Today my guest is Mike Snyder (@mambomike282), a listener of the show who owns a security firm in Washington state. As a Christian, he wanted to challenge me on the subject of evolution and religion, and so we went for it. 🙂
The Podcast Network is supported by:
neo.org – a social network with a purpose – to transform the world by enabling people to transform themselves
and
our first TPN Patron – Tony Kynaston.
I’ve been trying to explain to people for 20 years that free will is an illusion. I’ve covered the subject on a few podcasts, including this one and this one with Dr Susan Blackmore. I even mad a simple flowchart explaining why it must be an illusion. Now, finally, some neuroscientists have agreed with me.
According to Wired:
Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it. If that’s the case, do people actually make decisions? Or is every choice — even the choice to prepare for future choices — an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid? Those questions are raised by a study conducted by Max Planck Institute neuroscientists and published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand; seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions.
(via Cameron Collie via Is Free Will an Illusion? | Wired Science | Wired.com)
You may say “who cares?” Well you should. It’s incredibly important to understand. It’s easily as important as understanding that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around. It will change your life. At least, that’s been my experience and the experience of lots of people I know.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8&w=560&h=340]
My favourite line is “what happens in Vegas, stays on Flickr.”
Data sourced from socialnomics.com (follow @equalman).
Hat tip to Nathan Bush for the link to the vid.
Reports today about the AFP arresting 4 men in Melbourne who were allegedly planning to attack a military base in Victoria is being called "terrorism" by the Prime Minister and the mainstream media. For example, News.com.au claims the attack, if it had gone ahead, would have been "the worst terror attack on Australian soil". However, if they were attacking a military target, does that qualify as terrorism? Wikipedia states that there isn’t an internationally agreed definition of terrorism, but I normally associate it with attacks on civilian targets outside of wartime. A small group of Somali and Lebanese labourers and taxi drivers attacking a military base doesn’t sound like the definition of terrorism to me. It sounds more like the definition of "stupid".
(UPDATE: in discussion with @napper, I said I think an attack by citizens of a country on its own army and inside the country’s own borders is more accurately defined as “revolution” or “insurrection”.)
So – why is it being referred to as terrorism by the Govt and the media? Are we back to the days where The Great Corporation feels the need to frighten the masses? What should we be watching out for? Is there a new law coming soon that will disappear more of our civil rights? Will Rudd use this to help push through his Internet censorship?
UPDATE: I also meant to add – as Terry did in the comments – that I hope the AFP have actually done their job this time, unlike in the Haneef debacle.
UPDATE DECEMBER 2012
These days I’m using SOCIAL CHESS on the iPad to play turn-based games. I highly recommend it however you can’t export your games to .pgn, which is a shame for those of us that like to study our losses. 🙂
I have also been checking out CHESS PRO. It seems like a great training app for people who are new to chess. It takes a slightly different approach to other training apps.
How does it work? It’s really simple: you just play! The coach shows you the moves a Grandmaster would pick. Not just one move, but the 4 best moves.
Comes in a free version as well as a $9.99 version.
UPDATE (September 2012)
This post gets a lot of traffic, so I thought I should update it to include the apps I am currently using on my iPhone and iPad as a lot as happened since 2009!
Here are my main chess apps:
iPad / iPhone
This is my main app for playing real-time games online. I’ve tried both the iPad HD version and the iPhone version and I’ve ended up using the iPhone version on my iPad, as it seems a little more advanced in terms of features and reliability than the iPad version. I can usually find someone to play against in a matter of seconds and the gameplay, at least on the iPhone version, is quite smooth. The apps themselves are free however to play online you need an ICC membership which costs about $5 / month.
On the iPad, I tend to still use Shredder (see below) to play and study, and Chess With Friends (see below) to play asynchronous games, however I’ve found another app that is better at allowing the importing of .pgn files for analysis, and that is:
t Chess Pro allows me to grab the emailed games from ICC, drop them into a .pgn file, and upload it to Dropbox. Then I can download that on my iPad and open it in t Chess for analysis.
ORIGINAL POST from 2009:
There are a huge number of chess applications for iPhone these days and, as I’m a bit of a chess nut, I’ve been trying to test them all out to find out which are the best chess apps for the iPhone or iPod Touch. There are apps suitable for beginners through to grandmasters as well as apps that will let you play a quiet game by yourself on a plane, through to games that let you play against other iPhone / iPod Touch owners online.
These are the ones I suggest you take a look at. Prices and ratings are from the Australian iTunes store.
Hard Core
If you’re an avid chess player, you probably already know about Fritz and Shredder from their PC apps which have been around for many years and are battle tested against world champions. You might not have heard that they now have iPhone versions.
The PC version of Fritz has beaten grand masters from Kasparov to Kramnik. Not enough ratings in the Aussie appstore for an average, but seems to be getting 4 and 5 stars so far, which isn’t surprising.
The Good:
The Bad:
Another chess app that’s been around on the PC for many years, Shredder claims to be “the most successful chess program ever”. It has an average rating in the iTunes store of 4.5 stars.
The Good:
The Bad:
Best Free Apps
What options are out there for people who want a serious game but don’t want to fork out the big bucks?
Deep Green Chess Lite provides a solid game of chess for beginner or intermediate players. Average rating 3 stars.
The Good
The Bad
iChess allows for online play on FICS (freechess.org) servers as well as standard play against the AI or human opponents. Average appstore rating 2.5 stars.
The Good
The Bad
Best Online Play
I’ve been using CWF since it first came out and it’s a terrific asynchronous chess experience. It will set up games for you with random players or allow you to invite friends via email. Average rating of 2.5 stars doesn’t do it justice.
The Good
The Bad
If you want real-time online play, then Cyber Chess might be your best option. It connects to both FICS (freechess.org) and ICC (Internet Chess Club) servers. Only one rating on the Aussie appstore, which is for 3 stars. Price $1.19.
The Good
The Bad
What’s Missing
What I’d really like, but haven’t found yet, is a chess app that let’s me play against another human iPhone to iPhone on the same network. The same way that apps like Bump set up a private network, I’d love to play chess against the person sitting next to me in a cafe without having a real board. I’d love it if we could both whip out our iPhones and start a real-time game against each other. If anyone knows of an app that has that feature, please let me know in the comments section or on Twitter.