go on a tour again.

Keynote at noon, streaming

The keynote had multiple speakers, and lasted three hours!!

Philosophical stuff

One of the speakers mentioned how dramatically the world had changed in just seven years, and showed an event for the Pope in 2005 and in 2013, and you could see a sea of phones held up by people in 2013. I found this horrifically depressing, actually, not something to celebrate. But Google is "working very hard to continue this journey forward" to "make a difference in people's lives".

There was a photo of a baby, and someone holding a phone to the baby's head.

Tech stuff

OK, back to technical matters.

Regarding Android, "activity recognition". Yeah, I want my phone to know more and more about what I'm doing.

Android Studio, a new IDE for Android development, based on IntelliJ IDEA, was announced.

There was a lot of talk about Google+ (which I barely use).

A lot of talk about music services, "radio without rules" (I don't use any music services).

An obsession with images and automatically finding a "best image" for you, and zooming in on flaws in personal photos, etc. Brave New World, anyone? I don't manipulate any of the photos I take for my own use.

"Ask Google". I resisted the temptation to shout out "inappropriate" questions.

Google Maps, and the incorporation of information submitted by friends.

I am now seeing the full scale of what Google is trying to do to transform our once private spaces.

Larry Page

It's hard for me to summarize what Larry Page said, because it was so radical and so self-assured, a philosophical vision about the primacy and "positivity" of technology. He uses Google Glass with his children.

It was one of the creepiest speeches I have heard in my life from someone with power and determined to use that power. I respect that he went all out, nothing held back, in all honesty. I am simply not as optimistic that every advance of technology into our lives is a positive one, and I think things are moving very fast.

Here's a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.techhive.com/article/2038841/hello-larry-googles-page-on-negativity-laws-and-competitors.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.techhive.com/article/2038841/hello-larry-googles-page-on-negativity-laws-and-competitors.html">transcript I found online of Larry Page's speech</span>.

After the keynote

I was shell-shocked after the keynote, and although I stopped by one of the streaming presentations, I didn't get much out of it, and then I decided to just go home.

Conclusion

Sitting through the long keynote was well worth it, as far as improving my understanding of what Google is about and what it has done and what it wants to do. I have real concerns about the direction that Google and its leaders wants to take the world.

Chatham Baroque: The Pleasures of Purcell

Mon, 13 May 2013 03:55:23 GMT

It was a little crazy, but right after I came home from a mega-long Rachel Carson Trail hike today, I rushed to shower and change and run over to a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.chathambaroque.org/events/pleasures-purcell" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.chathambaroque.org/events/pleasures-purcell">special concert, "The Pleasures of Purcell"</span> by the Chatham Baroque at the local Church of the Redeemer in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Objectively, I should have just called it a day after the hike, but I love the Chatham Baroque and learning from Annie earlier that they were playing in the neighborhood just several blocks from where I live made me decide to hop over there. (The concert was free to the public, but welcomed donations, of course: please remember to contribute generously when you attend these kinds of community good will events!)

I attended in part because the musical genre was basically new to me: choral music by Henry Purcell. This is not my kind of thing, but I'm old enough that I've gotten tired of only listening to "my kind of thing" rather than exploring what is new to me.

I ran into Annie as I was limping my way toward the church with sore feet. I also noticed that Sam from the Pittsburgh Recorder Society was a guest performer for some of the music.

The concert

The Chatham Baroque was joined by a choir and solo vocalists and conductor to fill out the forces needed to perform the music.

I was completely wowed by the bass soloist. The depth and expression of his voice was amazing.

As for the music itself, I've already confessed that mostly sacred choral music from this time period is not really my thing. I didn't change my mind, although I was glad to have given it a shot. I have enjoyed playing the instrumental music of Henry Purcell for recorder, but this music for the English court didn't do much for me.

My Rachel Carson Trail hike for the year (13.4 miles): and how this is about love and gratitude

Mon, 13 May 2013 02:24:40 GMT

Today I did my first hike of the year (normally I would have done hiking already in the spring, but the combination of Abby's broken foot and my Pittsburgh Marathon training this year resulted in no space for hiking until after the marathon, which I did seven days ago).

My first hike of the year just happened to turn out to be a grueling Rachel Carson Trail hike.

Last year, I reported on the two Rachel Carson Trail Challenge goal training hikes I did in late April and early June. This year, I did the fourth of eight of the year's goal training hikes offered.

Sunday, May 12
Leader: Donna Stolz 412-303-6102, Eileen Lessman 412-760-8863
13.4 miles
Elevation change: 5055 ft

"This hike begins in North Park and heads over to Emmerling Park, then up and over Rich Hill and Lefever Hill. We end at the Log Cabin Road checkpoint location. Meet at Log Cabin Road parking area. Take Route 28 to Exit #12. Turn right at the end of the ramp, then right at the stop sign onto Little Deer Creek Road (aka Russellton Road). Travel about 1.5 miles and turn right on Log Cabin Road. Park about 100 yards ahead on the right."

As of this year, I've decided to do only one Rachel Carson Trail hike a year, so this was it.

Here is my report on the hike, as well as my long-awaited explanation of why this trail means so much to me.

Weather

The conditions were good. It was kind of chilly and windy, probably 45-50 degrees throughout the hike. The sun came and went. There were only short periods of light drizzling rain, thankfully.

Footwear

The Vibram FiveFingers KSO Trek shoes I wore last year on the Rachel Carson Trail developed holes, as a result of which I stocked up on some new ones. The pair that I opened, I've worn only a couple of times, and I wore this pair today.

Comparison with last year's hike

Last year on the 18.1 mile hike, I was stupid about my smartphone, and this year I was smarter. Today's hike was a shorter 13.4, so I was sure the battery would last long enough, if I didn't take photos with flash. And of course, I always have a phone charge in my car now.

Last year's hike went east to west and ended in North Park. This year's hike went west to east and started in North Park. But being shorter, it did not end in Springdale. It is really a different hike when you go on the same trail but in a different direction.

You might enjoy comparing the photos in different directions.

Meeting up at Log Cabin Road

John and I arrived on time but not early, which meant that when we arrived, we saw a whole contingent of people already carpooling to head to North Park. We never saw those people again. Oops.

Furthermore, although we were ready to go with the hike leader, Donna, latecomers kept on showing up, and we were lenient and waited for them, before all the rest of us remaining headed to North Park.

