I've heard this referred to as either Placement Chess or Bronstein's Chess (after the GM who reportedly suggested it). It's available to play on https://pychess.org, where it's called Placement Chess.
Lichess also includes a piece set similar to this, although with the notable difference that the Knight is shaped like a greater-than symbol and the pawn is a small square.
For those interested in playing and learning Shogi, take a look over at the great site https://lishogi.org -- a fork of LiChess for Shogi that includes real-time and correspondence play, AI opponents, analysis, puzzles and more. One of my favorite variants, Kyoto Shogi, is also available. The website https://pychess.org also has a ton of interesting and unique variants both traditional (Makruk) and modern (Chennis!).
If you want to play chess-meets-shogi, try the 'Crazyhouse' variant on lichess. I'm often fighting anonymous bullet games while waiting for CI pipelines to finish..
Crazyhouse is a fun game, but I find it inferior to both chess and shogi. Shogi without drop moves would be rather dull. The board is too big, and the pieces too slow-moving. Chess with drop moves (i.e. Crazyhouse) is too chaotic; drops make the already powerful pieces overpowered on such a small board. Chess and shogi are both nicely balanced games, Crazyhouse is not.
Another problem with Crazyhouse is that you can’t easily play it with a physical chess set. You can only play online, which some of us find hard to enjoy.
Absolutely! And I'm one of them :) Check out the Shogi Harbor community[1] and their Discord[2]. There's a lot of discussion there and they're very friendly.
The kanji on the pieces adds a significant potential barrier. I started with the piece set that had little directional pips on them and different colors to help (it's the twelfth set in the piece set list when you go to the settings gear on Lishogi).
This is a little surprising since MNRAS's niche has been that it had no page charges. So if one was short on grant money then you went with monthly notices. That's pretty nice if (a) you have zero grant funding available or (b) want to prioritize conference travel for students/postdocs.
MNRAS is one of the three "main" journals for astronomy along with Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) and the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ and AJ). A&A is mainly Europe and ApJ is more mixed but with more North America. Along with Nature and Science for high-impact things and regional journals for Japan, Australia, and the US (PASP).
This is an implementation of a neat pencil-and-paper game from the 1980's in Eastern Europe called Virus Wars or Klopodavka (bedbugs).
In this variant of Klopodavka, players can add a bug or squish an opponent's along cells adjacent to a path of friendly cells connected to the player's base. Players get six actions per turn and a player loses when no more valid moves are available. Although the AI is limited, it's an interesting game of territory and thinking about how one's own bugs will be used against oneself.
The code can be found at https://github.com/ptupitsyn/klopodavka-rs and was developed by Pavel Tupitsyn, who is also the maintainer of Apache Ignite according to his GitHub bio.
I don't think cursive is necessarily faster. But I do recall studies that showing what you're talking about: that a person's developed hybrid printing (printing with personal ligatures) are just as fast if not faster than full cursive.
What cursive does appear to be useful for historically is writing for long periods without tiring. Cursive written in the older Spencerian script fashion is written with big movements of the wrist and arm along the main diagonal path with little finger movement. The wrist and arms tire less quickly than fingers. Some professions in the 1800s like had to write all day, so it was quite useful and worth the significant training costs of learning such penmanship skills. They also had to write with pens that didn't write equally well in all directions.
And of course other fancy scripts likely just signalled class status similar to being able to recite Homer (in Greek) on command.
I grew up on cursive, and it always tired my arm so badly. When I learned it took far, far, far less effort for people back in fountain pen days, I felt somewhat cheated. Although they were all forced to use their right hands, never mind their brain lateralization, and that’s unfortunate.
My understanding is that the first conclusive proof that the Earth rotates was the astronomical observation of the aberration of starlight[1] in ~1730. The rotation of the Earth causes about 20 arcseconds of deflection from a stars known position, which is pretty large. The phenomena itself is due to relativistic beaming, and lead to one of the first measurements of the speed of light along with Roemer's earlier work using the moons of Jupiter as a clock in ~1680.
I think the 20 arc second deviation is caused by Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun. Did you intend that instead of rotation? The latter causes less than 1 arc second deviation.
Just changing my search habits helped a lot in in finding results quickly and managing the SEO spam for both DDG and Google.
I'm using Julia for a project right now, and answers are almost always found in either the Julia Discourse forum or Stack Overflow. By just searching either of those directly (plus more carefully reading the official documentation) I have found what I'm looking for much more easily.
The situation is more difficult with Python because the community aspect is more dispersed. But because my questions almost always have to do with using the standard library of external libraries, I've found devdocs.io to the be much simpler and more direct, especially because it runs offline. It covers >90% of cases for me with the docs for numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas, and base Python.
Maybe SEO spam forcing us back to RTFM will actually be a force for good?
