chess (2.1.1) simple chess - outposts 1

i started reading gm emms book, simple chess. let's put it simple, it is a good book. clearly written, easy-to-follow vocabulary (recommended for foreign readers). simple chess is on positional play, say, it explains us the basics of positional understanding.

ginger killer series - serial killah.

btw i like the style of uk gm lectures. for example simon williams aka gingergm is fully professional. don't forget to check out his videos and website

1-game-for-1(01)-day-notes
... and some own adding

outposts (1)

image credits nn 1

Religion (3) general stats

The current CIA world factbook tells us about the proportion of believers by religion.

In the World there are (as of 2010):

Christian 33.39% (of which Roman Catholic 16.85%, Protestant 6.15%, Orthodox 3.96%, Anglican 1.26%), Muslim 22.74%, Hindu 13.8%, Buddhist 6.77%, Sikh 0.35%, Jewish 0.22%, Baha'i 0.11%, other religions 10.95%, non-religious 9.66%, atheists 2.01% 

At adherents.com we find nice pie charts and other diagrams:
this below shows the number of 2005

For example in Hungary:
Roman Catholic 37.2%, Calvinist 11.6%, Lutheran 2.2%, Greek Catholic 1.8%, other 1.9%, none 18.2%, unspecified 27.2% (2011 est.)
In France:
Roman Catholic 83%-88%, Protestant 2%, Jewish 1%, Muslim 5%-10%, unaffiliated 4%
overseas departments: Roman Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, pagan
In Germany:      
Protestant 34%, Roman Catholic 34%, Muslim 3.7%, unaffiliated or other 28.3%
In the United States:
Protestant 51.3%, Roman Catholic 23.9%, Mormon 1.7%, other Christian 1.6%, Jewish 1.7%, Buddhist 0.7%, Muslim 0.6%, other or unspecified 2.5%, unaffiliated 12.1%, none 4% (2007 est.)
In the UK:
Christian (includes Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist) 59.5%, Muslim 4.4%, Hindu 1.3%, other 2%, none 25.7%, unspecified 7.2% (2011 est.)      

At adherents. com we also learn about the 

Top 10 Largest Highly International Religious Bodies

These are religious bodies in which at least 30% of their world membership live outside the "core country" (country with the largest number of members).

Religious Body	Number of Adherents
Catholic Church	1,100,000,000
Sunni Islam	875,000,000
Eastern Orthodox Church	225,000,000
Anglican Communion*	77,000,000
Assemblies of God	50,000,000
Seventh-day Adventists	16,811,519
Jehovah's Witnesses	16,500,000
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints	12,275,822
New Apostolic Church	10,260,000
Ahmadiyya	10,000,000
Bahai World Faith	6,000,000

RELIGION (2) intro

Religion is the most comprehensive and intensive manner of valuing known to human beings.  Religions have common characteristics. Paul Tillich thought of the essence of religion as existing in that which was of ULTIMATE CONCERN. "The Ultimate Concern is that which demands complete surrender of the person who faithfully accepts the Ultimate. (…) it is an act of both the conscious and the unconscious, unconditional, infinite and ultimate concern.” 

Only symbolic language is sufficient to express faith and God. Like signs, symbols refer to that which is beyond themselves. However, unlike signs, symbols play a part in that which they represent and cannot be easily replaced.  For instance, a country’s flag not only represents the nation that it stands for but also is an active participant in portraying the country’s “power and dignity.” Symbols arise from the unconscious and must be accepted on that level before conscious acceptance. 

