Goddesschess Random Roundup

March 29, 2009

Shedding photosynthetic light on the secret life of chess - beginning with...

Women GM Chess Tournament Mediterranean Flowers - Rijeka, Croatia Thanks to Goran at Chessdom.com for making this link available!

... and continuing on a bug's eye view of ancient board game metaphors, hybrids, perennial entanglements and migrating birds of a feather...

Schachblume (fritillaria meleagris) means common chess (as in the game) flower. Checker lilies (Fritillaria affinis - or - lanceolata, var. affinis) offers a separate term for what appears to be a different, though similar appearing flower.

"...while being shaped like a barrel is not something any of us aspire to, these chess pieces with their charming carved flowers are in no way an analogy of 'fat and forty'.

Our second "fat man" decked out in perennial garb... Nfr-Butrint's winding ivy conveys a symbol of the yearly zodiacal round. A triple "nfr" symbol was used to trademark only the highest quality Egyptian wines. Quite a vintage bottle of of chess, that jolly old Butrint ...

Indian chess master Vishwanathan Anand is given flowers during the award ceremony of the World Chess Championship in Mexico City, 30 September 2007.

Balinese Flower Wood Carving Chess The incredible craftsmanship that has gone into the creation of this extraordinary chess set is to be greatly admired. Nyoman Wika has skillfully carved the ornate design of the table and chess pieces from kepelan wood.

Chess Set designed and carved by Ketut Sandi

"Flowers" From The House of Staunton - "... Russian sculptor Oleg Raikis was introduced by the organizer of the match, Sir Jeremy Hanley, along with his unique chess set, "Flowers". The set is crafted from mammoth ivory and rare indiginous wood, Bokaut."

Chapter II - The Garden of Live Flowers
'I should see the garden far better,' said Alice to herself, 'if I could get to the top of that hill: and here's a path that leads straight to it -- at least, no, it doesn't do that -- ' (after going a few yards along the path, and turning several sharp corners), 'but I suppose it will at last. But how curiously it twists! It's more like a corkscrew than a path!

The Art of Marina Valuiska By WIM Nastja Karolvich - Alice and the chess art of Marina Valuiska - 29.06.2007 - She works as a lecturer in the Department of Criminology of the National Law Academy of Ukraine, and is an active member of the Academy chess club, successful in local championship. Marina Valuiska is also a budding proponent of "litho-art", inspired by the works of Lewis Carroll and by her chess activities. Join us as we visit her photo exhibition.

When Flowers Mate with Chess Boards

Partita a scacchi - Game of chess

Chess Board Garden at Port Lympne Topiary yew hedging encloses beds of red and white flowers alternated with squares of lawn, in the Chess Board Garden at Port Lympne, near Hythe in Kent.

Wallpapering the local chess planet or is that just a very large thistle?

Migrating game birds...?

How to Play Vimanam It would appear as though this Indian board game is telling us something about where "reality" germinates and flourishs. The two birds are part of this sacred ecology and their destination is, as ever and always, a race to the topmost pinnacle...

Use of the "game piece" hieroglyph - Draughtsman in hieroglyphs To Dance" [of the god] (2 plurals, 1 chick, 2 tokens) In hieroglyphs The basic word for 'Game piece' or 'draughtsman' is "ab". By implication, people on a flat arena were moving like "pieces"- (from a distance), and numerous varieties of the word 'to dance' include varieties using the "Game piece", as a determinative; two examples are shown: the word 'draughtsman', and 'to dance'- (the plural of "ab", "abU"- (U being the language plural-but also "the bird chick"-hieroglyph in Ancient Egypt).

Sacred Palms - Tress and the Sacred From the earliest times, trees have been the focus of religious life for many peoples around the world. As the largest plant on earth, the tree has been a major source of stimulation to the mythic imagination. More here at the goddesschess blog...

