The Elegance of Brute Force Part 3

The Elegance of Brute Force part 3

How do the mechanics of brute force apply to music and other forms of art? As we examined earlier the computer became more and more a force of nature and this created new possibilities.

In the recording of music the early forms were very difficult and produced noisy results. At that time it was a miracle to even be able to record. Later on secondary recording systems were very poor. If you listen to the old Charlie Parker recordings the quality is frequently so horrible that it cancels the brilliance of the player. The studio two tracks and later four tracks were considered miracles of the time and it took real genius to do editing on them. As time went on, recording evolved into the 2 inch reels and 24 tracks which lead to amazing quality recordings at the professional studios. A deep love affair with copious amounts of reverb was one of the quirks of that transition, as well as reverb on snares in the seventies. Through all of this, from the small box cassette recorders to the two track home recorders, the person doing home recordings was doomed to noisy mixes and very hamstrung capabilities in terms of freedom in recording. The gap between the professional recordings and the home recordings were enormous. The big problem was that the Pro studios charged a liter of blood an hour for their recording fees. Unless your recording produced large money and few actually did, you were trapped in a philanthropic nightmare of endless expense for small amounts of finished recording. Four, eight and twenty four track recorders made things better but tape still added noise which Dolby was not the best at dealing with and hard drive recording lathered the recording with a deadening process due to too much data compression.
In the meantime a silent revolution was under way with computer based recording. At first it was slow, clunky and strained the resources of the computer. As processor speeds went up and ram amounts became ever larger the capabilities of the computer based recording mushroomed.

The culmination of brute force in hardware has lead to a situation where people now have capabilities that are closer than ever to the professional studios that have decreased in number due to the competition. Mega setups of many different software components are now possible. My favorite is Pro Tools. (There are many that I have not used extensively or at all like Cubase, Cakewalk, Reason, Ableton and so many others exist to help the recording enthusiast.
In Pro Tools there are many supporting programs like plug-ins and add-ons are available for EQ, Compression, instrument sounds (Sans Amp for instance as a sound modifier), reverbs, Choruses, Antares and Melodyne, Sampletank and a myriad of other choices for creating a powerful workstation that would make the studios of the 60s and 70s jealous.
There is a very steep learning curve to all of this and the copy protection schemes of the various software companies make all of this very miserable, especially if your computer crashes.
If there is an Achilles heel to the Pro Tools environment it is that the midi program that runs in it is very pathetic. Recently Digidesign acquired the staff based score software program called Sibelius which is also a thing of beauty itself (Two big improvements in that program would be a more fluid method of bar elimination and addition than the one they have as well as a switch to allow chromatic movement of notes rather than diatonic within a score that has key signature. They do have a chromatic mode which is for twentieth century music but then you cannot have diatonic movement within this.)
If there is one combination that would be a marriage made in heaven it would be the combination of the old Bars&Pipes Pro software from the Amiga platform and Pro Tools. That would be so good that the end of time might arrive.

I am currently investigating the potential of GigaStudio, Hypersonic and EastWest because they were mentioned to me by a brilliant Professional Tenor living in Germany. The good side of the Microsoft takeover of the computer has been a standard under which software and hardware makers could produce under with a reliable floor underneath in terms of a supported platform. Apple also is a very reliable platform. Hardware improvements have not only produced an exponentiality in performance of programs but also in possible setups and combinations. I always love to read different setups that people have built which work in harmony with all of the elements. These improvements have occurred in all fields of life related to the computer and we are very much in love with the elegance of brute force when it comes to these realms.

The Elegance of Brute Force part 2

The Elegance of Brute Force part 2


In part one we looked at the brute force equation in regards to computers with the Amiga versus early PC. The Amiga programs for instance were all segregated and self contained making their removal easy and the likelihood of one program causing problems in another almost impossible. The Amiga could be simply turned on and off without elaborate shutdowns or start ups… unlike PCs in which all programs bleed into each other and load up at the beginning. Over time brute force would ameliorate many of these problems. But now, on the way to the summation in which we look at how application of these theories can produce tangible results that benefit us in an easy to quantify way, we come to one of the most important features and that is exponential application, which I would like to call “exponentiality” even though it is probably not yet a word.