Waiting for latecomers:

Because of Route 910 closures, some detours were necessary as Donna's husband drove us to North Park.

Hike

In North Park about to begin:

By the time we started, there were only a handful of us together as a group.

I was momentarily confused because I saw someone running in the wrong direction on the trail and thought she might be one of us, and was worried. I tried to follow her to call out to her, but she disappeared quickly:

Meanwhile, Donna called out to me, and I rejoined the group.

In North Park, a few sections of the trail are on the road, but then we go into the woods for real:

There's a whole bunch of stream crossings while in North Park. Some of them are easier than others. I should note that one of the harder ones had some fast water and basically ensured that your feet would get wet, because the logs were floating and not completely safe to step on. Some people jumped, but that's not safe. Wearing KSO Trek shoes, since the temperature was around 50, I was fine just getting my feet wet by walking through the water.

Out of the woods onto the railroad tracks (note that hiking in the reverse direction is tricky because it's not well-marked where to get off the railroad tracks into the woods; John and I got lost the last time we did the reverse hike and had to backtrack!).

There's a good amount of road walking on this section of the Rachel Carson Trail.

Crossing Route 8:

Finally, the power lines:

I am a bit sentimental about this section of trail in Hampton Park because Abby and I have done some cross country skiing here in winter, when she used to live up here before we got married and she moved to Pittsburgh.

Abby and I have also hung out here in the past watching birds.

Here is where John and I got lost. I was distracted by this sight and made a turn toward it (the trail turned in the opposite direction) to check it out:

OK, "acidic condensate collection tank".

Hmm, this didn't look familiar.

John and I turned back. We lost about ten minutes.

No animals out and about today!

Funny how this happens to me once or twice each hike:

What the heck is this going on?

Uphill.

Finally at Emmerling Park, about 3 hours and 45 minutes into the hike.

I hung out at Emmerling Park for about ten or fifteen minutes, using the restroom and then playing on the swing relieving my aching feet while waiting for John and the others to catch up and also use the restroom. The truth is, I was ready to stop hiking already, feeling tired. I was also sore because of two falls I had sustained earlier in the hike. One of the falls involved my tripping on my right foot, causing me to land hard on my left, reinjuring my left knee that I had hurt before the marathon in a fall down the stairs. My left knee was causing me serious pain again now in the hike. I also fell on a steep downhill earlier, landing directly on my butt and on the palm of my left hand, which reinjured my left elbow. Finally, my right Achilles was killing me, because I had not adjusted the strap of my shoe properly; I had readjusted it during the hike, but the damage was already done. I was quite ready to stop hiking, but there were still two hours to go! Oops.

Red flower:

And now we got to sections of the trail that are abused by ATVs and rutted and muddy. (We ended up encountering someone on an ATV, in fact.)

Standing water:

No fun at all hiking through these muddy ruts:

Finally back into open space:

Looking back down the big hill:

There's John and the rest down at the bottom:

We keep on going up:

Finally at the top, looking back:

What's going on here?

Finally back to the parking lot!

After

We hiked something like 5 hours and 45 minutes. It felt really long to us, as our first hike of the year. My feet were killing me. I was happy to take my shoes off and drive us back home barefoot!

By the way, my phone still barely had battery power left when we finished. I'm not sure it would have lasted another hour. This is useful to know. Of course, I immediately plugged it into my car charger! I should get an extra battery.

Why hike this trail at all?

Abby is confused why I like occasionally (once or twice a year) hiking on the Rachel Carson Trail, even though much of the time I find it tiring and weird. I've never fully explained this in words, so here, finally, is my explanation.

I have many sentimental reasons to hike this trail. One is that eight years ago, in late May of 2005, when a local running friend said he was doing the Rachel Carson Trail Challenge, I had taken an entire half year off from running was feeling sad and lonely. I looked up the Challenge online, and happened to find that training hikes led by Barb Peterson were being offered in just a few days, and although I had no intention whatsoever to do the Challenge, I thought the training hikes would be a fun way to do and see something different. After doing the third of four, I was so excited by the novelty that I ended up signing up for the Challenge!! With only three weeks left, there was not much training I could do for it, but I figured that if I just took it slowly, I should be able to finish.

The 2005 Challenge was an ordeal for me to finish, but I did, and the side effect was that I fell in love with hiking in general. I met people through doing the Challenge, and in 2006 I roped John into joining me on some longer training hikes, where we met more people, and some of them I began hiking with outside the context of the Challenge, in places like the Laurel Highlands. This was before the Pittsburgh Hiking Meetup was formed in May 2007 and made it much easier to find people to hike with. So the 2005 Challenge had the side effect of getting me into making hiking a regular part of my life.

Finally, as I was training for the 2007 Challenge, that was the time when I had just met Abby and was dancing with her, but we were not dating yet. When we were chatting at a salsa dance, I learned that she liked to hike and was intrigued. I invited her to join me and John for an April 29 Rachel Carson Trail Challenge training hike that happened to be passing through Hampton (as today's hike did), and she said she would join us for part of it. A comic series of events then took place, in which John and I arrived at Hampton earlier than she had expected, so she had not yet made it to Hampton to meet up with us. When I paused to call her, and she said she would meet us in the trail, John and I got confused and lost because of miscommunication. I kept having to call her again and again until we finally found her, and she set us straight back onto the trail and hiked with us for a bit before turning back. That was my first interaction with Abby outside of dancing; I got to see how she gracefully handled my clumsy mistakes during this outing and how helpful she was. It was a month after that when we finally started dating. Eventually, I proposed right after a hike led by one of the guys I originally first met through a Rachel Carson Trail Challenge training hike.

So I associate the Rachel Carson Trail not only with falling in love with hiking, and with meeting lots of interesting people I still hike with all these years later, but also I am reminded of how I fell in love with Abby and how hiking is a big part of what we have done and do. It is slightly ironic, of course, that she does not enjoy doing most sections of the Rachel Carson Trail, so in recent years I have been hiking it either alone or with John. And that is why I try to limit how often I hike on the trail; I've decided now to do it only once a year, so that I spend less time on hiking that Abby doesn't do with me, in order to share more hiking with her. But I would like to spend good time on the trail once a year from now on to remember what it means to me.

Finally, despite the strange hybrid nature of the trail, I believe in its existence and maintenance. It is a reminder that even in urban/suburban environments, there is still an underlying primitive nature that we can enjoy. The volunteers of the Rachel Carson Trails Conservancy work hard to keep this unusual resource open to the public.

