An interesting paper (citation and abstract below) recently came out in which they look at chess master versus amateur brains. It suggests that the “face area” in the brain is not really specialized for recognizing faces, but familiar spatial patterns more generally. In my analysis of the circles, I commonly drew on analogies between facial recognition and chess pattern recognition, and this

The August Chess Improvement Carnival, to be hosted by Takchess is coming up. Deadline for submission is August 1. If you want content to be seen, whether yours or someone else’s, you can submit posts here. If you want to host future carnivals, please email me at blue devil [dot] knight at Yahoo.I plan on seeing this through to number 12, the December Carnival. If you are interested in taking

Thanks for all the inquiries about my health. I’m fine. The post-Bazna lull led into my vacation trip, which has largely turned into a non-vacation since the ^&@#!*% book still isn’t finished. It’s going to be amazing if they still let us publish it so late…

I’m barely able to check the results of the World Teams and Biel, let alone look at the games or put up a post. Plus, the Movable Type software the Dirt runs on is pretty much obsolete now, it seems, so when the manuscript is done and I’m back I’ll be redoing the entire back-end. I’ll also be bringing in a few guest bloggers to class the joint up a little. (A little, wouldn’t want to overdo it.) Do don’t delete your bookmarks just yet. I’ll try to tweet every few days and should be blogging again before the end of Dortmund. Consider this an open thread if anyone is still out there.

Plus, there’s Biel, World Teams, and Dortmund all underway. And the World Cup pairings were just published. No Carlsen, no Aronian, no Kramnik, no Nakamura, no Topalov. Three (?!) players from the World Cup go to the 2012 candidates. One wildcard, plus Gelfand. (Sorry, Boris!) Then there are, idiotically, three who go in on rating average. (This infuriates me even more than wildcard. One of the things that made the WCh cycle special was that you had to PLAY for it and perform under that unique pressure.) This means that even if one of those five aforementioned heavyweights gets the wildcard, one of them is guaranteed to be out of the next WCh cycle. I know, it’s hardly a serious cycle and Carlsen boycotted the last candidates anyway, but still. As a fan I’m always more “why not play” than “why play,” and without a credible alternative at the moment it seems like it’s worth showing up.

The July improvement Carnival is up at The Prodigal Pawn, who is definitely in the spirit of July 4th. For those that don’t know, July 4 in the United States is when you blow stuff up to show how much you love the country (ok, really it is the day, in 1776, that the United States declared its independence from British imperial rule). You can learn some American history, chess blog history, and