The Dread Day Dawns

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Austin

As a few people over on Facebook have noticed, today is my birthday.

And as a few people around here will have worked out from an earlier post, this birthday is Officially A Biggie (people tell me).

It is also the only birthday that shares its digits-given-separately expression with an urban slang term for the police.  (That was especially for aficionados of the wonderful show The Wire, whose first series I got on DVD as one of my birthday presents).

The above image, which sums up my feeling du jour nicely, came on a Birthday Card from my mother, who shares my taste for mordant humour.

Now, as I said over on Fb, in my family we don’t really do Big Birthday Bash stuff after the age of forty. I seem to remember having four separate birthday celebrations for that one. But this time, it is going to be low key. A nostalgic curry later, and probably a slightly bigger bash with some of the extended family in a week or so’s time. And no-one is around at work at the moment, so the party there will have to wait for September… Think a bit of a dispensation is allowed at my age.

Of course, I’ve had a nice quiet weekend leading up to my birthday – and been able to enjoy England winning at cricket (second game in a row, yet). Some with birthdays this week haven’t been so lucky – like that young whippersnapper The US Prez, who has been spending the weeks leading up to his 50th this Thursday battling to get a debt crisis deal.

All things considered, I’d rather have my spot than his.

Posted in Family business, Getting old, Grumbling, Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Chess and the battle of the ages

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Austin

I’ve decided to separate the actual chess GAME I played last week, and that I was talking about in the last post, into a separate post here. The main reason for this is that specifically chess analysis-related comments can now go here, while anything else can go on the previous post.

So… arriving for my second competitive league chess match last Tuesday, I was shocked and appalled to discover we were playing a local junior club.

I say ‘appalled’, of course, because no adult player likes playing against junior players. And I ought to know, since I was, throughout my playing days in the 70s, the junior.

There are various reasons adults dread playing juniors in chess. One is that young players usually play incredibly quickly, making it all look terribly easy, while you are desperately trying to kick-start your ageing synapses.

Another reason is that you never know quite how good junior players are (since they tend to improve rapidly in their teens), but they are usually far better than you are told they are.

A third reason is that you are on the proverbial hiding to nothing.

Win the game, and someone will say: ‘Well, s/he was only a kid’.

Lose the game, and you lost to…a kid.

Finally, there is the worry that losing to a player over thirty years younger than you will focus your mind yet again on the topic of ageing and mental decline. Not a comfortable thought when you are approaching your 6th decade. It feels bad enough having to go to research seminars where people bang on about Alzheimer’s, Tau, gamma-secretase, Presenilins and all that depressing stuff.

Anyway, I sat there waiting for the game to start with an odd feeling of sympathy for all my long-ago adult opponents.

And so to the game.

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White: A Elliott  Black: D Bowden 19th July 2011

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nf6

Que..? I wasn’t expecting that! Black’s second move introduces Petrov’s Defence, aka ‘The Russian Game’. When Black played this move, I tried to remember if I had ever faced it in a proper game – and I couldn’t remember a single one. Going to my archive later (!) I find I had it played against me once, in a school U-18 match in early 1976. That game continued 3. Ne5: Ne4:? (..d6 is the standard move) 4. Qe2 Ng5?? 5. Nc6+ (oops) and I managed to win with my extra Queen.

Since my opponent in the present game was a keen-looking 13-and-a-bit year old, I suspected he would have read a book, or possibly two, about what should happen after any standard continuation. So I tried to confuse him with:

3. Nc3 Nc6

– and now we have the Four Knight’s Game, which every chess player has played at least once, and which has a reputation for innocuousness.

Position after 3...Nc6

When I looked through the archive I found, again, just one game from my playing days featuring the Four Knights, though reached by a different move order. This was one of the earliest games I have recorded, played when I was about the same age as my current opponent. I have had the position more recently in one or two games against the online version of the Shredder chess programme.

Which is another story… because in those computer games I was messing about playing the so-called ‘Halloween Gambit’, which is (in this position) 4. Ne5:?! This piece sacrifice cannot really be sound, but it leads to interesting play if Black tries to hold on to the sacrificed Knight, usually with White trying to checkmate a Black King which is often stuck in the centre.

Anyway – I sat there, wondering if I dared to play the gambit in a sort of serious over the board game. What if I lost? The rest of the team might quite reasonably think I had been taking the piss.

