I can feel me getting smarter
As of last night, Greg and I are officially “so much smarter than you”.
In an ongoing effort to make minions of all the world, we took it upon ourselves to enter a moment of introspection. Dictatorial control of the globe requires certain qualities of a person, and how can the self be made better if not through careful consideration of its faults? Upon peering into our souls and minds, we discovered something: we’re not that smart.
Let me offer you my perspective; Greg’s mileage may vary. Over the past several years (perhaps since senior year of college), my attention span has been diminishing (thankfully, only algebraically). I blame only myself and my lack of rigour. Nevertheless, my lacking in the powers of concentration has severely limited my ability to perform certain tasks like determining a tight bound on spatial quantum search, understanding the nuances of quantum pattern matching, or shaving.
Greg claimed to be suffering from a similar fate and, clever man that he is, suggested a solution: Chess.
He posited that the competitive spirit the game inspires would offer tangible incentive for concentrating on and rationalizing about one topic on a timescale of order greater than dekaseconds. In short, chess would, over time, reinculcate our respective abilities to think.
We started last night with a rousing (and, truth be told, embarrassing on both sides) game, mano a mano. Greg took me to town, but I feel a better man for it. Anybody willing to throw down the gauntlet is welcome; my brain can only thank you. For the record: Greg’s pretty good and I’m fair to middling.
If being good at chess makes you better at taking over the world that must mean the world is run by…computers! (Vice president and ambassador to mankind: G. Kasparov)
You should play chess with me, then. I was good when I was, like, six. Now, I think I remember what all the pieces do…
I will have you, and your childrens children to the fourth generation. You will perish in squalor and shame from the vastness of my chess-ular trouncing of you.
Name ye the time.
So I’ve played another game since. Turns out “fair to middling” should really read “bad”.
And now I too have joined in the efforts to improve concentration — and played Greg twice. And I’m getting really tired of being two pawns up only to go down to a position neither of us foresaw. But revenge will be mine!
One hopes all this playing of chess will so increase your mental power that the grammatical niceties of the English refelxive pronouns will be as open a book to you as Newton’s Principia and the title for you entry will be “I can feel myself getting smarter.”
Ah, but how else can I inspire my dear father to comment if not through the artistic abuse of the English language?
But, yes. One hopes.
Hint: install chess to you mobile, and train every free minute. I play chess with my p910 in subway or bus, and even when I can sleep.