The five main areas that we will explore this in will be our favorite, music (music production in particular) as well as money making/management, pleasure and art. (Other items are likely to enter in the summation.

If you are so smart then why aren’t you rich?

When I was young I heard this idea expressed often even though it is too ambiguous to be of much value.
Advantages that one is born into or acquires count heavily towards the end result and of course luck, both bad and good affect that final result despite all of our efforts; we have only the absolute ability to harm ourselves. (It is preferable to attempt to positively influence the outcome however)
Nicholas Taleb deals with this concept in his excellent book fooled by randomness which explores how humans in addition to not being very practical in terms of probability analysis, actually are in much less control of their outcomes (with the exception of being able to produce bad results) than they think.

Exponentiality is one of the strongest forces in wealth creation and maintenance though it is not the only one.

The idea of exponentiality is very present in Talebs thinking as he makes a case for people’s improper evaluation of the rare events. One point in particular would be people who offer out of the money options that are likely to expire worthless consistently on the bet that they will not be realized. Every day they collect steady money as the options fail to be in the money. But then the rare event occurs and after many days of seemingly easy money, they are wiped out by all of the cheap options becoming in the money. In fact, Taleb points out that most people would rather make small money 99 days out of 100 and lose than fail 99 out of 100 and in the end clean up because it is too hard on humans to wake up and fail every day.
Taleb is taking advantage of exponentiality. In a 50 – 50 proposition steady losing streaks are the rode to ruin but when you are getting 100,000 to one, as long as you don’t go broke or die while waiting, exponentiality is the only way to go. There is exponentiality in almost everything as we will explore later, and this factor is what causes people to analyze situations badly. In investment there are many situations to turn exponentiality in your favor and there are times when you don’t want a lot of it.
The first thing to factor in is where are you relatively and how do you feel about this. The framework by which we look at exponentiality is critical. Are you happy or are you desperate? On a scale of 1 to 100 with 100 being the happiest and most satisfied we will proceed.
If I am 100 that means that life is supreme, every day I get up and do what I like, enjoying life to the maximum while having not only enough capital to never worry about the necessities of life, I have more than ample insurance against the usual problems that can occur. In such a case then my main goal would be for preservation of the existing condition and I would use exponentiality as a defensive against the extreme condition. A small portion of my wealth would be put towards “insurance” of various sorts. We would want different currencies, precious metals, puts on different entities, property, assets in other countries. It is the sort of problem everyone would love to have.
On the other hand, let’s say you are a 5. Now everything is radically different. You might not have long to live, you are in a war zone, life is cheap and you need to get out now or forget it. If you think you have 5 weeks of survival time it is best to load up the assets (Keep a little bit for food) in one big Hail Mary and try to grow your money large enough to get away and start a life elsewhere. Of course that is a silly situation (You probably don’t have Wall Street tools in a war zone) and we all sit in between somewhere. Thus your age, health, wealth, demeanor, income, location, goals and many other factors affect your money management decisions. But having said that, most people do not understand the concept of risk and the most important thing they fail to see is that the things they are think are safe have not the degree of reduced risk that they think. On the flip side of the coin, peoples fear of risk lead them to miss out on the benefits of exponentiality. Lets say that there was a stock that you could invest in that would lead pay off 500 to 1 if it came through but there was a 50 – 50 chance that they would go bankrupt. Most investors would say that the risk is too great but if you were to always approach this opportunity by putting 1 % of your investing money in such situations in the long run you would finish rich. As we tighten up the percentages we can make similar assumptions. 50-50 with a chance of 100 to one is still quite wonderful.
And this thing they call safety is not all that it is touted as being. Take for instance investing in stale items like bonds and the Dow. There are times when such staleness is welcome but now is definitely not one of them. Without going into the details too deeply as this could expand this writing far too much in a direction that is really supplemental to our current point (we will go into great detail about this in future writings) a simple cursory glance at your utility bills of ten years ago along with energy prices, health care, tuition, insurance, food, taxes and thousands of other items paints a clear picture: Inflation is the dominant theme of this investing generation. (In fact it is the theme of the century not withstanding a rare interruption in its course during the great depression) In simple terms holding the Dow would have made you modest returns but adjusted for inflation they are not as impressive as the nominal values. Don’t use the silly core rate that the establishment uses to con people without enough time to work out its mode of control. Did your food, insurance, school, energy etc. increase at the core rate? (Frequently quoted at 2% and other such silly numbers) I experienced doublings of my expenses in most categories and this is not 2% a year. The cause is obvious but also outside the scope of this writing so we will just point out that if you are experiencing greater than 7% inflation, being in bonds yielding less than 5% or the indexes that are even less impressive given your returns is playing the game of appearing to win every day while being exposed to the outliers in possibilities which I think are far more likely to occur than establishment salesmen would lead you to believe. Why expose yourself to actual risk such as the bear market mauling of 2000 – 2003 or worse for nominal gains that hardly change a persons’ life?
Time is working against everyone, the demographics of the baby boom generation retiring and using up their paltry savings for such retirement is not appealing. The Dennis Gartmans of the world (a brilliant trader) would have you believe that the current monetary conditions can go on forever as well but do you want to bet on a historical amount of credit creation and debt as hedge funds are blowing up right as we speak? Inflation, demographics, structural imbalances demand that we have a little bit more in the fuel tank for our living and/or retirement. Exposure to assets that have the potential to grow in great multiples is important, in particular ones that are in a bull mode and showing consistent rising in value every year.