Light pollution from satellite swarms is an economic externality. Any company can dump sewage in the river (and maybe the sewage is necessary for progress!) but the private sector profits by consuming a shared resource.
For the night sky and astronomy the externality is not so great in the grand scheme, but if unmitigated it does mean that there will be fewer discoveries per taxpayer dollar sent to the NSF/NASA. I'm a postdoc in astronomy and am all aboard Starlink-style networking. But it also seems fair to me that SpaceX should be the party that's responsible for treating that externality with light pollution, or else it's the same old "privatize the gains and socialize the cleanup." We've already effectively achieved this for radio astronomy by regulating protected bands in the spectrum for passive listening.
> if unmitigated it does mean that there will be fewer discoveries per taxpayer dollar sent to the NSF/NASA
Fewer discoveries _by ground based telescopes_.
I want to make this distinction because more access to space also decreases the price of space based telescopes. A swarm half the size facing outwards would also be an incredible tool.
(I do want to note to everyone that ground based telescopes will still likely be significantly cheaper for quite some time. But still decreasing the cost of space based telescopes is a huge advantage)
As far as I know, A lot of people will never have access to an analog space based telescope that they can look though with their own eyes. There will be a lot of people who wont like that.
These swarms aren't going to affect the average amateur astronomer very much. You'll still be able to look through a telescope no problem. These satellites are pretty small.
But, I should mention that Blue, SpaceX, Bigelow, and Virgin are trying to create access for space. Bigelow has an expandable module[0] with the explicit purpose of building larger space stations. Bigelow is specifically trying to create a private space station[1]. All these companies are also looking at lunar habitats. So yeah, there might be a period where people are not able to look through space based telescopes with their own _physical_ eye, but we shouldn't expect that period to last that long. If you are explicitly trying to colonize space, well you have to make it cheap enough for people to... go... Yes, it'll be super expensive at first, but that's true for almost every new technology (with typically ~20 years to reduce that price).
"These swarms aren't going to affect the average amateur astronomer very much."
Not true. Most of amateur astronomers are also astrophotographers that is affected by Starlink's light pollution. Just look up any astrophotography group, I see posts of ruined shots by satellites every day.
Right now Bigelow Aerospace isn't doing anything. They were forced to suspend operations in March 2020, when the State of Nevada determined they weren't an essential business.
There's currently no news when or if BA will resume operations. Even if they do, chances are most of their original talent has made other arrangements by now. From a staffing point of view, they'll be starting from scratch.
IANAA (I am not an astronomer), but I'm wondering - what are the implications for cheaper commercial spaceflights and satellite launches on research astronomy?
Isn't terrestrial astronomy sort of limited by the Earth's rotation, atmospheric distortion, cloud cover, dust, light pollution, electromagnetic storms, electromagnetic noise, and limited availability of real-estate to place telescopes?
Yes and no. Yes, if there are clouds, optical telescopes can't see through them. That's why the really big scopes are built high up in the mountains above clouds. They are also being built in the dry desert air to prevent issues from humidity. With AO (adaptive optics), any atmospheric distortion can be compensated and removed from the images. So in some cases, we get better images from ground based scopes than space based. The size of the primary mirror is a huge factor. This image is a favorite of mine that shows the size of various famous telescopes[0]
It's also possible to build larger telescopes on the ground. It just makes more sense and cents to build on the ground than into oribit. However, something like James Webb needs to be in space due to the type of research it is doing. Also why it is getting sent so far away rather than a closer orbit like Hubble.
While I agree with this, I do think easy access to space also enables much larger telescopes in space. It would greatly decrease the cost of JWST. Though not enough to still compete with size/$ (GMT is planned at $1bn and JWST is $10bn, and GMT is like 7 JWSTs in size).
What I would sci-fi utlimately love is the combination of both. Putting permanent bases on the moon, and then building whatever the sciencey word for lunar telescopes. They get the benefits of no atmosphere, and the benefits of being on the "ground" so things can be updated/fixed compared to just floating in space.
Makes no sense to me. Given you'd have the capabilities to have bases there, you'd also have the capabilities to fix stuff floating in space effortlessly. Btw. ground can shake or vibrate, which is no benefit at all.
edit: also electrostatically charged, abrasive dust particles.
Thanks for the reply, that image is pretty compelling,
It seems that space based telescopes could be substantially larger than Earth based telescopes, based on not having to build a structure to support their weight then?
Sounds like a good idea, except we have a hard time getting really large things off the ground. If you notice the size of the James Webb with its unfolding primary is still really small compared to other terrestrial based mirrors. It's mind boggling to look at the size of those mirrors, and then easily missed is the comparison to the former dish at Arecibo. Arecibo doesn't even fit in the image and is just an arc that looks like the background.
I don't know that the externality comparison and compensation is self evident.
it is possible that the positive externalities of satellite swarms outweigh that of ground based astronomy, and they should be prioritized for the visual spectrum.