Another thing that spoke against daring the gambit was that all my games in this line with Shredder have followed one particular sub-variation of the Halloween Gambit. This is one of the things about chess computers – give them the same position, especially early in the game, and they will often make precisely the same move. But what if Black were to play something different, and that I’d never seen?

Anyway, after a few minutes vacillating I chickened out, and played the staid:

4. Bb5

His next move surprised me a bit too, especially as he played it almost straight away:

4. ….a6

The question here is whether White can actually win a pawn by Bc6: and then Ne5: The answer is ‘no’, but it looked like it would lead to some sharp play. Since the Four Knights has such a reputation for draw-ishness (notably after 4. …Bb4), I decided to have a go.

5. Bc6: bc:?!
6. Ne5:

– which looks a bit like it wins a pawn – but:

6. …Ne4:

Position after 6... Ne4:

The usual 5th move for Black in this variation is 5 …dc:, so that after 6 Ne5: Ne4: 7. Ne4: …Qd4 wins back the piece, though the variation is supposed to be favourable for White after (say) 8. 0-0 Qe5: 9. Re1 Be6 10. d4

[For instance, a game I found on a Russian chess server, D Borisyuk – M Kotsjubinsky ran:
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bb5 a6 5. Bc6 dc 6. Ne5 Ne4 7. Ne4 Qd4 8. 0-0 Qe5 9. Re1 Be6 10. d4 Qf5 11. Bg5 h6 12. Qd3 Kd7 13. Bh4 Re8 14. c4 Kc8 15. Qc3 Kb8 16. Bg3 Bd7 17. f3 h5 18. h4 Be7 19. Rad1 Qg6 20. Qa5 Bd8 21. Re3 Bc8 22. Rb3 Ka8 23. Bc7 Bh4 24. Qb6 Bd8 25. Bd8 Rd8 26. Nc5 Qc2 27. Rf1 Qc4 28. Rb4 Qc2 29. Nb7 1:0]

The equivalent idea after 5 …bc: 6. Ne5: Ne4: 7 Ne4: is ..Qe7, winning back the Knight. I probably should have played this, since there look to be several good continuations for White, e.g. 8. d4 to follow either ..d6 or …f6 with 9. 0-0 and 10. Bg5, or simply 8. 0-0 Qe5: 9. Re1 Be7 10. d4 and 11 Bg5.

I didn’t know all this, though the variations are pretty obvious. Anyway, for reasons best known to myself – probably the desire the complicate and to keep more minor pieces on – I played something different.

7. Qh5?! Nd6

Forced, as after ..Qe7 8 Ne4: the White N on e5 is protected.

8. d4 g6
9. Qf3 Bg7
10. 0-0 0-0
11. Re1 Nb5

Black’s 11th move came as a complete surprise – I was expecting either ..Re8 or ..Bb7. After the game he told me he had played Nb5 intending to recapture with the c pawn after Nb5:, and only after I played Nb5: did he notice his c-pawn was pinned.

12. Nb5: ab:
13. Bd2

I had quite a long think about where to put the Bishop. I was tempted to play Bf4 to reinforce e5, but that would block the Queen’s attack on the f-pawn. Also on d2 the Bishop might be threatening to go to b4.

By this time, I had used about 40 min of my allotted hour’s thinking time, while my opponent had used less than 20 minutes. Of coures, young players are famous for playing quickly, see above, but when did I get to be so slow?

13. …Qh4?

His first real middle-game error, since it allows the White Rook to reach e4 with gain of time. When you are getting a bit short of time it’s always nice when your opponent plays moves that allow you do something obvious without having to think too much.

14. Re4 Qf6
15. Qg3 Re8

Position after 15... Re8

Obviously White doesn’t want to trade Queens – in an endgame Black’s two Bishops might be quite tasty, and White’s small remaining lead in development likely wouldn’t count for much. Anyway, now I saw a tactical trick to force Black back:

16. Ng4 Qd8

– if 16…Re4: 17. Nf6:+ Bf6: 18. Qf3 and White wins the Bishop too, e.g. 18…Rd4 19. Bc3

And here we reach probably the game’s most critical point.

Position after 16. ...Qd8

The Kibitzers in the room downstairs wanted me to play the Queen offer 17. Qc7:!? here.

Position (variation) after 17. Qc7:

The main idea is obvious – 17 …Qc7: 18. Re8:+ Bf8 19. Bh6 and mate on the back rank to follow – or does it?