The famous Cramer on CNBC is a good entertainer and he in fact has great researchers behind him. He warned everyone of the Canadian Income trusts (without stating the reason though evaluation expansion made tinkering by lawmakers a distinct danger as the prices rose to extreme highs) and then turned around after they had been blasted into the dirt and told everyone to go into them for the yield that is a sign of smart people behind him. But there is a poison to Cramer’s’ stodgy hackneyed approach and this leads his viewers into a very stale, exposed and unimaginative view of markets. Cramer lectures everyone to absolutely avoid stocks under 10 dollars which is about as mindless of an instruction as could be given. There is some sense to this given that he is advising viewers of moderate sophistication away from an area that without deep study and quality information can burn your hide off. But the exponentiality of this group is of maximum value to a person looking to actually get rich, or survive a possible grinding downturn in typical markets. Look for instance at the junior Uranium stocks in the small duration of 1999 to 2006. Investors taking a few thousand dollars into the sector could be multi-millionaires now. It was not a very illogical place to be if you had done your homework. It still is a very good place to be though instead of a situation where anything you buy makes you rich in 1999, today you have to be very sharp to pick out the best companies out of over 400 (there must have been less than 10 in 1999) Uranium mining stocks. Add to the fact that they have risen to the moon in a short period of time; it is a difficult place to enter now. I think if you entered the right companies and just waited long enough that you could not fail but it is perhaps better to wait for the sector to have a large correction and come down in price and then jump on for the ride. Find a good research company and learn as much as you can before doing this. Using some portion of your money gives you exponentiality as does gold/silver, oil/gas and other similar things like base metals to a lesser extent. These are things that are bets against the 100 year (the last thirty have started exponentiality in a negative way for money creation and inflation) non stop trend of higher prices for goods and services.
Why do you want stocks under 10 dollars? (Even though this is relative, the market value, asset value and share structure dictates the real story) GSPG seems cheap at half a penny but they recently had an offering of a BILLION shares!!) is that you can not make 100 times your money or more in the world that Cramer tells everyone to operate in. If you are Nike then you sell shoes to the entire world, how do you double your sales without selling to Venus and Mars even though they are both alright tonight? But if you are a company that sells shoes to people in your neighborhood then the potential for doubling sales is easy in fact raising sales by 100 times is quite reasonable. Small priced stocks is your window to making large wealth out of small asset amounts, it is up to you to figure out how much of your spare money to put into them.

If you study bull runs in various asset classes you see many examples of stocks making millionaires out of thousandaires.
Pay for your research, it will increase your odds of success and give you exposure to financial exponentiality. If you look at current conditions in financial markets and political craziness I think it is an easy bet that there will be more than a few bumps along the way.