(Example from March 2012 of the kind of hike that Abby and I have enjoyed doing.)

Conclusion

The Rachel Carson Trail will always have a special place in my heart.

Thanks to Donna for keeping us company for most of the hike as trail sweep, and her husband for driving us to the start!

Back to what running is really about for me

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:32:41 GMT

So, four days after my disappointing Pittsburgh Marathon, I've recovered enough to first walk, and now do some light running as well. I did a very slow, short 3-mile run in Frick Park.

I'm guessing it will take me another two or three weeks to be completely recovered physically, but I'm ecstatic to be out and about again. I'm also happy that I'm emotionally recovered already; I was pretty unbalanced leading up to and after the ordeal. The big lesson I've learned yet again is that losing sight of what is important and focusing on narrow ideas of achievement backfired on me, self-destructively, just as it did when I played bizarrely poorly in a chess tournament last fall before relaxing and then winning the 2013 Pittsburgh Chess Club Championship.

What running is really about

Running for me is really about enjoying the outdoors, feeling alive and expressive through rhythmic movement, and getting to know my body better and accept it while working with what nature has given me, to improve how I move and feel. Now that this whole marathon thing is over, I'm back to running on the trails instead of the hard roads, and I'm back to not timing myself. I'm back to being out there alone, not measuring myself against anyone or anything.

So what about races?

That said, I do enjoy some element of competition, both against myself and against others, in the spirit of play and excellence. So, although I'll take it easy for a couple of weeks just enjoying maintaining and rebuilding fitness (not just for running, but also getting back to some neglected strength training), I'm looking forward to doing some races this summer, with an intent to run them fast.

The first one coming up for me is the Man Up Father's Day 10K in June benefiting the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://obcolefoundation.org/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://obcolefoundation.org/">Obediah Cole Foundation for Prostate Cancer</span>. I haven't done any 10K other than the idiosyncratic Great Race 10K in 5 years, so I look forward to getting back to doing other 10K races. Also, I have done this Father's Day 10k before, in 2004 and 2006. It would be nice if I could beat my 2006 time, getting back to my fitness level of 7 years ago, but ha, very unlikely.

Conclusion

I'm ready to have a pleasant summer of outdoors activities. Abby and I already have hiking and kayaking plans. Meanwhile, I'll continue running. The pain of the marathon season is already a dim memory.

Happy birthday, Johannes Brahms! 3 takes on a musical favorite

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:41:13 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

It turns out today is the 180th birthday of Johannes Brahms, born May 7, 1833, so I thought I'd share some of my favorite music by this great composer.

Piano

I discovered Brahms while a freshman in college and a total newcomer to classical music, upon taking a course called "Piano Music of the 19th Century" because it sounded like it was an easy way to get required "core curriculum" credit (no musical background was required for this appreciation course). Instead of being just a throwaway survey course I took just to get credit, the course changed my life. Sometimes that actually happens, when the instructor is passionate and communicative!

We listened to and discussed various of Brahms' miniature piano pieces he called "intermezzi", op. 116, 117, 118, and 119. Part of what we were supposed to do was tell stories about how the pieces made us feel and why (in terms of some kind of story that involved identifying musical ideas and development).

Although I went on to listen to other music by Brahms, for myself, I still have considerable nostalgia for the piano intermezzi Brahms wrote late in life, and this is so appropriate, I guess, given that they have a decidedly nostalgic, melancholic flavor.

I have many favorites among these sets of piano pieces, but decided to share just one of them today, op. 119 no. 1 in B minor. The melancholic arpeggiated descending thirds and ambiguous harmonies, with a longing melodic line above the inner voices, make this a perfect example of Brahmsian beauty.

Imagery

When I listen to this, I imagine sitting by a window, alone, as raindrops slowly and repeatedly drip down, and the clouds come and go, while occasionally a ray of sun peeks through and smiles, and occasionally there is a burst of thunder. Meanwhile, the wind is blowing and sometimes stops a raindrop from continuing to fall, or blows it back upward. I look through the window, and the world is gray and blurry, and the raindrops tell the story of what is going on outside.

Three interpretations

Here are three interpretations I found on YouTube. I personally like the raindrops to linger and accelerate and decelerate with rubato, and this guy "Ferien7" plays that up, taking a leisurely 3:44 for the whole piece:

I link to this video by an unknown because I like how YouTube can be a source of what I find to be good performances by people who are passionate about a particular piece but are not necessarily famous professionals or well-established recording artists. I have no idea who "Ferien7" is, but I like this performance.

Another interpretation along similar veins, but by someone much more famous, and tighter (3:38), is by one of my all-time favorite historic pianists, Sviatoslav Richter:

Finally, here is a very different, fascinating interpretation by Heinrich Neuhaus, actually Richter's teacher, which is very fast (2:52), and emphasizes the unbroken melodic line and the drama, over the individual notes:

(Update of 2014-08-21)

A year later, I found another interpretation, by Robert Hill, which I love for its extreme freedom. Check it out in my blog post about Robert Hill.

If you liked this piece, check out the other intermezzi by Brahms.

Why I feel sad when people congratulate me for finishing the Pittsburgh Marathon

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:07:36 GMT

I'm on the second day of recovery after my debacle of a Pittsburgh Marathon two days ago. The recovery has been going very well; I think I'll probably be walking "normally" (to a point) tomorrow. But meanwhile, I've been dealing with a lot of anger and sadness.

I feel the most angry and sad when people congratulate me for finishing the marathon.

A warning up front: in this post I'm going to talk about some things that might give the wrong impression and make you angry, but I assure you that I am just speaking from the heart, and that my own reaction to finishing my marathon has no bearing on how I feel about your finishing your marathon, or anyone else's. I simply have certain goals for myself when doing things like marathons, and I don't believe that everyone has or should have the same kinds of goals as I do, and I respect your own goals.

I'm also writing this because I think I'm speaking not only for myself, but for other runners who might also feel the same way but tiptoe around expressing their feelings, precisely because of the fear of offending those who might take the self-criticism the wrong way.

Not my first marathon

I think the first thing you have to realize is that this is not my first marathon. It is my second Pittsburgh Marathon. And it is probably the sixth time I at least mostly run (versus walked) a consecutive 26.2 miles or more.