Thought to be the origin of the modern game of Snakes & Ladders, Egyptian Hounds and Jackals - the Game of 58 Holes - was played on a variety of differently configured boards, including the palm motif.

A ba (pre-Christian Egyptian belief in a spiritual element) rests upon the roof of a tomb while the Ankh sign resides within.

Sacred Groves and Sacred Trees of Uttara Kannada...
M. D. Subash Chandran Madhav Gadgil - "The Indian tradition is strongly cosmocentric, where man lives as part of a system in which everything is related to everything else. Creation and destruction take place simultaneously. Materials and energy move from organism to organism. Matter is arranged in precise order in every organism, but in death this order is followed by disorder: cycling of materials through organisms brings order once again. But today, rapidly drifting from our traditions of sustainable use and coexistence, we seem to be entering a man-centred world that implies the decimation of nature."

Fiori e scacchi (Flowers and Chess)
(1998) by Rufova Elena Valentinovna

Scroll waaay down the above linked page for a larger view and be rewarded with lots of added chess scenery...

Scacchi e Arte Another mega source for chess art!
Valentinovna is listed third on this index page.

March 22, 2009

Chess Gardens in Regalia!
Plant your pawns early this spring!

EXTRA! Goddesschess kisses the new cartograpic world of GPS location and it smiles back!! We have placed the Waymarking global spotlight on this giant outdoor chess game situated adjacent to the Lachine Canal, below Atwater Market - Montreal, Quebec, Canada - etc. right down to the last coordinate decimal... AMAZING!!

Brickwall House - England

Bil's design for a Chess Garden used a grid of Sussex bricks set with black and white gravel in alternating squares. The black chessmen were represented by Taxus baccata, while Taxus aurea was used for the white pieces.

Kowloon Walled City Park - China

Four Chinese chessboards, each measuring 3x5 metres, have been laid out in the Park's northeast corner using pebble stones and porcelain. Visitors are invited to play on the round, rosy-granite tables, though you'll have to bring your own chess pieces.

The Chinese Zodiac Garden is just across from Mountain View Pavilion. The grassy enclosure is home to a dozen smooth, white-stone-sculptured animals. These zodiac symbols are arranged according to the tian gan (heavenly stems) and di zhi (earthly branches) of Chinese geomancy.

The Chess Garden - Brooks Hansen Reviews are enthusiastic.. "As we close in on the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Brooks Hansen's amazing novel The Chess Garden... I thought it might be appropriate to post an interview I did with Hansen back in 1996. If you haven't read this book, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. It's really about the redemptive power of fantasy and storytelling, among a lot of other things. It's still one of the best novels I've ever read."

The fruits from my chess garden- A selection of endgames by W. Proskurowski - a short citation for this author and his work, actually...

Of course - somewhere on the planet (ours, that is) there would have to be a Garden Chess Company An interesting gallery of garden chess ideas awaits...

Google pointed out this odd "mashup" from Cornell U.:
The Game Of Chess -- Garden's History of Treaties of Peace: Lo and behold, a small collection of pressed flowers and badly scanned chessbuds... readable nonetheless. Index includes:

The Game Of Chess. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 4, issue 20 (January 1852).

Game of Chess by the Electric Telegraph. The Living Age, vol. 5, issue 57 (June 14, 1845).

A Game of Chess with Napoleon. The Living Age, vol. 4, issue 44 (March 15, 1845).

The Game of Fate. The Continental Monthly, vol. 1, issue 3 (March 1862).

The Game of Proverbs. The Living Age, vol. 26, issue 321 (July 13, 1850).

More "radar" mashups
Sat nav drivers 'damaging ancient buildings'
By Aislinn Simpson - Britain's historic bridges, buildings and roads are under threat from drivers blithely following satellite navigation directions, a conservation society warned yesterday. (And that ain't all if you follow the Telegraph's links to other sat-nav mishaps).