There are many other vehicles to do this in but what is critical is that you work to deeply understand what it is that you are doing. Options, warrants, futures, small stocks and other items are just a small sampling of the myriad of rich possibilities for the individual that is disciplined and willing to work at being good at them. But if you are not disciplined and don’t like to work, do just one piece of work and that is to find a reliable information source. Then plunk down your loot and sit back taking the occasional glance to make sure all is copasetic.

This just touches the tip of the iceberg but is a good place to start.

THE ELEGANCE OF BRUTE FORCE part 1

THE ELEGANCE OF BRUTE FORCE part 1

In the early days of computing there were many competitors for the lead product. The Commodore machine was king in regards to numbers of owners. Commodore then followed up with a masterpiece of workmanship called the Amiga. The Computer was very efficient due to its management of resources. The PC for instance, does not multi-task in the technical sense though it does do a lot of things at once via the use of interrupts. In essence the PC wants pixels from the graphics chip, it makes a call directly to the graphics chip and gets them. It wants sound resources? It does the same with those chips. The Amiga was different in its management of resources in that it used a software solution to manage the various requests for resources and that was called Intuition. If the application wanted pixels it asked Intuition for them and intuition managed that along with the other applications request for resources. Thus, Amiga programs tended to have a unique-ness and economy that PC programs just could not have in their look the same brick-like stodgy world. The Amiga programs ruled over their PC counterparts in all areas of quality and functionality. In fact Atari and Apple (who always charged too much for their product unlike Atari and Commodore) were also superior to the PC in quality.

But that was only half the story. The two heads of the company were the opposites of their litigious and business efficient PC counterparts. Ali with his personal jets, mansions in many different countries and exorbitant taste for luxuries bankrupted Commodore and sent one of the greatest machines ever made to its grave. (With help from the competition-stifling and litigious Microsoft) Everyone was forced to go to the incompetent machine due to the above mentioned reasons and Microsoft’s’ brilliant codling of the business community. At first it was a depressing nightmare as the greatest computer and its best in the world applications slowly failed to get adequate support as its dwindling base could not reward the genius programmers that worked on it.
A lack of a wide enough software base, terrible marketing, weak support, and their world class awful management doomed the poor Amiga and made many people stick with inferior hardware so as to be compatible with their work environment with was dominated by the IBM systems and to a lesser extent the Macintosh.

Deluxe Paint (with its high quality introduction to animation), Can Do, The Toaster and what I think was one of the greatest pieces of software ever written; Bars and Pipes Professional were some of the reasons that underground Amiga supporters worked hard to keep the computer alive long after the Stores had to given up it.

Bars and Pipes Pro was a work in progress and it would reward many musical people to get to spend time working with this beautiful software. I worked mostly out of a hybrid interface (though later Todar Fay would start implement a musical staff and printing of that staff due to requests from people like your humble author who in those days could actually have contact with the brilliant software designers of the day) and demolished all competitors in design due to its extreme flexibility and absorption of the aggregate of all musical software products of the time. You could go in and work with notes as data points like with KCS (if you had that sort of patience) and was emulating the quality features of Deluxe Music as well. The thing that made this program so great was that in addition to all of the typical features you could go in and adjust and grab the notes as if they were clay in your hands. This was very important when working with the very difficult early samples of the tone generators of the time. (The modern ones as well could be difficult.) You could adjust everything the tiniest amount and approach it from many different angles. The uniqueness of Todars tools approach to score and track management was brilliant as well as most things he did. He was not in a deep way a musician as was evidenced by his confusion in the key and scale modes, which makes his accomplishments in this field even more impressive. I could go on even more about features of this software that over time gives more to you than you could imagine but this is about the death of such software and what replaced it.

