Cosmology revisited

So first of all, I know a handful readers or two came by after I commented over at William’s blog – if one or more of you decided to come back to read this: Welcome!

If you didn’t read this post (that is: looked closely at the images) back when I posted that, I suggest you start there. Now Salman Khan has made a series of videos where he starts at Earth, then moves on outwards. I notice in one of the videos he mistakenly uses light year as a measure of time, not distance, but he was pretty excited at that point, for good reason. I’ve posted the first video in the series below – when I watched it on youtube, it automatically started the next video once the previous one had finished, which was both good and bad as I probably sat there for over an hour watching that stuff, but I don’t know if it’ll do the same when embedded here. If not, you should really watch the series on youtube if you think the first part was ok – it gets even better and far more mind boggling as he proceeds.

I love what Sal is doing. If you felt the need to follow the link to Salman Khan’s wikipedia article because you don’t know who he is or what he’s doing, here’s another good video you should watch:

And here’s the link to the site.

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In other news, here’s a chess game I played earlier this evening (I was white and it was a 5 minute game so presumably lots of mistakes if you let the silicon monster have a look at it). I haven’t run it through a computer, but I still think my decision to exchange on g7 and move 20.f5 instead of taking on e6 was the right one. I really liked that 20.f5 move when I played it. If black wants to survive, he can’t defend that e6 pawn anyway, i.e. 20…Nf8, 21.f6+ Kg8, 22.Qd2 Nbd7, 23.Qh6 Nf6 (…Ne6, 24.dxe6 Nxf6(□), 25.Nxf6+ Qxf6(□), 26.Rxf6 and white has the same win as in the game with the Nf3 and Ng5-manoeuvre), 24.Nxf6+ Kg8, 25.Nh5! Ne6 (…gxh5 and after 26.Rxf7 black is mated), 26.dxe6 Rg8(□), 27.exf7 and game over). I think 20.f6 was a better defence than Ne5, Ne5 was a bad move. Black needs all the support he can get of the black squares around his king after he’s allowed the exchange of the g7-bishop. That said, the position after f6 is still losing for black.

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