Blindfold Chess - Eliot Hearst and John Knott
During the 18th century, when Philidor played two blindfold games of chess simultaneously, eyewitnesses were asked to swear affidavits attesting to this remarkable feat. Since then, blindfold chess—the art of playing without sight of the board or pieces—has produced some of the greatest feats of human memory, progressing to the extent that the world record is 45 simultaneous blindfold games.

Remembering Spring and Mr. Memory

Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps" Video

Frankly, I don't remember ever seeing this movie trailer before...

March 15. 2009

Rites of Spring!

BBC Radio 3 broadcasts Rites Of Spring - a week of special programming across the schedule to mark the beginning of spring, exploring music, poetry and ideas connected with birth and rebirth, growth and ritual. Info includes the upcoming Rites of Spring broadcast schedule.

Not included in the Beeb's schedule - Walt Disney's Fantasia version of "The Dance of the Hours". Well, it's video after all - !! - and includes this peculiar bit of animated footwork...

Please do not adjust your calendars - yet! In the eighth century B.C.E., civilizations all over the world either discarded or modified their old 360 day calendars. The 360 day calendars had been in use for the greater part of a millennium. In many places, month lengths immediately after that change were not fixed, but were based instead upon observation of the sky.

• SQUARE ROOT DAY - MARCH 03, 2009
1.73205081! Party Like It's Square Root Day! Hot on the heels of "1234567890" day comes Square Root Day. This rare "holiday" occurs when the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits of the current year. So, Square Root Day can be expressed as 03/03/09 (in Europe or the U.S., for once!) - because 3 is the square root of 9.

• NATIONAL PI DAY - March 14, 2009
Following Square Root Day and 1234567890 Day comes Pi Day (which would, quite naturally, be 3/14) I am Pi: Thoughts on the Ratio of the Circumference of a Circle to Its Diameter This week Congress made it official - March 14 is now National Pi Day.

• BUDDHA GREETING FESTIVAL - March 15, 2009

The Buddha-Greeting Festival, falls on the 15th day of the New Year's very first month according to traditional Tibetan calendar. [Xinhua]

Great Wall of China Disappearing: About a fifth of the Great Wall built in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) has disappeared in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Some of the damage has been caused by "man-made activities." What - are the residents of the area toting it away brick by brick???

Lots of Lots Hypercube Representations - Illustrations of magic squares, cubes, and tesseracts. This page covers squares and cubes (2-D and 3-D), Page 2 is about tesseracts (4-D)

Going to the Dogs": Healing Goddesses of Mesopotamia by Johanna Stuckey

The goddess Gula with her dog. Detail from a boundary stone dated to the reign of Babylonian king Nabu-mukin-apli, 978-943 BCE.

Buried Dogs Were Divine "Escorts" for Ancient Americans Anne Casselman for National Geographic News April 23, 2008 Hundreds of prehistoric dogs found buried throughout the southwestern United States show that canines played a key role in the spiritual beliefs of ancient Americans, new research suggests.

Awesome New Library At a rough estimate, over 2 million objects from ancient Egypt are kept in about 850 public collections, dispersed over 69 countries around the world. This website aims to collect them into a global virtual museum, which can be visited at any time, from any place. The Global Egyptian Museum is a long-term project, carried out under the aegis of the International Committee for Egyptology (CIPEG).

The Star-Map Hypothesis The proposition put forward here is that the Lascaux Leaning Man painting shows the constellations of Taurus, Gemini, Leo, and a Bird-on-Pole constellation figure, and the passage of this constellation lore is traced down through the ages as far as the Hellenistic period.

Ancient pre-Angkor kingdom unearthed in Malaysia

Malaysian archaeologists say they have found the site of an an ancient kingdom in northern Kedah state, which predates Cambodia's Angkor temples and may be one of the oldest civilisations in Asia. More here

The Last of the Zoroastrians Although Zoroastrians are few in number, their faith has influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam with its teachings of a single deity, a dualistic universe of good versus evil, and a final day of reckoning

Sail Like An Egyptian It turns out the oldest seafaring ships ever found actually work... Ship planks and oar blades discovered in 2006 at the caves of Wadi Gawasis provided a basis for the ship reconstruction.