I was fairly thrilled to finish my first marathon, which was the 2003 Pittsburgh Marathon, even though it was also basically an embarrassing disaster, because it was my first. There is nothing like the first, because before going in, no matter what, you just wonder whether you will finish at all. It is so unknown.

Marathon-long training run

I did one or two marathon-long training runs just by myself in Frick Park and Homewood Cemetery in 2006, while trying to toughen myself up for the Rachel Carson Trail Challenge. I did those slowly, so that I experienced none of the suffering from going too fast in my first Pittsburgh Marathon. This was a very important experience for me because I needed to prove to myself that simply going very slowly, I could cover a marathon distance any day of my life by just hopping out of bed without any special training. I wanted to defuse the mystique of the marathon.

I ended up abandoning doing my own marathon-distance runs, however, because even if I didn't suffer horribly, it still took a long time to fully recover. In fact, I made the mistake of playing in a chess tournament two days after one of these runs and had one of the worst tournaments in my life, in which my brain was deprived of fuel and I could not think. Ben Finegold, I never explained to you why I self-destructed while easily winning a game against your (then) wife in the Columbus Open, but now you know!

Sammy's Birthday Run

In 2006, I ran/walked (after completing the Rachel Carson Trail Challenge) Sammy's Birthday Run, covering 27.5 miles before I quit. I was going pretty slow. I was not doing it for time. I was doing it just to finish at least a marathon distance, although I was kind of hoping to get to 30 miles (I stopped because I felt my body had enough and I didn't need more punishment). I didn't time myself, but I know I finished in about 5 hours and 15 minutes (there is a 6 hour time limit for the run, and I arrived about half an hour late for the official start). This was with no carb-loading, any of that stuff. Just showing up an running really slowly, walking some of the uphill sections. I drank some sports drink that I brought, and ate boiled potatoes and pretzels.

No cramping up, no suffering (other than increasing fatigue and leg heaviness). Here is what I looked like finishing:

In 2008, I did Sammy's Birthday Run again, with even less training and fitness. This time I timed myself. I finished my 27.5 miles in 5:55:22. Hardly a great time, but it was a finish, and without any real suffering except at one moment. At around mile 22, I made the mistake of eating some cookies that someone had brought, and was in instant agony with stomach cramps. I slowed way down for a couple of minutes. Then I sat down for 9 minutes, used the Port-a-pottie, was OK again, and continued. But other than that incident, I had no leg or foot problems. So, basically what I'm saying is that for me, finishing a marathon distance by simply going slow is trivial, and therefore does not give me a sense of accomplishment. For you, finishing might be nontrivial, in which case you definitely deserve to be proud upon finishing your marathon!

Training

So another thing that some people have said is, "You should be proud of myself for all the training I put in to finish the marathon!"

But I'm not proud. I'm embarrassed and angry.

One reason: it is possible that with no training whatsoever, I could have finished Sunday's marathon in 4:38, with far less suffering. I did an average 10:37 pace for that marathon (including the minutes I spent at the side of the road resting). What if I had just gone into the marathon healthy, without messed up legs and feet and body, fully rested, and simply jogged slowly (for me) at 10:37 pace the whole way?

An even better reason: look at my training record that I've documented since February. My cramping and slowing down before mile 11 was a total joke. It wasn't training that enabled me to get past that. It was overtraining that disabled my fitness.

Two months ago, in March, I was barely starting marathon training. I did a 12-mile run crossing Pittsburgh bridges 11 times that was tough for me. I averaged just a bit faster than 10-minute pace. Just a month later, I had already gotten much stronger: I did my hardest run, a 16-mile run, in 2:27, for an average of 9:11 pace. And I did that in Luna Sandals, with no blisters, no leg cramping, no problems. And without breakfast and without any Gatorade or gel or food during the entire run! And that was just a training run, not a race where I gave it my all.

Unfortunately, that 16-mile run was the last time I felt really strong. I screwed things up after that. I could have run the Pittsburgh Marathon that day, probably, and finished in 4:00.

Shoes

I get the impression that some people are questioning my shoe choice, wondering whether wearing Luna Sandals messed up my marathon.

This also upsets me, because the last thing I want is for Luna Sandals to get a bad reputation just because I happened to be wearing them when I ran a bad marathon. Fact is, as I explained, I believe the Luna Sandals saved me from much worse. I had toe cramping wearing non-sandals in all my previous half marathons and marathons. And I have to refer again back to the 16-mile long run that I did in Luna Sandals. I didn't wear these shoes untested in the marathon.

Finishing versus excelling

The problem with the marathon is that it is such a public event, and there is so much focus on "finishing" one. I don't feel good about merely "finishing" a marathon. Here are some analogies I make to myself.

I'm an amateur flutist, and still a beginner, with only two years of serious self-study so far. Suppose I had the opportunity to somehow get put into a professional orchestra, and got assigned to perform a flute concerto. Suppose we did the performance, and after messing everything up and playing quite poorly, we got to the end. Would I feel proud of "finishing" the performance? This is exactly how I personally feel about what I did in the marathon.

Here are some possible modifications to the music program that would make me proud of "finishing":

Suppose that we took the flute concerto slowly enough that I could get most of the notes and expressiveness in. Then at least it would preserve some integrity that I could be proud of.
Suppose that we chose a much easier and shorter piece that I could actually master, and we played that.

The analogues in the running world:

I could have done the marathon very slowly, like with Sammy's Birthday Run, and run an even pace, with no suffering other than extreme fatigue, and been proud of that.
I could have abandoned the idea of finishing a marathon at all and choose to run half marathon or 5K races that I can run fast and well.

Personally, I am far more proud of my fastest 5K, 10K, and half marathon races than of any marathon I have done or ever will do again, because they stand as gems of perfect execution. I would rather do a smaller thing well and completely than a bigger thing badly and sloppily.

Nobody ever cheered for me as I performed my greatest feats in the 5K, 10K, and half marathon where I thought I was going to puke or fall apart, but those are the moments I treasure.

So in fact, I am abandoning the marathon and returning to trying to improve my performances at shorter distances. You will not be congratulating me as I shave off minutes or seconds from my times, but that's OK.

Conclusion

I'm very emotional right now, and I felt now was as good a time as any to say something about my personal values and goals when it comes to running races, and by extension, to other aspects of my life.

I actually do feel good about finishing the marathon in one respect: I proved that even if I totally screwed everything up, and deserved all the pain I experienced, and it was all my own fault that I could have avoided, I went on anyway and got the job done. When I realize that this is what people are trying to communicate to me by congratulate me, I am very appreciative.