At the time computer chess programs were coming of age. When the programs got just good enough to be intriguing but always bad enough to lose to you was the most fun of all. When you wanted difficult battle to toughen you up and occasionally lose you would turn up the computer full tilt and play open tactical positions. When you just wanted to win for sure with little effort you would just keep the position closed (not trade pawns to open ranks, files and diagonals) and build up force behind the lines where the forcing moves would not be in the horizon of the chess programs search engine. The computer was happy. And it became even happier if you had given it a pawn, so that it would willingly join in the position because it evaluated it as being OK. Then lines would open as you traded pawns and broke through and it would be too late for the computer. It was such days that made me brag that I would never lose a match to a computer in my life time.

But processor power slowly changed the landscape. As the computers became stronger there were less and less positions where you could control the tactics of the silicon monsters. Begrudgingly you would have to concede that it was equal to you, then better than you until the modern day Fritz, Crafty and other powerhouses would make you feel lucky to ever win a game. (Never mind the super computers that do battle with the world champions, there is no hope of ever winning for 99.99% of the worlds chess lovers) It was through Brute force that chess programs became elegant. They developed great judgment like humans had via calculation of immense amounts of data rather than “intuition”. Computers soon began teaching humans rather than the opposite.
Part two will show how the power of processing took mediocre hardware and made beautiful and elegant things happen in music. In fact the potential of what can be done today is not appreciated by many that will be shocked by what will unfold in the coming years. We hope to show a tiny bit of that in our writing.

Music and Pleasure in the decision making process for composition

Endorphins make the result
One of the things that I have noticed when people review music is that they frequently refer to the number of iterations in relationship to hook, melody, section or chorus etc. They say “This should be repeated more”, but more often they say “It is repetitious, boring and played too often.” This can be correct but it can frequently be woefully wrong. Sometimes a person is not familiar with the genre and does not get much out of the hook and thus it will be very boring to them quickly. Another person might love the genre and will have brain-mapped the musical material and is now functioning in the sub-conscious level in regards to the piece of music. Take for instance the Rolling Stones song tumbling dice. At the end they slowly work the hook gradually adding their female chorus and expanding the good feeling. Most Stones fans would say that they were correct in repeating the hook as much as they did. A person that was not moved by it might say that they should cut it shorter. In Richard Wagner’s funeral march at the end he pounds away at his dominant cadence over and over. He was a master and knew that it was working in a big way and he showed the insight of milking it for all that it was worth. His endorphin system told him how long to do it, not some left brain algorithm. When writing, it is best to let your mind tell you what is enough and what is too much not what a person that is not “getting it” thinks. All of the great writers used their endorphin flow dictate much of what they did. If you wrote music like a math equation rather than feeling it you would get mechanical music. (And that is not always bad either depending on the context and how it fits into the big picture according to your endorphin flow.
Many other factors are like this in music, that is, context driven. That is why a song or movement will elicit love and hate from a broad spectrum of listeners. I have always said that I am more interested in what someone loves in music than what they hate. What they hate might be bad or more likely they are just not connected to its wave length so to speak. Stravinsky once said that whenever he heard a bad piece of music it was always Villa-Lobos. It is very humorous to here but what would really be a hoot would be to hear what it was that Stravinsky thought was great music, what pieces he thought were profound and endorphin loaded. Some of the brilliant people at the University directed me to what they thought were the great pieces of music. I never regretted one of them, once brain-mapped they paid off spectacularly. The universal music lover takes a lot longer in time to run out of material, I like to know what is good in every type of music.
I recently went to a studio and had the people there mix the songs. They introduced me to a roving mixer and the young man sat down and discussed mixing while doing it. I did not have the spare funds to mix all of the songs I wanted and we devoted about 30 to 40 minutes per song that we worked on. Many of these mixes were put up on GarageBand.com. They were much better than what was done before but because the amount of time allowed was so small they were ultimately not usable as final mixes. But all was not wasted. What I learned from the engineer was quite a bit and from that I figured out how to do the mixing myself. This jump started me in a big way and was the second big boost to my musical energies which had been virtually destroyed due to depressing events a while back. The first big lift was just working with GarageBand.com and the experience brought me out of a shell that had made compositional work or most musical work very small and inconsequential. While it was a bit sparse at times, the input about my offered musical creations helped inspire a new wave of energy. Many people expressed positive feelings about the music which was helpful. Many others gave good advice about technical matters that were interfering with realization of the music’s potential. While I had always worked hard at compositional measures many aspects of recording and mixing remained a mystery that was being filled in one piece at a time. This year has been a good one for my growth in this area. Thus I have remixed the CD called “The Tunnel” officially for the first time and expect it to be available at site called CD-Baby soon. Work is proceeding on other CDs for release and hopefully we can get 27 of them finished before moving on to finish the current crop of projects that are in pipeline. Budgeting for Orchestra would make a lot of other things possible as well.
Good luck to all of you and hope you will consider getting a copy of THE TUNNEL at CD-baby.