Myths are an integral part of our ultimate concern.  One might be able to replace one myth with another, but s/he could never completely remove mythology from human consciousness.  In fact, Tillich argues that even a “broken myth,” cannot be replaced with a scientific substitute because myths are the symbolic language of faith”

Religions give answers related to the following topics: the notion of a deity or absolute (ultimate concern and importance); the nature of human beings; divine providence, destiny, fate; the meaning of human history; the problem of evil; humanlife and suffering – afterlife-life, life after death, world concept, ethics – moral code. With regard to e.g. the West- Judaism-Christianity it is characterized with a belief in one god, in linear history and sacred scripture – the book. How the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions argues for God’s existence? There are A. Revelation- scripture- direct instruction from the deity; B. Reason; C. Experience  Religious experience of the divine (absolute); D. Psychic Phenomena-Death and Immortality; E. Pragmatism - faith   

There are different kind of religions:

Monotheism- a belief that there is but one god.

·       Theism- one god separate from the creation

·       Pantheism- one god existing in the creation-i.e., world=god

·       Panentheism- one god, the world is part of god who is greater than creation

Polytheism- is a belief that there are many gods.

Agnosticism-is no clear or definitive knowledge of whether there is a god or not

Monism is the view that all is of one essential essence, substance or energy. Monistic theism, a variant of both monism and monotheism, views God as both immanent and transcendent

… and the post modern relativism where descriptive ethical relativism has led to normative ethical relativism.

In general, according to religions God is:

Supreme Being	All Just
Eternal Being	All Loving
All Perfect	All Merciful
Beneficent Being- All good	All Kind
All Powerful- Omnipotent	All Charitable
All Knowing- Omniscient	All Forgiving
All Good	All Understanding
All Present- Omnipresent	All Sympathetic

Moral codes

All societies need moral codes in order to survive. Without moral rules there is disharmony and chaos that no society can long survive. It is one of the most characteristic features of a religious tradition to have a moral code.

of course there is a lot of question to think about

for instance, what about the doomsday clock? the world is coming to an end?

"Historically, philosophical reflection on religious themes had two foci: first, God or Brahman or Nirvana or whatever else the object of religious thought, attitudes, feelings, and practice was believed to be, and, second, the human religious subject, that is, the thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and practices themselves." (oxford handbook)

Below are the questions for a religion to be answered, as elaborated by Mr Pecorino

  1 THE ABSOLUTE: what do the believers hold as most important?  What is the ultimate source of value and significance?  For many, but not all religions, this is given some form of agency and portrayed as a deity (deities).  It might be a concept or ideal as well as a figure.

  2 THE WORLD: What does the belief system say about the world? Its origin? its relation to the Absolute? Its future?

  3 HUMANS: Where do they come from? How do they fit into the general scheme of things?  What is their destiny or future?

  4 THE PROBLEM FOR HUMANS: What is the principle problem for humans that they must learn to deal with and solve?

  5 THE SOLUTION FOR HUMANS: How are humans to solve or overcome the fundamental problems ?

  6 COMMUNITY AND ETHICS: What is the moral code as promulgated by the religion?  What is the idea of community and how humans are to live with one another?

  7 AN INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY: Does the religion offer an explanation for events occurring in time?  Is there a single linear history with time coming to an end or does time recycle?  Is there a plan working itself out in time and detectable in the events of history?

  8 RITUALS AND SYMBOLS: What are the major rituals, holy days, garments, ceremonies and symbols?

  9 LIFE AFTER DEATH: What is the explanation given for what occurs after death?  Does he religion support a belief in souls or spirits which survive the death of the body?  What is the belief in what occurs afterwards?  Is there a resurrection of the body? Reincarnation? Dissolution? Extinction?