(Update of 2013-05-09)

The following day, the third day after the marathon, I was able to walk normally and was emotionally recovering as well and was embarrassed by this rant.

The fourth day, I went out for a short run and reflected on what running is really about for me.

2013 Pittsburgh Marathon: my 135th race was the worst I finished, but I did!

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:23:08 GMT

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube';

Yesterday, for my birthday, I ran the Pittsburgh Marathon for the second time. The first time was ten years ago, in 2003. That was an ordeal in which I had aimed at finishing in 3:30 and in fact run the first half in 1:45, but then faltered badly to struggle to finish in a <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://runhigh.com/.2003%20Results%20A/R050403AA.html" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://runhigh.com/.2003%20Results%20A/R050403AA.html">chip time of 3:53:25</span>.

My second Pittsburgh Marathon went even worse. I had wanted to finish in 4:00, but instead finished in 4:38:21.

This was my 135th race in my life, and the worst of them all that I actually finished (I failed to finish one 30K race because of severe illness that should have kept me from going to the start line at all).

Here's my report on what happened, why, my thankfulness for all the good that came from the experience, and my running plans for the future.

Coming back from injury and burnout

I think it's important to understand that my poor performance did not come from nowhere. I had battled injury and burnout for some time. Logically, I should not have gone to the start line at all.

Night before

I got zero sleep the night before the race. Terrible, but my body was probably confused by the carb-loaded diet as well as my insistence on spending the whole day napping because I was so tired. I had felt that I had to do that napping because I was not going to be able to sleep well at night anyway.

Early morning on race day

Super early, Abby drove us to the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.visitpittsburgh.com/essentials/neighborhoods/north-shore/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.visitpittsburgh.com/essentials/neighborhoods/north-shore/">North Shore</span> to park. Then we napped for a bit before heading to the nearest light rail (aka "T") station to wait for a ride downtown:

We got downtown finally, I dropped off a bag of post-race flip-flops at Gear Check, time was starting to run out, and I got in line for a Port-a-pottie:

It was 15 minutes before I did what I needed to do. Then I had to quickly head to my corral.

Clothing

What I wore:

the same blue singlet I wore in the 2003 Pittsburgh Marathon ten years ago (my favorite running shirt that I have actually worn for probably at least 70 of my races in over a decade, as well as most of my warm-weather casual runs also!!)
Brooks Infiniti Short III that I bought at Elite Runners and Walkers before the Just A Short Run half marathon in March
Luna Sandals (Venado) that I've been wearing for almost all of my runs in the past month, maximum distance of 16 miles
CEP compression calf sleeves, which I had worn just one other time
my phone, in a SPIbelt.
on my back, I pinned a "We are all Boston Marathoners at heart" bib
a long-sleeve T-shirt on top of my singlet, since it was cold (under 50 degrees F?) before the race; the plan was to discard this T-shirt before the race (and hope that people collect it and find a good home for it!)

Entering the corral

This is the second race in my life in which I have carried a phone. I planned to use it only in case of emergency, and in order to meet up with Abby afterwards, but as you can see, while I had a chance, I took some photos also.

I was assigned to corral C because of my estimated finish time of 4:00 that I had written down when signing up for the marathon months ago.

This was my first mistake. Given my comeback from injury and inactivity, the truly logical thing for me to have done was to set a very conservative goal of simply finishing the marathon without terrible suffering. Given that I ended up finishing in 4:38, I might as well have moved back into another corral and planned to finish in the 4:20-4:30 range, in which case I bet I would have done that with minimal pain and suffering.

In the future, I resolve to face the facts on the ground in any event as strenuous as a marathon. It doesn't make any sense what I did, especially given that I was perfectly smart when in March I did my first half marathon in nine years and ran it conservatively and had a great experience! I am capable of logical reasoning and have actually executed it in the past. But apparently the marathon puts me into a hyper-emotional frame of mind.

Pace?

Also, I had chosen not to sign up to follow an <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.pittsburghmarathon.com/pace-team" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.pittsburghmarathon.com/pace-team">official pacer</span>, because on all my long training runs, I had found my own pace by feel, and done well ignoring pacers. My plan was simply to go slow and then get faster. I did look around for pace signs. I only saw one from where I was standing: a sign near the front of the corral for finishing in 3:50. I looked back and saw no other signs.

This was my second mistake. Given that I had not done any serious running for ten days, with my longest run being only two miles, and my last "long" run was an eleven-mile run fifteen days ago, I should have realized that whatever "feel" I had for pace was gone, and I should have moved back in the corral till I found a 4:00-finishing pacer, at least (but as mentioned earlier, what I should have done was move into a slower corral altogether and then found a suitable pacer there).

Race start

There was a moment of silence for Boston.

Star-Spangled Banner, then the waves began. A photo as mine was approaching the start line, around 7:05 AM:

Then we went.

Wrong pace

I honestly thought I was going slow. I was hardly breathing at all. I was going so "slow" that I pulled out my phone to take some photos. But then I got very confused, because the 3:50 pacer was still in my sight after many minutes:

I could not process this information. Part of me wanted to slow down, but I felt like I was barely running. Part of me believed that the pacer must be slow, but come on, these pacers are supposed to be reliable.

So I made the mistake of not trusting the pacer. It sounds crazy, but I really felt like I was going too slow.

Slowing down?

At some point, I lost sight of the pacer, so I felt reassured that I must have slowed down properly. Here's another problem: I did not keep track of my mile splits because the mass of people made it hard for me to actually reliably spot any mile markers on the course; I don't even know how many actually existed.

I even took a photo of myself 40 minutes into the marathon feeling fine.

There were spectators on bridges, some of them positioned seemingly precariously.

At some point I realized that I could see the 3:50 pacer up ahead. I got worried. It was unlikely that I was magically super-fit now. But I didn't feel like slowing down.

At some point I must have started slowing down, because eventually I saw a 3:55 pacer pass me.

Still, it appears from the alert system that I signed up for (to notify my parents by email, and Abby by text message, and my Facebook friends and Twitter followers), that I did the first 10K (6.2 miles) in 55:29, meaning an average pace of 8:56 and estimated finish time of 3:54:04. That's much faster than the 9:08 pace I had intended for a 4:00 finish.

