21 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Dec 2023
    1. There will be errors in MESON – those I have copied from books, magazines and the card collections I have access to, those I have copied from the other free online databases and those I have perpetrated myself. If you find an error, do contact me about it, quoting the problem ids (PIDs).

      MESON is comprised in part of card index collections of chess problems and puzzles.

    1. Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 4, 2020Interesting to see this database, which I had read about. In the UK a #chess study enthusiast called Richard Harman built up a collection of endgame studies on index cards, indexed by material and features. He was regularly consulted by judges for 'anticipations' of new studies.1Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 4, 2020Richard died in 1986 and his Harman Database is now in my house. I kept it up-to-date for a few years but it was superseded many years ago by Harold van der Heijden's electronic database.1Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 4, 2020Card indices of #ChessProblem s exist around the World. The White-Hume Collection was split up years ago but some of it still exists. The Albrecht Collection in Germany is now on computer database and kept by Udo Degener.
    2. Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 5, 2020As for the Pirnie collection, not counted it, but I am slowly going through it for my online #ChessProblem database: http://bstephen.me.uk/meson/meson.pl?opt=top… . Also going through several boxes of the White-Hume Collection which I have.
    3. Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 4, 2020The Pirnie Collection of #ChessProblem s is index cards in Clark's shoe boxes and is held in my house. The late JP Toft created a huge card database of #ChessProblem s in Scandinavia and is now held in a public library.
    1. As his work developed over the following decades, Kasparian produced many studies of great depth and analytical refinement. He was a strong player (the champion of Armenia ten times and a competitor in four USSR championships) and it shows in his compositions. In introducing his collection of 400 studies, published in 1987, he described his work in the following terms. "I have paid the greatest attention to the themes of positional draw, mate, stalemate, and systematic manoeuvre. This is no accident, but entirely natural: in contemporary study composition these themes are often being elaborated, they are promising, fruitful and, perhaps, inexhaustible." Yes, his themes may be the familiar ones, but the originality and subtlety of the play give his compositions a variety that seems as inexhaustible as the game itself.
    1. Presumably Genrikh Kasparyan used his card index of chess puzzles as material to write one of his many books including: - Domination in 2,545 Endgame Studies by Genrikh Kasparyan. ISBN 0-923891-87-0 - 888 Miniature Studies by Genrikh Moiseyevich Kasparian. ISBN 978-86-7686-147-7

      As a chess champion, he surely used to to fuel his chess studies and chess career.

    1. It Took Decades To Create This Chess Puzzle Database (30 Thousand), 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9craX0M_2A.

      A chess School named after Genrikh Kasparyan (alternately Henrik Kasparian) houses his card index of chess puzzles with over 30,000 cards.

      The cards are stored in stacked wooden trays in a two door cabinet with 4 shelves.

      There are at least 23 small wooden trays of cards pictured in the video, though there are possibly many more. (Possibly as many as about 35 based on the layout of the cabinet and those easily visible.)

      Kasparyan's son Sergei donated the card index to the chess school.

      Each index card in the collection, filed in portrait orientation, begins with the name of the puzzle composer, lists its first publication, has a chess board diagram with the pieces arranges, and beneath that the solution of the puzzle. The cards are arranged alphabetically by the name of the puzzle composer.

      The individual puzzle diagrams appear to have been done with a stamp of the board done in light blue ink with darker blue (or purple?) and red inked stamped pieces arranged on top of it.


      u/ManuelRodriguez331 in r/Zettelkasten - Chess players are memorizing games with index cards

  3. Oct 2023
  4. Mar 2023
    1. Textmaterials war zunächst ein technisches Problem. Angelehnt an die Praxis des Thesaurus Linguae Latinae wurde ein ausgeklügeltes Verzettelungssystem entworfen. Die gesammelten Texte wurden dazu in Passagen von jeweils etwa 30 Wörtern Länge unterteilt und in hieroglyphischer Form auf Zettel im Postkartenformat geschrieben. Die Bezeichnung des verzettelten Texts und der aktuellen Textpassage wurden in der Kopfzeile notiert. Wo erforderlich, sind auch Notizen zum szenischen Kontext einer Inschrift beigefügt, und meistens wurde der Versuch gemacht, eine Übersetzung der Textpassage zu geben. Gerade die Lückenhaftigkeit dieser Übersetzungen zeigt deutlich, wie unsicher man sich damals noch an vielen Stellen sein mußte. Die gesamte primäre Textaufnahme hatte bis zu einem gewissen Grade vorläufigen Charakter und war nicht als abschließende Analyse der Textstelle, sondern als Ausgangspunkt eines vertiefenden, vergleichenden Studiums gedacht. Dass heute viele der damals problematischen Passagen keine Schwierigkeiten mehr machen, ist zuallererst ein Verdienst des Wörterbuches und belegt, wie dieses das philologische Textverständnis auf ein neues Niveau gehoben hat.