Steve Kusaba

Garageband.com

The web is such a potent place for people not in the public eye. Many things can be archived whether or not a sensation is being built around them. Thus a person can be productive and make the possibility of others sharing the result. Garageband.com is similar to blogger.com in that they both make great things possible and are likely to be underestimated by many people. I have been reviewing music at garageband.com and while I find the average reviewing skills relatively weak on the whole (with quite a few brilliant exceptions) the quality of music production is quite suprising in places. If people were to spend a lot of time browsing the site they might be pleasantly shocked by a lot of quality in all categories. My intuitive guess is that this sort of thing will be the wave of the future. Any artist that does not recognize the value of archiving is blinded by non-science. I encourage everyone to go there. (Don't forget to check out the Steve Kusaba songs there also!) Someday when the easy archiving of wave files is in place, things will be even better!

While having many categories, garageband should add just a few more. Nonetheless they should be applauded for making such an excellant place for musicians to show up.

A suspension of values

Looking back on the days when I first learned chess the thing that stands out the most is how I had no idea what I was getting into. After learning how the pieces moved, then learning how to check the king while not allowing him a way out it was time to do something more interesting. Then the joy of eventually finding people weaker than you and grinding them down until their naked king could not resist checkmate made this a good thing to do in between biking and picking berrys. But this was not the norm.
More usual was the sophisticated opponent that always came up with ways to forcefully destroy your pieces before they could get involved in their own aggression. And so chess was at that time a game of brutal force and quantification of "The one with the most toys wins". So my next successful plan was to take out Big Bertha (queen) and maybe one or two other pieces on a big hunting spree to locate targets that my opponent could not guard very well and after winning enough free stuff then to grind them down to paste. Laughing all the while! But what to do about those people who seemed to protect everything while always having more pieces in play? So now the game was entering into the pinnacle of physical reality. It came down to who had the most toys yet again but now we had to get better at eating their toys. Unless of course the attack on the king came to direct fruition but that was the same as the toy analogy since the kings value was infinite.

In the backdrop of the physical reality the introduction to intangibles could now appear. Time for example was not a physical entity, we are referring to the time measured as tempi. With each move you could bring a knight into play or send him on a useful duty which would be using a tempo. Send him to do something worthless and you wasted a tempo. The textbooks stated almost unanimously that three tempos equal a pawn so that we could relate the whole thing to the physical reality. Yet this unsatisfactory. In some positions the three tempos could be worth more than a pawn and would yield more rewards often enough. Also the degree to which the position enhanced the value of tempos mattered, close things up enough unless you could A. Get something done right away or B. Obtain a lasting bind it was better to keep the material. The part that nobody mentioned is that intangibles as well as things such as the bishop pair are of greater value depending on the skill of the participant. Extra tempos in the hands of a poor player might not be worth the pawn while in the hands of a consummate master it would be worth quite a lot. So now when we look at intangibles we have to factor in the skill of both opponents. Some players are easier than others to take advantage of with a tempo or more. Styles as well as strength play into this. Emmanuel Lasker was an early great at understanding the interplay of the opponents and intangibles.
Another well known intangible is mobility. A knight that is blocked and cannot go to any squares is said to be immobile. A knight in the center that has a full range of squares and secondary squares is said to be quite mobile. Yet attempts to measure this are prone to inexactitude. Do we count the number of squares a piece or pieces can go to for a precise measurement? Can you have numerical amounts of mobility? 68.35 units of mobility? No, it does not work like that. Two pieces in just the right location with small amounts of the right kind of mobility are most effective. (clock time is also important. What kind of problems are best to present our opponent with the amount of time that they have. When Tal first met Botvinnik he presented the world champion with enormous complications going into the final hour of the game. Tal being younger and more at home in such positions enjoyed success. ((Bronstein was a master of Chaotic positions and used to aim games in that direction)) In the rematch Botvinnik took care to control the types of positions that he got into and regained his title)