Really slowing down

I started really slowing down before even reaching the Birmingham Bridge. I knew I was getting into serious trouble. It was crazy, but my left knee was bothering me, and my left quads had started to twitch. So I had gone only about 11 miles and I was already struggling.

You have to understand how nonsensical it is for me to be having muscle cramping after running only 11 miles at a pace that is actually slow for an 11-mile run.

Even if we assumed, falsely, that I got to mile 11 at the same pace as during my first 6.2 miles (8:56), note that I ran an entire half marathon (13.1 miles) in late March, only in the beginning of marathon training, at an average of 8:28 pace, and was totally fine with no cramping during the race. And after a couple of weeks of further training, I had felt much stronger during a 16-mile run.

So basically, it was a cruel joke I played on myself that I was in such poor condition that I was cramping up after 11 miles at a slow pace. I was very angry at myself that I had made a complete travesty of my marathon, just like in 2003.

Halfway, and change of plan

I slowed down more in Oakland to keep the left quad twitching under control.

According to the alert system, I got halfway in 1:59:46, average pace of 9:09, and estimated finish time of 3:59:31. But of course, by then, I knew that I was done for. I was just going to continue slowing down and suffering, for over two more hours, if I finished at all.

When I finally saw the 4:00 pace group pass me, somehow that was a real blow to me.

At 9:27 AM, not too long after the halfway point, I texted Abby: "Severe pain. Very slow, just aim finish. Maybe 4:30."

Now my main thought was to focus on making it to Annie (of the Pittsburgh Recorder Society), who was going to watch for me in Highland Park, just before mile 20. I had told her to expect me around 10 AM, and Annie had even posted to the Pittsburgh Recorder Society Facebook page telling everyone I was running.

I was so not going to make it for 10 AM. But I wanted to go slowly enough that I could hold off the quad cramping.

Despair

At around 9:49 AM, <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.runoverit.com/" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.runoverit.com/">Chris</span> passed me and said hello. I told him I was doing very badly. He wasn't doing as well as he had hoped, but was moving along, unlike me. Here's a photo I had the presence of mind to take only as he had already gone way ahead (in the blue shirt):

At 9:54 AM, I made a video statement on my phone, just for myself: "I'm after mile 17 or something, in Homewood. I'm doing really badly, but I'm still running, and that's all I can say about that."

Annie

At 10:11 AM, not yet at Annie's, I was contemplating quitting, because the pains I was experiencing (right quads twitching also, and even my arms and hands, mysteriously, in spots where I had old injuries years ago, plus a really bad blister on my right foot where I had all those skin problems earlier, and less bad but very annoying constant chafing of the Luna Sandals straps) were so terrible. I decided to just take a break at a fluid station and squat and stretch. I texted Abby: "Very bad shape. Rested some." I also finally posted to Facebook, "In very bad shape. Trying to finish anyway." I was not actively reading Facebook during the marathon at all, but did notice a lot of notifications, and assumed they were words of encouragement from my friends; I didn't want to read them until I was done, because I felt I might let them down. Abby replied, "What is your plan?"

At 10:19, I said, "Don't know. Walking, blister and cramping."

A note on the blistering and chafing: it got really warm and I got sweaty, so that was part of the problem. I had not run in these sandals in such conditions before: I had mostly run in dry, cold conditions of 35-50 degrees F. Also, I had forgotten about road hazards: there were cups of water and Gatorade all over around the aid stations and my feet were sticky and wet for much of the marathon. It was a rather unpleasant feeling.

I kept running/walking. I saw Annie. I decided there and then, seeing her, that I was going to finish, rather than just bail out and crash on her couch or something pathetic like that. I shouted that I was in severe pain but planned to continue on! She took a photo of me, which I knew was going to be on Facebook before too long, so I'd better make good on my promise to her!

At 10:29, I texted Abby: "Got to Annie. Running again."

I then focused on just continuing to move, slowing to a walk if I needed to in order to deal with cramping.

Mile 22

At 10:51, I reached S Aiken, just before mile 22. This is an important point in the course for me, not only because it begins a downhill, but also because it is where my friend Nathaniel cheered me on ten years ago when I was also suffering.

Strip District

At some point, I was getting discouraged again and started walking, when I accidentally spotted Deb and Mark watching. Seeing familiar faces among the spectators is definitely helpful! Upon seeing them, I felt ashamed of my walking and my negative thoughts. I went up to them, and they were going to take a picture of me, and I got all determined, and screamed, "I'm going to finish this thing!!"

I kept on running, and did not stop, even though I saw many people walking, and also saw many relay runners zooming by. I decided that I was not only going to finish (it was now clear that I could), but that I was going to finish as strong as I could, even though it would count for nothing. I was going to run at the edge of quad twitching, all the way to the end. It was going to hurt far more than if I just ran very slowly to finish, but I didn't come this far just to walk if I could run. I was determined to push.

As I got closer and closer, I periodically texted Abby the street I had just crossed, so that she would know roughly when I was going to finish.

Finish line

And so I finished. I finished in a state of my quads twitching like firecrackers. I got my medal. I kept on walking. I grabbed a bag of chips and water. I forgot to look for other stuff, like Smiley Cookies (that Abby later said she saw were being handed out). I just wanted to stop the twitching, get my bag from Gear Check, get out of my Luna Sandals into some comfortable, cushioned flip-flops, use a Port-a-potty, and finally find Abby and the "CMU tent", which I assumed was just a section of the <span class="link-defunct" data-url="https://www.pittsburghmarathon.com/PCC" data-verified="2026-04-15" title="link defunct 2026-04-15: https://www.pittsburghmarathon.com/PCC">Pittsburgh Corporate Challenge Tent</span>. (I had bought a bracelet for Abby earlier so that she could have access to the tent.)

I could barely walk after I started cooling down, because I got stiffer and stiffer. It took me forever to make it to the Finish Line Festival area, and I was so mentally drained that I had to call Abby to have her tell me where the tent was.

Videos (update of 2013-05-23)

Videos of the Pittsburgh Marathon have been posted.

I found myself in one of the sets of videos, for those who finished in a clock time between 4:40:00 and 4:50:00.

You can see me at around 4:44:35 and finishing at about 4:44:40 here:

The tent and the Pittsburgh Campus Challenge

When I signed up for the Pittsburgh Campus Challenge through Carnegie Mellon University, there was advertised to be "gourmet food, private massages, and more" in the tent. The reality was actually quite different.