      The structure of the filing system for the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache was designed based on the work done for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae started in 1894. Texts in the collection were roughly divided into passages of about 30 words and written in hieroglyphic form on postcard-sized slips of paper. The heading contained the designation of the text and the body included the texts' context (inscriptions, etc.) as well as a preliminary translation of the passage.

      These passages were then cross-referenced with other occurrences of the hieroglyphics to provide better progressive translations which ultimately appeared in the final manuscript. As a result some of the translations on the cards were incomplete as work proceeded and cross-comparisons of individual words were puzzled out.

      A slip showing a passage of text from the victory stele of Sesostris III at the Nubian fortress of Semna. The handwriting is that of project leader Adolf Erman, who had "already struggled with the text as a high school student".

  5. Jan 2023
    1. More recent ad-ditions to the website include a “jigsaw puzzle” screen that lets users viewseveral items while playing with them to check whether they are “joins.” An-other useful feature permits the user to split the screen into several panelsand, thus, examine several items simultaneously (useful, e.g., when compar-ing handwriting in several documents). Finally, the “join suggestions” screenprovides the results of a technologically groundbreaking computerized anal-ysis of paleographic and codiocological features that suggests possible joinsor items written by the same scribe or belonging to the same codex. 35

      Computer means can potentially be used to check or suggest potential "joins" of fragments of historical documents.

      An example of some of this work can be seen in the Friedberg Genizah Project and their digital tools.

  6. Oct 2022
    1. level 1tristanjuricek · 4 hr. agoI’m not sure I see these products as anything more than a way for middle management to put some structure behind meetings, presentations, etc in a novel format. I’m not really sure this is what I’d consider a zettlecasten because there’s really no “net” here; no linking of information between cards. Just some different exercises.If you actually look at some of the cards, they read more like little cues to drive various processes forward: https://pipdecks.com/products/workshop-tactics?variant=39770920321113I’m pretty sure if you had 10 other people read those books and analyze them, they’d come up with 10 different observations on these topics of team management, presentation building, etc.

      Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.

      The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.

      I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.

  7. Mar 2022
    1. According to Alan Connor’s 2013 book Two Girls, One on Each Knee, it was Mathers who popularized themed crosswords, and he was one of the first crossword setters to structure his clues as gimmicks such as knock-knock jokes and rhyming couplets.
    2. According to Roger Millington, author of Crossword Puzzles: Their History and Their Cult, Mathers first encountered crossword puzzles in 1924, but he quickly grew bored with the “dictionary clues,” or clues that consist of or contain a synonym of the answer, that were popular in American crosswords. Instead, he favored so-called “cryptic clues” that required solvers to think laterally and creatively. Mathers didn’t invent cryptic clues, but he’s considered the first crossword setter to use them exclusively, abandoning dictionary clues altogether.

      Edward Powys Mathers (1892-1939) is considered to be the first crossword setter to abandon straightforward dictionary clues and exclusively use "cryptic clues" to make the puzzles harder and more interesting. He helped to popularize this form of crossword puzzle construction as the setter for The Observer, a British newspaper, between 1926 and his death in 1939.


      Cross reference: Roger Millington, Crossword Puzzles: Their History and Cult

  8. Jan 2022
    1. It’s a lot more work to give people an interesting puzzle to solve, support them with high expectations all the way through them doing something genuinely compelling and interesting with the synthesis (and they know when you’re just BSing them), and hold them to high standards while also modeling the appropriate behaviors yourself. It’s almost impossible with class sizes upwards of 40 and class periods of 40 minutes and most of the system isn’t actually optimized for achieving that anyway
  9. Jun 2020
    1. In many ways, though, mathematicians treat the problems they are attempting to solve—problems that require highly specialized background and sophisticated thinking and technique—in much the way that non-mathematicians treat puzzles.
  10. May 2020
  11. Oct 2019