A Chess Mystery

I was in conversation this morning with the writer Joanna Trollope and chess grandmaster, Raymond Keene, at the official launch of outdoor chess in Holland Park. Amongst the topics was Shakespeare and the single reference to chess in The Tempest.

Act V Sc. 1:

Here Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda,

playing at chess

Ferdinand and Miranda by Angelica Kauffman

MIRANDA

Sweet lord, you play me false.

FERDINAND

No my dearest love,

I would not for the world.

MIRANDA

Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,

An I would call it fair play.

What are they arguing about? She is accusing him of cheating and he says not. Can one be right and the other wrong?

At about the time that the Tempest is set, there were two sets of rules for chess: the original Islamic ones and the more recently agreed European rules (that eventually replaced them circa 1475). One of the major changes affected the Queen. In the earlier game she could only move one square, but in the revised version became free to travel across the board as today.

Miranda and her father Prospero had been trapped on an island for twelve years before the tempest, devined by Prospero, that shipwrecked and brought Ferdinand and his father, Alonso, the King of Naples to their door (and the "comedie" that followed).

Raymond's theory is that in this game, Ferdinand moved his Queen as per the modern game, whereas Miranda was playing to the old rules. Thus - neither was cheating and indeed both were right! Mystery solved!

The work of art depicted in this image is and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Flying high - wondering!

I'm doing my "amazed" thing again... sitting in seat 02K of a BA 747 heading home to London after a most relaxing two weeks in Palm Springs. Settled in, with maximum comforts, we roar through the night sky at thousands of feet above the ground and over a zillion miles an hour.

Today, most of us fortunate to be living in the western world take this sort of travel for granted. However it was not always so.

Our driver this afternoon commented on how ill-able the early white settlers in California had been in crossing the desert as opposed to the native Indians. Where one relied on oxen or horses to carry water and provisions, the other moved easily through the hostile terrain from water point to water point. The aborigines and Khoi San people had similar skills to deploy in their native terrain.

A former colleague maintained that aircraft were only kept airborne because the majority of the passengers believed it possible ... I am not quite such a Luddite or sceptic, but I am still constantly amazed by powered flight and the technology that keeps us aloft and me scribbling this blog as my plane hums along.

But, I wonder, with each step of progress that we make as a species, how many yards of instinct and acquired knowledge do we lose access to? How many of us can navigate by the stars or even communicate by whistles, silent hand signals or, for that matter, even morse code? Will writing and reading follow? Will the alphabet that I spent so many hours learning, be the ancient sanscrit of the future and, how soon that future?

A wasted exercise

The tracking by satellite of a wild cougar through California sadly ended with the healthy young animal being trapped and shot. It's only crime was to successfully locate a food source - a part-time farmer's livestock.

I don't deny the need to protect that livestock from predatory cougars (or even coyotes such as we saw in the wild yesterday)... I do though feel more could have been done in the name of science, if not biodiversity, to protect both.

Why collar and track predators if you aren't going to protect the subject of your study? Why do this sort of study at all? What was learned apart from it's ability to cross highways - possibly via underpasses specifically built for that purpose?

The reports and photograph portray a very healthy, wild animal. Surely it could, and should, have been relocated and studied further!

The lack of objection to the animal's destruction brings into question the State's competence to manage, let alone study, wildlife in California.
Photograph by courtesy of: http://www.ejphoto.com/cougar_page.htm