Key word being "ground based." SpaceX's work will likely lead to much wider access to space-based telescopes. That may turn out to be a more-than-fair tradeoff.
The other thing about LEO constellations is that they're not permanent. A polluted river may not clean itself up automatically after a couple of years, but LEO will. We can change our minds about the utility of LEO Internet constellations at any time. There seems no real downside to deploying them and seeing if all stakeholders can find reasonable grounds for compromise.
starlink is low enough that it will clean itself /relatively/ quickly, but even doubling the elevation get's into some very long lived debris[0].
If you wanted to tax these mega constellations to mitigate the externality they're causing, directing 2 to 3% towards orbital telescope production/launch costs arguably would be the most immediate remedy.
No, it's not. These are relatively new problems posed by specific companies. If we say part of their taxes go to solving this problem they caused, then what about all the other things their taxes were going to before?
It's roughly similar to suggesting a tiered membership service should upgrade all customers to the highest tier without charging any more than they did last month.
The taxes don't exist prior to satellite network, so there is no before. Growing the economy grows tax revenues and adds new revenue to the federal budget.
It is like adding a new customer to your license membership service. Marginal costs are zero but they add to revenue. You can then use the extra revenue to develop new features.
That's not a workable position. By that measure a new industry that blows up significant fractions of major population centers for pennies - but pays taxes on those pennies - is a net producer of new tax revenue and should be considered a net benefit.
Yes, obviously, in this highly contrived example there are many other non-tax laws and reasons this company could never exist. But I think it still demonstrates the point that a new industry that produces new taxes is not inherently a good thing even if you limit the scope to simply government revenue.
I don't believe there is a perfect view of these things, but at least taking the tack I originally expressed is more workable than this.
>new industry that produces new taxes is not inherently a good thing.
I think you are making different point than in the last post. I never suggested this. I agree that new companies can theoretically cause externalities that cost the government more than their taxes.
My point is that in this case SpaceX taxes are not pre-allocated to cover government costs incurred by SpaceX. SpaceX isn't increasing the number of people on welfare, teachers, defense budget, ect. In fact, SpaceX existing saves the government huge amounts of money on launch costs.
Maybe I worded my original post poorly then, as that was the idea I was trying to convey.
And you're right. As I said, I don't think there is a perfect way to view these things. However I do think that viewing those taxes as pre-allocated is a reasonable easy heuristic. Otherwise every single externality has to be rather thoroughly investigated. Is it already known and accounted for? If it is not accounted for, is it intentionally not accounted for or is the externality actually entirely unforeseen? How much does the externality actually cost? How much additional revenue does the company/industry causing this externality bring in and how does it compare, etc etc etc.
Not viewing those taxes as pre-allocated to existing programs essentially leads to immediately discounting any new externality because of the sheer complexity of trying to figure out the exact dollar amounts involved. Many externalities do not even have an objective dollar cost from which to start the accounting.
Even if you wish to continue with SpaceX, how do we account for them properly? They may be saving the government money on launch costs, but they are also deriving an unusually high benefit from our public education system. I'd assume they are also putting more wear on our road system than many companies. And that's not even scratching the surface. And SpaceX isn't even the whole industry.
Much, much easier to view taxes as essentially pre-allocated first and then figure out how you want to deal with things more specifically later. At least it gives us a tractable starting point.
that's assuming there are no deductions. I'm willing to bet every rocket explosion we see, is written off as r&d expenses and reducing their taxable revenue.
in a company as fast paced as SpaceX, I doubt they pay much in taxes yet.
> the private sector profits by consuming a shared resource.
The public benefits from this privately maintained system. Irrespective of who profits, this is a service that I very much want, and I'm perfectly happy if Random Corporation XYZ makes a few bucks as long as I get the service at a reasonable price.
"The public" usually refers to the whole community and implies payment through a government or similar scheme. You cannot call your benefit from a private transaction a public good or yourself the public in that scenario. Otherwise literally all commerce is for public benefit. The comment was making a point about externalities.
It's a false and misleading point. It makes no difference whether SpaceX or NASA is selling satellite internet service.
This isn't a tragedy of the commons scenario, or a "privatize the gains" scenario. It's simply a competing use. For millennia astronomers have had near-exclusive use of the sky. I don't see why they should continue to be able to hog it all to themselves.
Wow, those dastardly astronomers, hogging something that somehow isn't part of the commons. They should learn how to share! How about letting astronomers use the night sky every Tuesday?
I like to describe this position as NIMOP: Not In My Orbital Plane.
The idea that you own a view to infinity to me us more absurd than taxing me for breathing air, which is also a negative externality taken to extreme.
Let's put a quadrillion more times the mass in space. Let's build huge orbital rings, and take to the Galaxy. Let's get a trillion people living in space.