Position (variation) after 19. Bh6

I saw this far, but was worried that Black could defend the Bishop with 19… Qd6. Actually, simply trading the pieces there with 20. Rf8:+ Qf8: 21. Bf8: Kf8: would leave White a pawn up in the endgame, but I thought I should be looking for something better. I didn’t notice that Black has what LOOKS like a better defence after 19 Bh6 by playing 19…Bb7, when the White Rook is attacked. What does White do now? 20. Rae1 looks good – threatening 21. Ra8: Ba8: 22. Re8 – but Black can play 20..Qd6, when trading pieces on f8 again gives the same endgame, though probably a bit better for White than before as in this version his Rook is already on the e-file (say after 21. Bf8: Qf8: 22. Rf8:+ K/Rf8:23 a3), or perhaps all the heavy pieces will be traded off.

Of course, one should remember that, as the chess saying goes, it is always easy to sacrifice someone else’s pieces!

Anyway, this all looked quite good when we were analysing it after the game, but a bit later it occurred to me that after:

17 Qc7:!? Qc7: 18. Re8:+ Bf8 19. Bh6 Bb7! 20. Rae1

– Black can play 20…f5! giving his King a much-needed escape square on f7.

So is there a really clear win for White anywhere in these variations after Black accepts the sacrificed Queen? There is, the key being to prevent Black from playing …f5 with a judicious Nf6+.

So:

17 Qc7:!? Qc7: 18. Re8:+ Bf8 19. Bh6 Bb7!

.. and now, instead of 20. Rae1 straight away:

20. Nf6+! Kh8 21. Rae1 (threat: Ra8: and R1e8), when the best Black can do is 21… Qa5! 22. Bf8: Qe1:+ 23.Re1: Rf8: 24. Nd7: and in this version White is two clear pawns ahead and should win without too much problem.

Position (variation) after 24. Nd7:

Of course, there is another snag with the Qc7:! sacrifice:

Position (variation) after 17 Qc7:

– which is that Black does not have to accept it. He could decline it various ways, including the simple 17…Rf8, or 17. …Ba6 connecting the heavy pieces on his back rank and avoiding the mate threats that way, or even the slightly wild 17. …f5.

So how much of this did I see over the board? Not that much, I admit. I saw 17. Qc7:, and that there seemed to be a defence against certain bank rank mate with 19 …Qd6… And then I decided not to chance it. Partly this was because I was now down to 15 minutes for my next 14 moves. I decided that if I sat there trying to calculate the variations after 17. Qc7: I was going to lose on time, and played something obvious (though, as it turns out, not that good).

So back to the actual game:

17. Re8:+ Qe8:
18. Re1 Qf8!

The trade of Rooks seemed an obvious way to remove one of Black’s defenders without losing time, but does it help? I had not anticipated 18 …Qf8! – I was expecting …Qd8. 18. …Qf8 puts an extra defender on the h6 square, stopping White from forcing off the Black KB with Nh6+.

19.  Qh4

Position after 19. Qh4

Probably not the best. Objectively White should probably take the c-pawn with 19. Qc7:, though it is not clear that White has much. Black can even play 19 …Ra2: after which White probably has to play 20. h4 to avoid mating threats on his back rank.  19. Qh4 does set a cheap trap, though.

19. … Bd4:??

And just when Black’s resourceful defending had got him almost out of the woods, he makes a terrible mistake. 19…d6 was an obvious and good move, keeping the White N out of e5. Although White could force off the Black KB with 20 Nf6+ Bf6: 21. Qf6:, the game would be pretty much level after 21. ..Be6 22. a3, and with the reduced material is not obvious that White could do anything even with the weak Black squares around the Black King. It is even possible that Black can usefully play 19. …f5. One point about this position is that, once White exchanges his N for the Black KB, the two Bishops remaining are of opposite colours, This means that trading off the Qs and Rs would always leave a very drawish ending.

Sadly, the move Black played simply loses the Bishop.

20. Nh6+ Kg7
21 Qd4:+ f6
22 Ng4

– threatening both Bh6+ and Nf6:

22. …h5

– missing the threats and losing the Queen, but he was dead lost anyway. The rest is easy.

23 Bh6+ Kg8
24 Bf8: Kf8:
25. Qf6:+ Kg8
26 Qg6:+

And Black resigns, as it is checkmate next move.

——————————————————————————————-

Postscript: we were looking at the denouement of this game (moves 17-19 and attendant variations) again tonight down at the chess club, and  it turns out there are a couple of holes in the above analysis. I shall be interested to see if anyone spots them.