  10 RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER RELIGIONS: What is the prescribed manner in which believers are to regard other religions and the followers of other religions?

source: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/pecorip/scccweb/etexts/phil_of_religion_text/
image credits nn 1,2,3

UPDATE - REMARKABLE COMMENTS 
(after posting a nice long discussion followed. the highlights copied here)


B O'Brien I'm sorry I haven't had time to address this; it raises some interesting questions. I think Tillich was on to something. However, the analysis does largely leave out Buddhism, and the questions attributed to Mr Pecorino display some western cultural bias.
A Salmon Paul Tillich, as you know, was the most famous of the de-mythologizers, theologians (Tillich was Lutheran) who pointed out that all of the myths, including the resurrection of Jesus and that of Adam and Even, were not historical or true as fact. Tillich also argued against the Christian notion of personal immortality. The world-wide revival of religious fundamentalism in the 1980s (which helped produce the new anti-science GOP) swept much of their work aside. Too many want to believe that the Biblical myths are true for emotional reasons to make Tillich influential today. (...) Tillich also tries to redefine "faith," which typically means belief without evidence. Faith is "ultimate concern," Tillich proclaimed, which meant that atheists who were so concerned had faith, a conclusion which few atheists had any interest in.
B O'Brien TO A Salmon -- Faith in the religious sense didn't mean "belief without evidence" until the modern era. Tillich (and I've read his book Dynamics of Faith, so I actually do know something about him) in a sense was trying to go back to an earlier understanding of religious faith, not "redefining" it.
A Salmon Well, the earlier Hebrew meaning signifies trust, not belief in. The New Testament writers inherited a different context where one religion was not universally believed to be true. Faith in the New Testament involves belief without evidence, a hope in "things unseen," but by this time the Hebrew view of God as having a literal body had largely disappeared, so one was asked to have faith in an invisible being. 
B O'Brien //Faith in the New Testament involves belief without evidence, a hope in "things unseen," // A lot of the writing of early and not-so-early Christian theologians contradicts that. Augustine certainly wouldn't have agreed, nor Anselm, nor a lot of others. The whole idea of "truth" being synonymous with "factual" and requiring "evidence" is a relatively modern notion. 
A Salmon Truth for the writers and believers of the New Testament is doctrine. If you do, as some zealots do, spell it with a capital letter, it sinks in more: "the Truth." This view continues today among fundamentalists in particular. They have "the truth" and want you to know that Jesus is "the truth," etc. As for Old Testament faith, the story of Abraham and Isaac is an example. Abraham is not asked to believe that "God" is real or exist but rather to trust "God" in God's unethical command, by ethical standards elsewhere, to kill or murder his own son. Later God is depicted ordering genocide. None of those who believed in that God were recording as raising moral objections or deciding to disobey.
B O'Brien Don't confuse modern understanding of "truth" with how people understood "truth" 2000 years ago. It's a perilous thing to look at how modern people understand "truth" and scripture and assume that's how it was always understood. Also a lot of the more horrific OT stuff comes from a 7th century BCE "revision" according to a lot of scholars, reflecting dissension and conflict within Jewish life at the time. It's old propaganda, in other words, aimed at long-dead people facing a long-gone situation.
A Salmon Truth for post-Christian, post-Enlightenment people means commonly an awareness of conditions and facts, such as biological and astronomical and language solution, but not in an absolute way. We determine what is true now through science, especially, and scholarly research throughout the disciplines generally. 

RELIGION (1) sources

i start a workaround on the topic of RELIGIONS.
i will continuously update the list of sources. 
and the posts as well, if need be.
initally i read 2 books. these are:
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion
And an online textbook written by Philip A. Pecorino.

For Bible quotes i will use the New International Version

image credit nn 1

sources
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/pecorip/scccweb/etexts/phil_of_religion_text/
https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-NIV-Bible/
http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195331356.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195331356
http://diversiton.com/religion/

FILM (3) Lencsilány is awaiting

Although Hungary cannot show off such a long tradition in the world of comics as US can, there is an author with a very good book that would fit perfectly in a Tim Burton scene.
The book is called Lencsilány. As a critic says "it is a peculiar vicious world. The solitude and the dark silence is more threatening than wicked mohawks and evil monsters." The story has references to Edgar Allan Poe and is in line with Géza Csáth's world view.


