GoBox is now available

Oh, bother! There's a lot of blogging to do, Blogspot is having technical difficulties, and I'm a bit short on time. Let's just keep this first post brief and add the rest as the week goes by.

Shortly after I returned from vacation, Pong Yen sent me an email that the GoBox was now available at the Yellow Mountain Imports website at a special introductory price of $98. I should have one hopefully in a couple of weeks.

Image from YMI

In addition to the GoBox, YMI is now also selling goban sleeves for $9 and $8. There are two sizes available to fit either the regular table gobans or the slimmer bamboo table gobans. This is an inexpensive way to protecting your board when it isn't in use ... if that should ever happen.


Fuseki Quiz 12/20

Black to play. Where is the biggest move on the board?
The wariuchi at B looks vital.

Scoring of the previous Fuseki Quiz 11/20
(Jump to the last quiz!)

• A = 6
• B = 4
• C = 8
• D = 10, Black pushing with Q7 and, afterwards, with Q8 (see Ref.Dia.1) is playing on a grand scale. Especially in handicap Go, the solidity of Black's wall is attractive. White will have great problems trying to find a way to reduce this territorial framework. On the other hand, if White gets to play 1, 3, and 5 in Ref.Dia.2, Black won't get much territory here.
• E = 2

Reference Diagram 1

Reference Diagram 2

In Other News: Good Reads:
The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing and Our Future

From Publisher's Weekly:

American history, both distant and recent, is troubled with violence and schisms that constantly threaten the foundations of the country. The country has endured a civil war, two world wars, slavery, genocide and now, of course, the raging battle between the red and blue states. Are we on the brink of dissolution? That's the question Enriquez poses in this fact-filled, statistic-laden book. For more than 200 pages, Enriquez, the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School, gives readers as many reasons as he can for why America may be headed toward an un-united future.

I picked-up this book at the library just before my trip. It seemed rather interesting.

I recall back in my college History classes how fascinated I was about the Roman Empire, how long it had lasted, and how quickly it came apart. Back then, my professor had mentioned to our class that many of the countries that exist today will come apart and come together. The United States would be no exception. We have fifty stars on our flag today. Tomorrow, we could have more, or less.

The writing style will seem odd to some readers. One would think that it was laid-out like a huge marketing brochure. There are many one-sentence paragraphs and some whole sentences are presented in super-large or small fonts. I suspect that Enriquez was trying to make this book accessible to today's common audience that prefers to digest its information in soundbites. I didn't find the style to be a burden at all.

The first chapter of this book, short as it is, might turn-off readers if they don't have a rudimentary understanding of Economics. It is, however, one of the more important ones in my humble opinion as it outlines the financial pressures that drives the dissolution of nations.

The sixth chapter was particularly interesting to me as it outlined the political and socio-economic divisions within Mexico and how these could affect the United States as well.

One interesting historical snippet that I learned from this book was how the Reagan administration had tried to acquire Baja California from Mexico as part of a debt-restructuring deal. That would certainly have made a very visible change in the western profile of the US.