Once again it takes an intuitive judgment of what form of an intangible is more valuable. Judgment of which intangible is more important than another as well as the known physical characteristics. And there are many intangibles. (Being able to make the position conform to the intangibles that we posess helps as well.) Knowing how they all work together in regards to our opponents strengths and weaknesses as well as our own strengths and weaknesses matters a great deal. It is the interplay between these fluid yet vaporous concepts that give the greatest pleasure for me in chess. (Yes I like when people fall into my cheap traps, or I swindle out of a horrible mess as well) The modern chess game of today has the superb titans of our time using these esoteric means to secure wins against players that are very difficult to topple.
In John Watsons' masterpiece "Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy" he attempts to reveal the nuts and bolts of the new game that has emerged since Aron Nimzonvitch wrote his positional great work, "Chess Praxis".
While expressing doubt for Nimzovitches idea of over protection he pays homage to the great master as forming one of the bedrock upon which todays Grandmasters build many of their concepts. Some of the chapter titles show Watson covering how modern masters deal with intangibles. 2/2 rule independence, 2/3... Are your pawns really backwards? From Modern Pawn Play. 2/4 The modern Bishop 2/5 The contemporary Knight 2/7 Bishops Versus Knights : Minor-piece Pairs , and here you get get a lot of insight into situations where rather than keep the position closed for the knight since bishops prefer open positions the possessor of the knights prefers to open up the position in a hurry in order to accelerate the knights before the bishops can awaken. (After that I had a brief love affair with the Chigorin defense.)

Watson also mentions the evolution through the sixties where working against static weaknesses was the rage. (They learned to love this style in the 20s through the 50s but it hit its apex in the 60s) John goes on to present how modern players give the opponent the opportunity to play against their static weaknesses (doubled, isolated or backward pawns for example) but always in exchange for this they get ample amounts of mobility and dynamic potential or some other intangible. And all of this occurs under very heavy layers of deep tactical issues. No wonder Chess is not a spectator sport to the degree of other sports, the viewers practically need a doctorate to understand what is going on.

Another of my favorites was his chapter on the exchange. The exchange sacrifice is more present in the modern game than at any time prior. Often there is little visible compensation. But oh is there ever compensation because it frequently succeeds. After reading the chapter on exchanges I read an unannotated game by V. Anand. It was simply amazing. (I am easy to impress, I love all the games of the professionals) Many moves laters Anands' initiative on the queenside comes to fruition and he moves in for the kill winning a brilliancy.

I suspect that there are many intangibles that world class players use that have not even been identified yet. Having the judgment to sort them all out while being under pressure from a genius while being given limited time to think.... This is the ultimate sport, chess.

Do not invest with the herd

Buying indexes is a poor plan. There is risk but little reward. A person never can make 10 times their money. The common idea is that if you make 6% you have had a great year. Real inflation (not the silly core rate that does not include things that rise, that people actually need) rises faster than that. Best to pay for quality research and attempt to invest in things that have the potential for exponential growth. Avoid indexes and mutual funds.
If you hear of your investment on Television all the time the likelihood of you making a fortune is low. If no one has heard of your investment area it has real potential. If you went into the Uranium sector in 1999 to invest because you had the vision to understand that energy was in serious decline for the long term and that radioactive investments were obviously good bets as electrical generation is not negotiable.
Do you think that IBM is going to 20,000 dollars a share? It has a better chance of making it to 20 dollars a share. Microsoft to the moon?
What are they going to do, sell Windows to the Martians and moon people? Some day Microsoft will not exist. On the way to that painful point many people will lose a lot of money being exposed to not a lot of gain. Let the institutions buy IBM and Microsoft. They want to earn 30% over 100 years. You had better try to make the money in your lifetime instead.