For me it is also similar to Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Did you see the movie? Actually it was just scary. Just imagine buttons in the place of your eyes. And a giant spider trying to eat you. And you are not like Frodo, not saved every time. When the spider comes, we feel real chances that she gets Caroline. Does she go back to her at-first-far-too-kind parents. No, the girl said: Nevermore.

I think she would be a perfect partner for the Pumpkin King.



Of course in such a context, love also has different meaning. The little Gillygirl (an english equivalent for Lencsilány) says things like this: I am too tired. Let me die.

The story ends with the black silence absorbs that scary world. So Gillygirl is awaiting ... to be a film star.

Some pages of the Lencsilány can be read here. It is english, don't worry. and have FUN:

image credits nn 1,2,3,4,5

FILM (2) X-men: The Marauders

MARAUDERS  hungarian: martalócok    

okay, let's say apocalypse has the horsemens, but sinister's marauders would have their chances, at least in the marvel universe.

 

all credits go to http://www.comicvine.com

 The Marauders are a group of henchmen for Mr Sinister, assembled by Gambit.  They are responsible for the slaughter of the Morlocks.

  

NOTABLE MEMBERS

 

CHIMERA

 

Chimera is an extra dimensional pirate who commit crimes in multiple dimensions.

 Chimera can generate ectoplasmic bursts in the form of dragons, to strike enemies both physically and psionically. She has low-level telepathy. She possesses skill with weapons, generally firearms.

 

GAMBIT

 

Gambit is a charming master thief turned X-Man. He possesses the mutant ability to charge inanimate objects with kinetic energy, causing them to explode, he is also extremely agile because of his powers. 

 

Gambit's signature move is throwing charged playing cards.

   

Gambit's mutation 

gives him 

red and black eyes

  

In Apocalypse's recent plan for mutant survival, Remy joined his side as a double-agent and became one of the Horsemen. After Apocalypse's defeat, Gambit was left insane by the brainwashing, and after a failed attempt to abduct Polaris - in which Gambit attacked Rogue - Sunfire took Gambit with him to a temple in Japan where Mr. Sinister surprised them both.

Remy becomes 

Death

  

and the love story

The Thieves Guild was at war with the Assassin's Guild, but Remy was meant to be the one to unite the two guilds through an arranged marriage to the head of the Assassin's Guild's granddaughter, Bella Donna, whom he had befriended as a child years before. On his wedding day, Remy was challenged to a duel by Bella Donna's brother, Julien. When Remy killed him in self-defense, he was banished to ease the tension between the Guilds.

LADY MASTERMIND

 

    

 Regan Wyngarde is the daughter of the original Mastermind. Originally an agent for the Hellfire Club, she joined the X-Men after being captured by Pandemic. Shortly after, she betrayed the X-Men and joined the Marauders and eventually the Sisterhood of Mutants. 

EXODUS

 

A mutant from the Crusades; a follower of Magneto.

Exodus possesses vast telepathic and telekinetic abilities; extraction of life energy and prolonged lifespan is examples of his many powers. Able to psionically transport himself. Mutant abilities enhance when others around him or he himself, have faith in him and his abilities. Can project his astral form from his body onto astral planes or the physical planes. In the physical plane he can only travel in astral form over short distances. In the astral plane, he can mentally create psionic objects and manipulate the aspects of his environment. He also has reddish skin. Exodus can use his psionic powers to increase his strength and durability. Exodus has considerably strong force fields. Exodus is one of the few mutants that retain powers after the events of M-Day. 

Conclusion

 

Now, let's see what is the purpose of this illustirously infamous team ...

... illustrated with a picture 

and that's it.

And if not the marauders, life does it 

For more info 

check this out: http://www.comicvine.com/marauders/4060-40480/

Now, who is your favourite in this team?

image credits: comicvine.com

UPDATE: Arclight made her appearance in X-Men: The Last Stand, while Riptide had an important role in X-Men: First Class, as henchmen for Sebastian Shaw, and later to Magneto.