slm_HN

"Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure."

What does graft mean in this context? Is there a process where you graft diamonds, like plants? Does it refer to the diamond seed crystals mentioned in the article?

Puzzles are great for learning tactics, but eventually you need to learn some strategy and positional play. You'll need to read a book or two for this. And don't forget endings!

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr.

However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org.

They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, which is good for chess since it allows more chess players to make a living.

Tell me you don't have anything to contribute other than a weak, ten year old meme without saying that you don't have anything to contribute other than a weak, ten year old meme.

Yeah, I'm not buying this. For three years China has desperately been searching for an animal reservoir for the virus. They have found nothing at all. This report wants me to believe there was one infected animal at the market and that was it?

Or is it more likely that the lab, which had numerous coronavirus samples, did gain of function research and had a history of accidental leaks, was not involved at all?

This is a surprisingly good article. Most of the time when the mainstream press covers the chess world there are just too many inaccuracies in the reporting.

>I get a pretty strong pseudoscience vibe from it.

I don't quite know how to categorize complaining about pseudoscience based on a "vibe".

It's not quite irony... maybe it's just humorous. As a member of the post Alanis Morissette generation I guess I can no longer recognize irony.

In fact there is opponent reading (literally) in Blackjack. The opponent (dealer) must check his hand for blackjack, if the dealer's upcard is a 10 or an Ace, after having dealt the initial two cards to every player. "Hole peeking" is a technique where a teammate stands behind the dealer so they can see the hole card when the dealer checks for blackjack. They then signal this information to the player so he knows the value of the dealer's hand. Hole peeking used to be so common that casinos now have card readers built into the blackjack tables so that the dealers don't have to expose their hole card to check for blackjack.

It is/was also possible for a player at the first seat of the table to see a sloppy dealer's hole card when checking for blackjack. This is called "first basing" while using a teammate is generally called spooking.

As I remember the book it was the humans probing the neutron star with something (x-rays?) in order to survey/study the star that triggered the evolutionary advances in the cheela. So no, it wasn't curious timing, the humans precipitated the rise of the cheela.

Great book btw, hope I'm remembering it correctly.

East Lansing is best known as the home of Michigan State University which is best known as the school that harbored Larry Nassar while he molested hundreds of american gymnasts.

Who wants to be associated with that?

As others have already pointed out that paper doesn't say meat is bad, it says that the culprit is processed red meat. It's not the meat that's bad, it's the vat of carcinogenic chemicals that processes the meat that's the problem.

Just think about it a little bit, man evolved over hundreds of thousands of years eating meat, there's no way that it's bad for you.

Yep, I've seen the exact same thing at my local used bookstore on normal business days. Someone with an ISBN scanner methodically scanning every book and buying whatever the app told him.

I can see why some people think this guy is a bit much (Wolfram-branded Pilot Precise Grip pens, Wolfram Cloud, Wolfram Language) but this is a very thorough and interesting article. He even admits the embarrassing stuff: Apple Mac Pro.