Abby said it was a good thing she made it to the tent before too late (she had gone back to nap in the car after seeing me off), because by 10 AM, half marathoners had eaten much of the food already, and she had remembered to save some for me for later! There was still food left, but much of the good stuff was gone. And it wasn't really "gourmet". There was dry fried chicken, rolls, pasta left, as far as I could tell, other than the pancakes Abby had saved from earlier, and a Panera Bread sandwiches she also saved for me.

There was a signup sheet for massage by Massage Envy, however, and a very long wait, as I got my massage after one hour and twenty minutes, which was actually OK because I was so sore I simply needed to be left alone for a while to just eat and eat and rest.

CMU won!

When I came into the tent, there was confusion because I didn't have a sticker on my bib indicating that I had access to the tent. Apparently I was supposed to have gotten a sticker at some point, but I don't remember getting instructions about that.

When they learned I was with CMU, however, they gave me the prize for CMU winning the Pittsburgh Campus Challenge, to hand over to Pattye at CMU. We beat Pitt!

Feet

My feet were terribly sore. I got one blood-filled blister:

But otherwise, the damage was not as bad as I had thought. During the marathon, I had wondered sometimes about all the stickiness I felt on my feet, but it was not blood after all; it was a mixture of energy gel, Gatorade, orange juice, and whatever else was left on the road that got onto my feet:

I had two chafing spots from the straps, but they were not serious. All in all, my feet were in much condition after wearing the Luna Sandals than they were ten years ago after wearing standard socks and running shoes. The drawback is that my feet were horribly sore, although after one night of rest, the foot soreness is actually all gone.

One day later

However, I do have a different problem: one day later, numbness in my left foot remains, because I had adjusted my strap for my left foot too tightly, out of fear of it coming off. Overly tight strap was a big mistake. I did make an adjustment at some point during the race, but I could at least have loosened the strap earlier when I felt discomfort.

In all my previous runs, my left foot has never fallen out. I hope the numbness goes away in another day.

Legs

My legs were utterly trashed, as might be expected given how I had tortured them for so long. At first, I thought it was just my quads and hamstrings, but once I pulled off the calf sleeves, I realized that my calves were trashed too, but had completely avoided cramping because of the compression. I count this as a total success for the calf sleeves, because in the marathon ten years ago, my calves were seizing up in the second half, not just my quads. I will always wear calf sleeves in the future in long runs or hikes.

Em of Massage Envy was very helpful in getting me able to sort of walk, so that I could go with Abby back over to the North Shore to our car (I had to walk across the bridge, then waited as she brought the car over).

Overall, I think wearing the Luna Sandals was the correct decision, despite the drawbacks. I did not have toe jamming, toe blistering, toe cramping that I believe I would have had in other footwear. I did not have ankle soreness of any kind. Or shin splints. I did not have any right knee pain at all, just left (and almost certainly because of my fall on Thursday). I could have used more cushioning though. But my order of the thicker Luna Sandals (the new Mono model) has not yet shipped.

Thanks!

I have a lot to be thankful for even though in some sense this marathon was truly a debacle for me.

I am thankful that this race returned to Pittsburgh after suspension in 2004-2008, as Dick's Sporting Goods rose up to be the title sponsor. I am amazed by how large and popular the Pittsburgh Marathon has become since I last ran it ten years ago. I think it's great that the city has this annual celebration of its neighborhoods and of the running community. The Pittsburgh Marathon is not just about the marathon, but about just regular fitness running, free workshops on health and exercise, and celebrating a sport that brings everyone together.

I am thankful to Pattye Stragar for spreading word of the Pittsburgh Campus Challenge through the CMU fitness mailing list.

I am thankful to Steel City Road Runners for their well-organized Saturday long runs that got me out during the cold months when I otherwise might have chosen to just sleep in.

I am thankful to my friends who encouraged me as I progressed through my training and in my discouraging days before the marathon.

I am thankful to Annie and Deb and Mark for being spectators I saw and knew who gave me additional motivation to keep going.

I am thankful to all the spectators and volunteers I don't know who offered cheers, water, orange slices, music, and everything else that reminded me that humanity is caring and helpful.

And of course, I am particularly thankful to my wife Abby, who has been so patient these months as I have pursued this marathon thing that she thinks is crazy (OK, I know it is crazy), and helped me every single day. Abby, this whole experience has truly deepened my appreciation of you, and I will never forget what we went through together to make this birthday present happen.

Did I achieve my goals?

Let's go back to my blog post from three months ago where I stated my goals for the marathon. What did I actually achieve?

maintain a smart pace: failed (totally)
finish strong: succeeded (insofar as I pushed as hard as I could for the last three miles approximately)
avoid leg muscle cramping: failed miserably with the quads, succeeded with the calves
avoid foot blistering: failed (got one bad blister)
conquer the hills: neutral (didn't feel particularly bad at hills as such)

So it would seem that I basically failed, as far as the marathon itself.

But I think I succeeded, in a larger context:

I didn't expect to be wearing huaraches for a marathon, but I did wear Luna Sandals! I proved to myself it could be done.
As a side effect of marathon training, I got myself into much better shape than I have been in for the past half decade, and did my first half marathon in nine years, and set up exercise habits I hope to make permanent independent of any future marathoning.
Abby's help as I took on the task of training made a profound impression on me.
The outpouring of support from friends was a welcome surprise to me, because in my last Pittsburgh Marathon, I mostly went about it alone, telling only a few people about it.

Why did I fail so miserably?

I believe I failed mostly because I didn't have the proper training. I started too late, I didn't have enough time to more gradually absorb increased training volume, I could have used an extra month or two of more long runs.

I also did not adapt properly to setbacks that should have led me to change my goals drastically. There was a downward spiral in terms of injury, fatigue, and loss of calm reason.

What next?

Done with the marathon

I told Abby that this is it: no more racing marathons again, ever. I mean it. I'm facing the reality that this is not the right event for me. I believe I could do a good marathon, but what it would take is not worth the effort. The sacrifices that I made, and Abby made, were considerable. There are other things we could be doing.

So I look forward to our returning to "normal" life as I recover.

Running

That said, I totally enjoyed getting back into year-round running. I will never go into winter hibernation again. I still have to figure out ideal footwear for the coldest and snow/ice/water-ridden conditions for next winter, of course.

