A Quantum Diaries Survivor

I recently gave a look at the statistics table of my chess games on the Internet Chess Club, and was left wondering whether I should rather spend more wisely my time. Indeed, here is the table:

In it, you can read the number of games I played, separately for each of the time controls used. The main categories are “bullet” ( one minute per player),  “blitz” (two minutes to 15 minutes, if I recall correctly), plus the fixed ”1-minute” and “5-minute” category, which include an automatic pairing system.

If you browse the numbers, you can see that I played a total of just about 10,000 games on ICC since I started with the handle “tonno” eight years ago. Ten thousand games correspond, very nearly, to about a thousand hours of play (5-minute games last on average 8 minutes, 1-minute ones on average 2).

1000 hours spent playing blitz chess! A thousand hours is a hell of a lot of time. They correspond to about seven months of work. In that amount of time I write on average two papers, sign 20 more written by others, present a talk at one international conference, and graduate a student. Am I wasting my life ?

I do not think so. Chess is a way to relax for me, and a very intellectually stimulating activity. I generate endorphines while I play. It is very nearly like a drug. And like a drug, it has anti-social connotations: my wife, in fact, hates it when I play online… But there is a sort of equilibrium which allows both of us to spend some evening time taking care of things we like.

Of course, the question remains… Maybe I could play a bit less and do other things instead. Well, yeah. Like, driving three hours to observe the night sky all night long….

Peter, over at Not Even Wrong, facetiously directs people willing to discuss the physical appearance of Lisa Randall to my blog. [A long thread and a followup discussion developed six months ago here after I included a description of Lisa in a writeup of a very interesting seminar she gave on black holes at the LHC].

He does it in a discreet manner, without a direct link - and I appreciate the subtlety. Funny how with the internet you directly experience how knowledge is power: from the stats page of my blog I get a “signal” of people looking for “Tommaso Dorigo Lisa Randall”, and with some investigation I am able to figure out it is coming from people reading the comment thread in Peter’s blog.

Anyway, Scarlett and Natalie. As I retorted in the thread at NEW, I am not good at gossip. My wife says I am not interested in the people who surround me: I loathe discussing their life - I find it a rather vacuous way to spend one’s time. But I have my own weaknesses - I am interested in young, attractive girls. I feel no shame in admitting it: at 42, I have not lost interest in young female bodies yet. Got sex in my mind. How’s that for a coming out, JoAnne ?

So, really, Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman. They are walking the walks of the Berlin festival, where is presented among others the movie they  acted in, “The Other Boleyn girl“. They are enemies in the movie, but close friends in real life. A rare instance in the world of acting, where beautiful women are accustomed to be prima donnas and the presence of a competitor wreaks havoc. Anyway, a picture with both smiling and looking gorgeous is too beautiful to resist the temptation of pasting it here…