Category Archives: Did you know that…
Sunday surfing…
Following up on last Thursday’s surfing (which got over 50,000 views), today I move in a completely different direction on the ‘net and find a lot of inspiration. Potpourri, nonsense, trying to be serious (at times!), and so on. It is the ‘net. It takes us places and is an adventure. All that is required is to have an open mind…Enjoy!
Odds and Ends
—————–
THOUGHTFUL OPINION
LINK
“A recent article in the New York Times saw as a problem the fact that females are greatly under-represented among the highest rated chess players. Innumerable articles, TV stories and political outcries have been based on an “under-representation” of women in Silicon Valley, seen as a problem that needs to be solved.
Are there girls out there dying to play chess, who find the doors slammed shut in their faces? Are there women with Ph.D.s in computer science from M.I.T. and Cal Tech who get turned away when they apply for jobs in Silicon Valley?
Are girls and boys not allowed to have different interests? If girls had the same interest in chess as boys had, but were banned from chess clubs, that would be something very different from their not choosing to play chess as often as boys do. As for chess ratings, that is not subjective. It is based on which players, with which ratings, you have won against and lost to.
Are women and men not to be allowed to make different decisions as to how they choose to spend their time and live their lives?
Chess is not the only endeavor which can take a huge chunk of time out of your life, and unremitting efforts, to reach the top. If you want to become a top scientist, a partner in a big law firm or a top executive in a major corporation, you are very unlikely to do it working from 9 to 5, or taking a few years off, here and there, to have children and raise them.
Applying the same unsubstantiated assumption to differences in “representation” between different racial and ethnic groups likewise produces many loudly expressed grievances, political crusades, and millions of dollars from lawsuits charging discrimination — all without a speck of evidence beyond numbers that do not match the prevailing assumptions.
People who base their conclusions on hard facts often reach very different conclusions than those who base their conclusions on the preconception that outcomes would be even or random in the absence of somebody treating somebody wrong.
Something as simple as age differences among groups can doom any assumption of even or random outcomes.
If every 20-year-old Puerto Rican in the United States had an income identical with the income of every 20-year-old Japanese American — and identical incomes at every other age — Japanese Americans as a group would still have a higher average income than Puerto Ricans in the United States. That is because the median age of Japanese Americans is more than 20 years older.
People with 20 years more work experience usually make higher incomes. And age difference is just one of many differences between groups.
You can study innumerable groups in countries around the world today, or over centuries of recorded history, without finding a single example of the even or random outcomes that are used as a benchmark for determining discrimination.
Nevertheless, courts of law — including the Supreme Court of the United States — use something that has never been found anywhere as a norm to which current realities are to be compared. Billions of dollars, in the aggregate, have changed hands as a result of individual lawsuits charging discrimination.
Life is undoubtedly unfair. But that is not the same as saying that the unfairness occurred wherever the statistics were collected. The origins of this unfairness often go back to different childhood environments for individuals or different geographic or cultural settings for groups and nations.
These differences between nations, as well as differences between individuals and groups, reflect the fact that the world “has never been a level playing field,” as economic historian David S. Landes put it. Renowned historian Fernand Braudel said, “In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally.”
How long will we continue to take something that has never happened, and never had much chance of happening, as a norm?”
Click on above banner to access link
Sevilla Monologues
——————————

From my talented goddaughter, Mariana. https://www.instagram.com/chemi_the_snail/

1969. The good old days. Zvonko Vranesic has just won the Canadian Championship. Take a look at a super-young Hugh Brodie over on the left. http://www.croatia.org/crown/articles/10863/1/Zvonko-Vranesic-Croatian-Canadian-International-Chess-Master-and-Professor-at-the-Univeristy-of-Toronto.html
————————————-
Glasses and pretty Asian girls
(Part I)
Surfing the ‘net
ODDS AND ENDS

A fantastic photo ot twins. Sources are unclear if the photographer was/is Diane Arbus (1923-1971) or Chadwick Tyler. I think that it is more in Arbus’ style, but who can be sure.

NEW YORK, NY – CIRCA 1968: Diane Arbus poses for a portrait in the Automat at Sixth Avenue between 41st & 42nd Street in New York, New York circa 1968. (Photo by Roz Kelly/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was one of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century. Noted for photographs of marginalized people—dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers —and others whose normality was perceived by the general populace as ugly or surreal. She took her own life.

Photo by Josef Breitenbach (1896–1984): Dr Riegler, J Greno, Munich, 1933. Breitenbach was Jewish and had to flee towards the end to Paris, where he lived for 6 years before fiinding his way to America. : Dr Riegler, J Greno, and Joseph were best friends and took many photos together.

Andre Breton, French artist and intellectual, went to Mexico where he met Frida, Trotsky and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Breton

Beware of open doors and sirens…Maryna Linchuk by Vincent Peters http://www.alrincon.com/en/blog/maryna_linchuk_by_vincent_peters.html

You enter the bar and see this girl all by herself, lonely, sad and drinking. What do you do? http://www.sttorybox.com/sttorypics/158-estas-sola Ngaio den Hertog

Kids may seem more vulnerable than adults, but they are amazingly resilient. And they come with batteries that never seem to discharge completely….

Photo by Vivian Maier Sadness in a Museum. http://pt.slideshare.net/guimera/museum-watching
Black is my happy colour
lina Rakitina Born August 14, 1996. Russia
“I’ve been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.”
― Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Wow!! 2016 already…
——————-
A sucker is born every quantum moment…
I kid you not! This caught my eye over at gm Rowson’s stimulating twitter, and as it seems that idiocy and lunacy is the theme of this Monday’s blog (so far), I could not resist.
I love the slick quantum mechanical approach to selling old used hat…by the way, Grey Matters International really exists!
Prepared for action…Miss Jones is going to teach you all you need to know about quantum–neuroplasticity!
Using chess to sell…CONDOMS!
NAKED CHESS
This was part of an advertising campaign in 2002 for the condom manufacturer Jontex.
LINK
—————————–
HERE’S ANOTHER ONE…
Look no further! Wondering what to get your teenage-son for X-mas? Or better still, before your son heads off to the WYCC, slip a box of these in his suitcase! What better way to say ‘Bon Voyage!‘ ‘CHESS’-condoms! 144 condoms in a box! LINK
Available at CMA today!
I bet you did NOT know that…
Cathy Rigby is the only woman to pose nude for Sports Illustrated. (August 1972)