Half marathons

Doing Just A Short Run again gave me confidence that I can "master" the half marathon distance. I would like to continue doing half marathons. I have decided to do the Montour Trail Half Marathon in September. This means I will have to skip the CMU Pretty Good Race, which is always held the Friday before this Saturday race, but it's time for me to get back into doing half marathon and 10K and 5K (and even mile) races, distances that I can actually work on being able to run well without wrecking myself.

Heck, I might even run the Pittsburgh Half Marathon a year from now! (Although I don't actually want to think about that for a while.)

Conclusion

In isolation, the 2013 Pittsburgh Marathon may be considered to be a total debacle for me, the worst race I've finished out of the 135 races I've showed up for in my life. But I'm glad I went through the process of training for it, and I'm grateful for it as a vehicle of self-discovery: I faced some unpleasant truths about various poor decisions I made. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to share my journey with friends and family.

As Emil Zatopek said:

<blockquote> If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. </blockquote>

(Update of 2013-05-09)

The second day after the marathon, I was still in physical and emotional pain, and wrote a little rant expressing my disappointment.

The third day, I was able to walk normally and was emotionally recovering as well and was embarrassed by my rant.

The fourth day, I went out for a short run and reflected on what running is really about for me.

(Update of 2013-12-22)

I just wanted to point out a much healthier attitude and experience of a marathon gone badly: this is a really beautiful article that every disappointed racer should read.

I recognize that I trapped myself during March and April with increasingly unbalanced expectations of my marathon, and lost all calmness and perspective. I still don't know whether I will run a marathon again, but if I do, I vow to do it with a clear mind and body.

I spent the past week not knowing whether I could run in the 2013 Pittsburgh Marathon tomorrow

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:22:17 GMT

Tomorrow is my birthday, and I will be running the Pittsburgh Marathon.

I have no idea how it will turn out, because I spent the past week not knowing whether I would even make it to the start line!

Here's what's been happening.

Last Saturday: recovering from injury

A week ago I was in despair as I skipped a planned Steel City Road Runners final taper run because of injury and burnout.

Sunday

I continued to rest and apply cream to my foot skin cracks. My right shin is OK again.

Monday

After three days off from running, I was worried about losing fitness. My feet were healing slowly. I did just a mile on the treadmill, wearing Vibram FiveFingers Bikila LS, not Luna Sandals, in order to keep my feet from drying out. I felt very sluggish and weak. I wanted to verify that I could at least run at all though.

Tuesday

My right foot was hurting again, healing not complete. Also, I was feeling simply physically exhausted, like I was getting sick or something: I had a headache waking up. I took a day off work to do a lot of napping.

Wednesday

I thought my friends who have been following my marathon training progress for the past two months should know what was up, so I posted on Facebook, "If the marathon were tomorrow, I would not go to the start line. I hope another three days of healing will get me there."

Later I did feel better and get in a short 1-mile run, in Luna Sandals.

I started carb-loading.

Thursday

I felt better, my feet were mostly healed, and I got in a 2-mile run. I publicly declared on Facebook, "I'm on for the marathon on Sunday!"

Later in the day, in a freak accident, unfortunately, I fell down the stairs at work. Basically, I missed one step when taking a step with my left foot. I ended up landing really hard and awkwardly on my left foot on the second step down instead of the first step down, with considerable pressure on my left knee, which buckled to the side a bit, and then I landed on my right foot, with less pressure on my right knee, then I fell to the right and banged up my right ankle also. I was surprised that I didn't actually break anything, but I was shaken. I tried to joke about this on Facebook, but the incident did not help me.

Friday

Tired. No running.

Saturday (today)

Woke up exhausted, spent the whole day napping. Finished carb-loading. I gained about three pounds in the past three days.

Conclusion

I've done what I could in order to make it to the start line of the Pittsburgh Marathon tomorrow. Everything is out of whack, but I didn't want to cancel doing it, or switch to doing the half marathon. I haven't had a real run in nine days. I regret completely messing up my preparation for the marathon, but as long as I think I can finish it, I am doing it.

This may not be quite logical, but emotionally, in the past week, I have felt that I need to do the marathon, not so much because I have done so much for it (OK, that's the sunk cost fallacy, I know), but because I signed up for it with an agreement with Abby that this was going to be my last marathon for 15-20 years, and lately, in light of my suffering (and her collateral suffering), I amended that to tell her that I was never going to do a marathon again, ever!

Playing violin music on flute

Sat, 04 May 2013 03:32:33 GMT

Abby and I enjoyed another party at Henry's. I have been very tired leading up to the Pittsburgh Marathon to run on Sunday. I took the day off from work as planned in order to get more reset, and picked up my race packet at the Expo.

I didn't play all that much music at the party, but the highlight for me was playing Fritz Kreisler's "Liebesleid" on flute with Henry accompanying on piano. I totally love this little piece that Kreisler wrote for violin, and I enjoy making it work on flute. We were just having fun at the party, but eventually I want to make a real performance out of it, and record it myself, because I have very strong ideas on how to play it to express what I feel in the music.

Some existing performances on violin

Fritz Kreisler himself

Here is Kreisler performing his own piece:

It's a fine performance, but ironically, not actually my favorite!

David Oistrakh

This is an interesting interpretation. It is still not as free as I like, but it is elegant and subtle in its expression.

Itzhak Perlman

A romantic rendition with great elements, but too fast and tight, not meditative enough, so overall it leaves me disappointed.

Joshua Bell

Here is a modern performance by Joshua Bell. This is an example of a performance that I don't like at all, being very square and without a lilt and freedom.

Ryu Goto

A fine performance I would put into the category of elegant and subtle.

Katica Illenyi

Now this, I really love: a performance of extreme detail and personal expression. One of the most beautiful performances I have encountered!

Gidon Kremer with Martha Argerich

My favorite performance is actually this unusual one of very extreme emotional expression. Note how Kremer stretches out time and also accelerates with many tempo changes (finely covered by Argerich, of course). He takes the dynamics down to an extreme, and varies his vibrato. He plays this piece as a deep story of love rather than just a lighthearted one.

Performances on flute

Most of the performances I found on YouTube with flute were really, really bad. Here are some of the exceptions:

Unji Chung

Very emotional reading. A good performance, but maybe too extroverted for my taste, too driving and with an over-powerful vibrato.

Oksana Sinkova

Expressive phrasing, coloring, tone, and deeply felt. She appears to be playing a wooden flute. Enchanting!