Rare Maya panels found in Guatemala By Sarah Grainger GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Archeologists have uncovered carved stucco panels depicting cosmic monsters, gods and serpents in Guatemala's northern jungle that are the oldest known depictions of a famous Mayan creation myth.

Archeologist Richard Hansen explains the detail on one of two newly discovered Mayan panels in the northern Guatemalan Peten jungle March 7, 2009.

This is pre-Christian, it has tremendous antiquity and shows again the remarkable resilience of an ideology that's existed for thousands of years," Hansen, an Idaho State University archeologist who has worked at El Mirador for over a decade, said.

March 8.2009

From the horse's mouth - indeed! But what in Sea Biscuit's name are those horses saying?

View Some of the World's Earliest Portable Animal Art "Archaeologists Hizri Amirkhanov and Sergey Lev of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow... some remarkable Upper Paleolithic art, dating to around 22,000 years ago. ...They show some of the world's oldest known portable art."

The clarity and elegance of form in Greek Geometric art is as effective in three-dimensional sculpture as it is in vase painting. Small-scale bronzes, such as this horse, were produced in workshops throughout the Greek mainland and represent the most innovative sculptural achievements of the period

Horses first domesticated 5,000 years ago By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID New evidence corralled in Kazakhstan indicates the Botai culture used horses as beasts of burden — and as a source of meat and milk — about 1,000 years earlier than had been widely believed, according to the team led by Alan Outram of England's University of Exeter.

Timeline of the Development of the Horse by Beverley Davis - Except possibly for the dog, no animal has contributed more to humanity than the horse. ...No one could write the entire history of the horse, but the facts gathered here may make it easier to understand horses and the importance they once had for us.

Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson - The writings left on tombs and tablets by the great civilisations of the ancient past have mostly now been read. This intriguing book on the strange art of “decipherment” focuses on those scripts that remain mysterious.

better graphics.... Among others, more fragments from Sebekhotep can be found at this site

"...writing and graphic systems are dynamic, imaginative means for communicating ideas visually. Works of art---ffective vehicles in their own right for conveying meaning--gain visual and communicative strength when they include writing or graphic symbols. Moreover, inscription itself is a powerful, creative act."

Squiggles in stone reveal old words to modern scholars Tuesday Mar 03, 2009 ALMODOVAR - When archaeologists on a dig in southern Portugal last year flipped over a heavy chunk of slate and saw writing not used for more than 2500 years, they nearly broke into applause.

Tonga petroglyphs hint at Isle link Carvings uncovered by erosion are similar to those found in Hawaii - By Christie Wilson - Beach erosion on a remote island in Tonga has revealed a trove of petroglyphs that archaeologists say are similar to those found in Hawai'i, hinting at the possibility of early travel between the two archipelagos.

THE CROSSHOUSE AT MIRINGA TE KAKARA…AN ANCIENT NEW ZEALAND TEMPLE. "In the course of normal science, it may happen that anomalies begin to accumulate. Some of these may be set aside for future research. Some may be dismissed as irrelevant. But if a sufficient number of anomalies accumulate, anomalies, which resist solution by the paradigm or incorporation into it, a crisis develops."

The diagram above is from a Fanditha magic book used in Maldives. It is a spell invoking a spirit called Dhaalum or Dhaaim.

3,000-year-old papyrus fragments found Ancient find may solve century-old puzzle, shed light on Egyptian history ... Found stored between two sheets of glass in the basement of the Museo Egizio in Turin, the fragments belong to a 3,000-year-old unique document, known as the Turin Kinglist.

Democratic Chess: Get inside a pawn’s head!

