That's very odd, Petrosianic. Carrying on the rating difference theme (contrived link coming up!), on Tuesday evening I beat a guy with a FIDE grade of 2027! My biggest ever win by a clear margin. My English grade is 118 (my opponent's is 161), which works out at around 1600 according to the conversion formula.

Was this an OTB game, or online?

OTB, time control 36 moves in 75 minutes then 15 minutes quickplay finish. So a proper long game, none of that blitz nonsense

You know, shifting gears, I really regret the inability of most software to use older time controls, in which you got a fresh time supply at a specific point in the game. You can play with an increment (where you get dribbles of time on every single move), or you can play sudden death (where you get no time at all after Move 1), but it's impossible to go there and play 40/120.

Even rapid chess. These days 30/G is common, but 30/30 used to be a very popular time control. They even had a National 30/30 Open at one point. I really liked that control because you did have to play fast, but you couldn't count on just running someone out of time. It's completely gone now.

Another time control I liked, but have never seen anywhere except in some of the Chessmaster programs is Hourglass Time. For example, both players start with 30 seconds. If White takes 5 seconds on Move 1, that time doesn't just disappear, it goes over to Black, giving him 35 seconds, and leaving White with 25. So you could control your opponents speed to a degree by controlling your own. For example, if one player has 5 seconds and the other has 25, the guy with 25 can either move fast, to keep his opponent's time low, or, if he needs to, he has the luxury to take a little time himself. That could be fun if you set the time at around 2 minutes. But as I say, the only place I ever saw it was on Chessmaster 6000. I played a few games on their site just to be able to play real people with that time control, but it was no good, as most of the people there were using computer assistance.

I'd love to go out to Pier 1 or some place, and buy an actual sand-based timer and try a few OTB games that way. (But it would probably get broken in the first time scramble.)

We're number 1! We're number 1!. Not only are we still the top 3 of best countries to live in the world (unlike our poor poor neighbour sitting at #28), we're now the 'smartest' country in world (unlike our poor poor neighbour sitting at #4).

For the humour impaired, this is just friendly rivalry (hence The Nothing Thread placement), and I know the metrics themselves can be misleading (but we're still the best place to live--providing you either like snow or are willing to compress yourself into one of the very populated thin strips of 'habitable' land along the St. Lawrence or along the lower west coast of BC). heh-heh.

So, the Yukon might not be quite as good?

The Yukon is glorious. Except many people aren't willing to put up with a long dark winter. If you can live through that...or migrate...the Yukon is magical spring to fall and once it gets into your blood, it keeps calling you back if you leave.

Is it just me, or is organized atheism getting dumber?

Atheists use 'unholy' water to unbless Florida highway

This right on the heels of a resurgence of their circular-reasoning billboards, but this seems even sillier. To unbless something, aren't you tacitly conceding that the blessing did something that you wish to counter-act? So, without meaning to, they've changed the argument from whether not God exists to admitting that he does, and arguing about whether they like him (I concede that they don't, but so what?).

Add to that, the fact that they're going after one group in the name of inclusion. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for a group that equates their own beliefs with Reason itself. These guys are Free Thinkers and worth every penny.

The biggest question for me, the most obvious question, in fact, which the article doesn't address at all is what is Unholy Water? Unless city facilities have improved since the last time I was there, I'm guessing it's tap water from Galveston.

Come to think of it, don't they have Unholy Water in Dungeons & Dragons? As I recall, in D&D it's water that's blessed by an evil cleric. So I guess this Florida group got it straight from bin Laden's online store?