Message from America

During a recent visit to a large bookstore, I noticed that there were five shelves of Sudoku books but only one shelf of chess books.

Cool.  What is chess?

How many shelves of Bibles and devotionals were there?

America also has stores with potato chips and no fresh food. So what else is new.

Sudoku is fast food. Chess is organic nine grain bread can't make much money off anything unprocessed.

Sudoku is just a computer printout and you can sell it for 2.99

Five shelves of Sudoku books? Man, that really is a large bookstore!

btw, what does this have to do with the title?

A whole shelf of chess books? The last time I went in a megabookstore (it was a Borders, so that tells you when), there was 1/2 shelf of chess books. If I ignore those horrid books that I would consider overpriced if they were free, there were six books, including the two that I bought: Nunn's Chess Endings (2 vols).

you found a bookstore with a whole shelf! In america! Inconceivable! My last book i had to order from the Netherlands, it $28 there and $165 on amazon

That is too F'n funny  good one.

The term bookcase is useful for making distinctions between the whole piece of furniture and a single shelf on a bookcase. Typically in commercial bookstores, one shelf on a single bookcase runs three to four linear feet, holding several dozen books.

205thsq wrote:

you found a bookstore with a whole shelf! In america! Inconceivable! My last book i had to order from the Netherlands, it $28 there and $165 on amazon

You paid $165 for one book?

I have a set of encyclopedias that I'd like to sell you.

The Sudoku books took a single bookcase consisting of five shelves.  The chess books were on a single shelf at the bottom of the adjacent bookcase.  Next time, I'll take a photograph.

The average American spends about thirty hours per week in front of a television getting their weekly dose of propaganda.  So how can they be blamed if they have no time for a game which needs more than a single paragraph of instructions?

Including tax, I paid about $165 for one book. It is five volumes and has the name Encyclopedia in the title. If I bought it today, the price would be higher.

http://www.chessinformant.rs/eco-encyclopaedia-of-chess-openings 

To clarify I ordered it directly from new in chess for $28 plus $10 shipping... on amazon (where i did not buy it) the cheapest one was $165 at the time i looked and i guess the whole thing has gone nuts since then $5678.00?! seriously?! what is going on? http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/9056912003/sr=/qid=/ref=olp_tab_new?ie=UTF8&colid=&coliid=&condition=new&me=&qid=&seller=&sr= even though i bought it for cheap I was bummed last weekend on a road trip when a page popped out

I don't disparage Sudoku players; certainly Sudoku is better than watching the idiot box.

For chess players and others with similar mental acumen, I recommend trying some culture-free tests like Sudoku but with graduated difficulty.  Specifically, I'm thinking about tests like Raven's Matrices.  See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices

I've thought about writing a program to generate sets of such matrices with some having a difficulty level even higher than seen with the most advanced Raven set.  I could make money publishing these as simple recreation, but the sets would not be calibrated to IQ as are the official versions.  But it would be possible to make a rough correlation by establishing correspondences between the difficulty of an invented set and an official set.

Some of Raven's matrix problems are really tough.  There are discussion boards where many smart people argue for weeks about a solution for a single problem.  If you are a strong chess player, you might want to try some examples on the web.  For a real Raven's Matrices test, you'll have to pay a few hundred dollars for an administration by a licensed psychologist.

letter from America was a weekly monologue delivered on Australian radio by Allister Cook for 30 odd years.

The government shut down the bookstores?

Underregulated capitalism, which favors efficiency over substance, advertising over quality products, mergers over entrepreneurship, shut down Borders and put Barnes and Noble at risk. These drove most of the independent bookstores out of business. 

Wow, Ziryab and I completely agree on something :).