Inspired by Lewis Carroll´s “Through the looking glass”, Marcovici’s concept has IP-WLan-network cameras installed in each of the sixteen pieces on-board. These pieces are then capable of looking around and interacting with all the other pieces, including the two real players who control the game.

March 1, 2009

Warping the woof and weave of chess

Reflecting on a new generation of mirrors
Mathematician Andrew Hicks designs unusual mirrors that reflect wide panoramas or even show text the right way round

Cylinder mirror: Mirrored cylinders like this one are used in a painting technique called anamorphosis, which creates images that are only visible from a certain viewpoint, or through a distorting mirror.

The technique may even remain totally conceled from the human eye. As I discovered for myself in Las Vegas, a digital camera lens reveals the hidden anamorphic effect...

Anamorphic Images A stimulating gallery of images is offered at newscientist.com

The underlying idea of transferring information from one grid to another has a long history in both mathematics and art. When the blank grid differs from the original grid, for example, a drawing can suffer intriguing distortions. In art, the result is sometimes called an anamorphic picture. Mathematically, you're looking at the results of a type of transformation or mapping.

The 3D display system, developed by researchers at the University of Southern California, uses a spinning mirror to reflect images in all directions.

Those who like to think of China as a land of mystery are well served by the Chinese 'magic mirrors", which are some of the strangest objects in the world. An interesting video presentation of the general effect...

Article About The Subirachs Magic Square by George Zimmerman "Thirty-Three is one of the most powerful numbers of the mystical occult. A general practice of numerical composition in medieval literature was based upon lines of tradition that had come down through Pythagoras in classical antiquity. They came from earlier (but uncertain) sources, emanating from Egypt or Sumer and Babylon. The use of secret, symbolically ciphered numbers throughout the Bible is well-established, as reflected by Saint Augustine's extensive speculations on the mystical meanings of 33 (as the number of years in the life of Christ), or the 153 fish that Peter caught (John 21:11)."

Unmarked magic 4x4 square In Egyptian Old KIngdom Muu iconograpy? Anything is possible where the magical Muu dancers and Egyptian mathematics are concerned... Square dancing? Nothing quite so recreational it seems... In Muu context we encounter a ritual send off for the deceased in the initial leg of their journey into the vanishing point of the Western horizon. Perhaps there is a ritual connection between the four Muu and senet pawns, which Egyptians referred to as "dancers".

(Ed Note: Early senet-type game boards listed in the Petrie collection were composed of 33 rather than 30 squares. Like the Muu, they are enigmatic. The Muu were four in number - giving us two discrete mathematical factors that tend to confirm Mr. Zimmerman's outlook on the primordial religious nature of Subirachs Magic Square ...)

Hieroglyphics Cracked 1,000 Years Earlier Than Thought
FLASHBACK! ScienceDaily (Oct. 7, 2004) — Western scholars were not the first to decipher the ancient language of the pharaohs, according to a new book that will be published later this year by a UCL researcher.

Riddle Of The Jade Jewels Reveals Vast Trade Arena
ScienceDaily (Jan. 2, 2008) — Analysing the origins of jade used in ancient jewellery has revealed a trading arena that was active for more than 3,000 years and sprawled over 3,000km in Southeast Asia – possibly the largest such network discovered in the region to date.

Something mildly Infuriating...
Internet "Dens of Antiquity" - Items such as the two shown above are for sale on the open market through various Internet dealers. In all too many cases, the commercial side of the antiquities market appears to be a law unto itself. Just one page of an Egyptian collection reveals a few amulets that are potential board game pieces. With lots broken up and cast to the four winds, the push for profit appears to have taken the upper hand over our need to know...

Elementary my dear Donald...

Video - Donald in Mathmagic Land was released on June 26, 1959. Directed by Hamilton Luske and 27 minutes in length, in 1959, it was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Documentary - Short Subjects). The film was made available to schools and became one of the most popular educational films ever made by Disney.

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