{"id":2463,"date":"2013-09-05T11:41:39","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T19:41:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=2463"},"modified":"2013-09-05T11:41:39","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T19:41:39","slug":"a-chesslecture-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=2463","title":{"rendered":"A ChessLecture Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After many years of not changing very much, ChessLecture.com is really starting to try some new ideas this year, and I think it&#8217;s a great thing. They are releasing many of the older series of lectures as DVD&#8217;s, and posting some of the lectures on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/ChessLecturecom?feature=watch\" target=\"_blank\">new YouTube site<\/a>. I think I mentioned the YouTube site once before when it only had one video on it. But now there are several videos available, and so you can get a really good sample of the style of the different ChessLecturers.<\/p>\n<p>The videos uploaded so far are from the following series:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Positional Chess<\/em> by FM Valeri Lilov<\/li>\n<li><em>Nimzo-Indian Patterns<\/em> by IM Bryan Smith<\/li>\n<li><em>A Secret Weapon for Black (Scandinavian Defense)<\/em> by IM Bill Paschall<\/li>\n<li><em>Slav Defense with 4. &#8230; a6<\/em> by GM Leonid Kritz<\/li>\n<li><em>Smyslov Endgames<\/em> by GM Jesse Kraai<\/li>\n<li><em>Tactical Motifs<\/em> by yours truly<\/li>\n<li><em>Learn from Your Fellow Amateurs<\/em> by yours truly<\/li>\n<li><em>50 Years of Tal-Botvinnik<\/em> by GM Jesse Kraai<\/li>\n<li><em>Learn from the World Champions<\/em> by FM Dennis Monokroussos<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In each case, what&#8217;s on the YouTube site is just one lecture out of a series, and to see the rest you would have to get the DVD or become a member of ChessLecture.com.\u00a0 If you like these nine lectures, just imagine having 2000 more to select from! That&#8217;s what you get when you join ChessLecture.com, even for just one month.<\/p>\n<p>Also, ChessLecture.com has a Facebook page now, which will be useful for subscribers because every day they give a capsule description of the new lecture for that day. And there is also an e-mail newsletter each week that gives a synopsis of all five new lectures for the week. I think that all of these changes are moving toward a very desirable goal of making the site more interactive.<\/p>\n<p>I believe ChessLecture also has a Twitter feed now, but I long ago decided that I have no interest in Twitter, so I&#8217;ll have to let you explore that for yourself.<\/p>\n<p>This is a complete change of subject, but I also have some off-topic news to pass along. The paperback version of my book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-Universe-Zero-Words-Mathematics\/dp\/0691160163\" target=\"_blank\">The Universe in Zero Words<\/a>, has now come out! This is pretty exciting to me because it&#8217;s the first time I&#8217;ve written a hardback that has gone to paperback.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of people never even buy hardbacks. I used to be one of them, before I became a professional writer. My viewpoint was: Why pay extra, sometimes a lot extra, for a cloth binding, when all I really care about are the words inside? What I didn&#8217;t realize was that most hardbacks never come out in paperback. By buying only paperbacks, I was missing out on three-quarters of the books published, and basically letting the market decide what I should and should not be able to read. For example, my first book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Big-Splat-How-Moon-Came\/dp\/0471150576\" target=\"_blank\">The Big Splat<\/a>, never went to paperback because it didn&#8217;t sell quite enough. (The publisher told me it needed to sell 8000 copies. To date, it has only sold 7500.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the good news is that you now have your choice of formats for <em>The Universe in Zero Words<\/em>, and if you were waiting for the paperback, wait no longer! Rush out to Amazon and buy your copy today!\u00a0 \ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n<p>While I&#8217;m on off-topic news, let me also mention that later this month I will travel to Germany for the first time. The occasion is a meeting called the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, which will bring together about 80 winners of the most prestigious prizes in math and computer science with 200 talented younger mathematicians for a week of hobnobbing and brainstorming. I&#8217;ve actually signed on to write a blog during the event, which will I believe be cross-posted at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\" target=\"_blank\">www.scientificamerican.com<\/a>. If you can imagine getting 80 Nobel laureates together in a meeting with 200 young scientists, or 80 grandmasters together with 200 top junior players, you can see why I am excited about this event.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m debating whether I should cross-post any of my Heidelberg blog entries here. Maybe we could call this blog &#8220;dana blogs math&#8221; for a week.\u00a0 What do you think? They&#8217;ll all be about math and computer science, not chess, so I have to think they would not be all that interesting for the audience of this blog. So perhaps I won&#8217;t do it. But in any case, don&#8217;t expect any chess posts here between September 20 and 28. Either there will be math, or there will be nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After many years of not changing very much, ChessLecture.com is really starting to try some new ideas this year, and I think it&#8217;s a great thing. They are releasing many of the older series of lectures as DVD&#8217;s, and posting some of the lectures on the new YouTube site. I think I mentioned the YouTube [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,1363,235],"tags":[2656,2659,948,2657,2654,2658,2655,2517],"class_list":["post-2463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chess-lecture","category-current-news","category-off-topic","tag-big-splat","tag-dvds","tag-facebook","tag-hardback","tag-heidelberg-laureate-forum","tag-paperback","tag-universe-in-zero-words","tag-videos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2465,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions\/2465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}