King Hunt

Late in 1912, a 26-year-old German named Edward Lasker made his first trip to London. Still a bit seasick from a rough channel crossing, he made his way to the local chess club, as was his custom whenever he visited a new country. He spoke no English, but one of the members invited him to a game. Lasker took white, and they started innocently enough:

1. d4 e6 2. Nf3 f5 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bg5 Be7 5. Bxf6 Bxf6 6. e4 fxe4 7. Nxe4 b6 8. Ne5 O-O 9. Bd3 Bb7 10. Qh5 Qe7

lasker-thomas, position before combination

But here the young German saw a remarkable opportunity, an eight-move combination that produced one of the most striking endings in chess history:

11. Qxh7+! Kxh7 12. Nxf6+ Kh6 13. Neg4+ Kg5 14. h4+ Kf4 15. g3+ Kf3 16. Be2+ Kg2 17. Rh2+ Kg1 18. Kd2#

lasker-thomas, final position

Or 18. O-O-O#! “This was very nice,” said his opponent, who turned out to be Sir George Thomas, president of the club and later British champion. In after years Lasker would remember his effort modestly as “the most beautiful game I ever succeeded in winning,” but Mikhail Botvinnik was more forthcoming: “If Edward Lasker had played only one game in his entire life,” he wrote, “this would have been enough to preserve his name in the annals of time.”

| Entertainment

Steampunk Chauffer

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=d6kAAAAAEBAJ&dq=75874

Zadoc Dederick and Isaac Grass quietly patented this as an “improvement in steam-carriage” in 1868, but the details are pretty sensational: They’d invented a mechanical man with jointed legs who could pull a cart, lift its legs to clear obstacles, and even run backward.

The boiler is in the torso. “It is unnecessary to describe this part of the mechanism, as there is nothing peculiar in it.”

| Technology

Claws and Effect

From Lewis Carroll’s first textbook in symbolic logic:

  1. No kitten that loves fish is unteachable.
  2. No kitten without a tail will play with a gorilla.
  3. Kittens with whiskers always love fish.
  4. No teachable kitten has green eyes.
  5. No kittens have tails unless they have whiskers.

What conclusion can be drawn from these premises?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Cloudy

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%91%D0%BE%D0%B3_%D0%A1%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BE%D1%84.jpg

All rational beings believe in their own existence, whether or not they actually exist. Sherlock Holmes believes that he exists, but he is wrong. God too believes in his own existence–and his omniscience makes it impossible that he is mistaken. Therefore God exists.

On the other hand: Perfection is essential to godhood, and a perfect God must be perfectly virtuous. But virtue implies overcoming pain, fear, and temptation, and a God who is subject to these ills is less perfect than one who is not. Thus perfection is impossible, and God cannot exist.

Asked what he would say to God on Judgment Day, Bertrand Russell said, “Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!”

| Religion

New-Minted Coins

Words of which William Shakespeare was the only recorded user, at some point, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

  • bepray
  • bragless
  • compulsative
  • conceptious
  • confineless
  • continuantly
  • correctioner
  • disliken
  • exceptless
  • exsufflicate
  • foxship
  • insultment
  • oathable
  • offendress
  • omittance
  • overgreen
  • overstink
  • questant
  • razorable
  • successantly
  • thoughten
  • uprighteously
  • wenchless

In Inventing English, Stanford literary historian Seth Lerer credits him with inventing nearly 6,000 new words.

| Language

Strike Three

After cataloging her disappointment with Europe, Asia, and Australia, xenophobic travel writer Favell Lee Mortimer finished her world survey with Far Off, Part II: Africa and America Described (1854). What did she discover about the intriguing people and exotic customs of these remote continents?

  • “It is a rare thing in Egypt to speak the truth.”
  • “Those who wish to visit Nubia ought to go there in a boat, for there is no other pleasant way.”
  • “Perhaps there is no Christian country in the world as ignorant as Abyssinia.”
  • “Cruelty is the chief vice of the Caffre.”
  • “Newfoundland is a dreary abode.”
  • “Though Mexico is so beautiful at a distance, yet the streets are narrow and loathsome, and the poor people, walking in them, look like bundles of old rags.”

“Washington is one of the most desolate cities in the world: not because she is in ruins, but for the opposite reason — because she is unfinished. There are places marked out where houses ought to be, but where no houses seem ever likely to be.”

| Literature · Society