I get the impression Amazon sometimes delays shipment according to the price paid. They use an economical next‑day carrier for shipments within California, but the customer doesn't enjoy that speed if they didn't pay for it. An order I placed this month with the cheapest (i.e., free) shipping option was shipped via a next‑day service—but only after Amazon sat on the order for five (calendar) days. Older electromechanical power meters had a rotating disk that let you gauge your rate of energy use at any moment. The disk made one revolution for each watt‑hour (i.e., each 3600 joules) of energy used. You could calculate how much power an appliance was drawing from how much faster the disk spun when you had the appliance turned on. If you ever wondered how to glean the same information from a no‑moving‑parts meter like the one shown: the dots under the rightmost numeral are a "watt disk emulator". A dot turns dark or light with each watt‑hour used. (The "kWh" legend next to the dots refers to the numeric reading, not the dots.) The dots march left‑to‑right if you're consuming energy, right‑to‑left if you're sending energy into the grid. Happy nineteenth, everyone. The position shown here arose in the last game of a chess tournament in St. Louis this month. It's black's turn; what's the only move that doesn't result in black losing the game?
Black played e1N+, i.e. he promoted the pawn to a knight (giving check)
and the game ended in a draw.
For about a week now I've seen the same lizard in the same spot day after
day. He clings to the side of my house just below the eaves, about ten
feet off the ground. I don't know what he thinks about but I permit
myself to admire his example of composure and equanimity. He looks
at me when I walk by.
Positions that call for underpromotion are rare but not unheard of; the Wikipedia article on pawn promotion mentions a game from 2006 that reached a position like this one. Most chess players find aesthetic value in underpromotion (when it's not a gratuitious flourish), and why not? Seeing a knight do what a queen couldn't is like watching an underdog win. Here's my question though. If underpromotion—which is a form of understatement—is so endearing, and if the taste of chess players isn't way out of the mainstream (a big if?), why isn't understatement in general more popular, say in movies (where overstatement is routine)? He goes somewhere else in the nighttime and returns in the morning, except for Thursday when I didn't see him at all. The Moon was close to Mars and Saturn in the sky that day and perhaps he decided to keep a low profile until the baleful influence of that conjunction had subsided. Ernest Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham, wondered how a creature as excellent as man could fail to be immortal. "His mind is a far finer instrument than anything that had appeared earlier—he knows right and wrong. He can build Westminster Abbey. He can make an airplane." Yeah, but can he do this— I'm not sure which of these events surprised me the most:
If the prime number theme was intended to be endearing to geeks (and it is), the "Amazon One" text painted near the cockpit windows fails. One is not prime. Nor is it zero, the geek's choice of where to start numbering things. And this isn't Amazon's first plane, it's just the first they painted their name on. The president of the leasing company (which provided ten planes to Amazon before this one) jokingly said, "This is Amazon 11, as far as we’re concerned."
Jupiter
Moon Lone Pine Peak (12944', 3945m) |