What it does show is just how much there is to find in chess positions and variations, even in positions that are not what you would call super-complicated. Which is, of course, why chess players find the game so enthralling.

 

Posted in Chess, Getting old | 9 Comments

Where to put the chess?

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Austin

In which I ponder where to hide my latest, and oldest, obsessive enthusiasm…

I have another of my chess games, played last week, I thought I might post up… but as I was thinking about this, a question arose.

Or rather – two related questions:

First – how many readers of the blog are there are that actually want to see chess games?

[I know of four chess-playing scientists that read the blog, including the two Steves Caplan and Moss. But that’s …four people. I think there are at least three times that many readers in all.]

Second – WHERE should any chess games posted up go?

After all, I am pretty sure non-chess-ical readers would rather not have to wade though acres of my chess games, with only-of-interest-to-proper-obsessives chess analysis, to find the non-chess-ist thoughts in a chess-ist post.

There are a couple of obvious solutions.

[Excluding the most obvious one…]

One solution would be to keep the periodic chess posts here, but badge them with a Stern Health Warning at the top – so that anyone non-chess-fascinated would not be tempted to read them.

Another would be to have a separate page, but still as part of the blog, and post chess posts (or even just the detailed chess analysis)  to THAT page, perhaps linked from the main blog when games appeared and/or when some interesting not-simply-chess question was in play.

[Richard – can we do that? I can do it on my other WordPress blog, where I used to run a separate Diary page].

On the last question there – that is, of chess touching on issues interesting to those who AREN’T chess players – there really are some such that are worth a discussion.  Just off the top of my head, there is the correlation between chess playing and mathematical ability (there are three British chess grandmasters with PhDs in Maths that I know of, and the topic ‘chess-playing mathematicians’ even has its own Wikipedia page). There is, a bit related, the occurrence in chess (along with maths, again, and music) of true child prodigies. And there are some interesting things to say about the ways early computer scientists seized on chess as a model for trying to make a ‘machine that could think’, and how changes in computer hardware have changed the way chess computers actually do what they do – though I think I don’t know enough about computers to do that last one justice.

By the way, if you hunt around, you also find links between, not just maths and chess, but science and chess.

One example. There is a new film out about perhaps the ultimate tragically flawed chess genius, the late American player Bobby Fischer. Fischer’s mother Regina (nee Wender) was a medical student and later a doctor. His long-presumed father Hans-Gerhardt Fischer (the man listed as his father on Bobby’s birth certificate) was a biophysicist, but more recently it has become clear that Bobby Fischer’s biological father was almost certainly Hungarian physicist Paul Nemenyi, one of the many eminent Jewish scientists expelled from Germany in the 1930s by the Nazis. [More on this here, and even more here.]

Another example – probably the most famous scientist who played chess for fun was Albert Einstein, who was a friend of long-time world chess champion Dr Emanuel Lasker. There is even a chess game attributed to Einstein out there on the internet. You can play through it here, though its ‘provenance’, and even the identity of Einstein’s opponent, are a subject of much chessical discussion (see the discussion thread under the game, or try here).

But anyway – none of that really bears particularly on my own chess playing… and it is where to put stuff relating to that that I haven’t decided.

So: views please – from both the chess-positive and the more, errm, ‘chess-negative‘.

——————————————————————-

UPDATE:

Have decided to put the analysis of last Tuesday night’s league game in a solely chessical post, to spare the rest of the readers. To follow later, or perhaps tomorrow morning (PS – now up here).

I actually played a game I like better that my league game later on last Tuesday evening, whilst playing some casual rapid stuff with other people from the club. So here is that one for my chess-ist readers, to tide you over while I finish the diagrams for the league game.

White: AE Black: AN Other Czech/Pribyl Defence (10 min a side rapid game)
1. e4 c6 2. d4 d6 3. Nc3 Qc7 4. f4 Nbd7 5. Nf3 Nf6 6. Bd3 a5 7. a4 e5 8. de: de: 9. f5 Bb4 10. 0-0 Bc3: 11. bc: 0-0 12. Ba3 Re8 13. Qe2 b5 14. ab: cb: 15. Bb5: Qc3: 16. Rfd1 Ra7? 17. Ng5! h6 18. Nf7:! Nc5 (if ..Kf7: 19. Bc4+ wins) 19. Be8: Ba6?! 20. Bb5 Bb5: 21. Qb5: Qe3+ 22. Kh1 Nce5: (threat Nf2+ and mate) 23. Qb8+! Kf7: (if ..Kh7 24. Qh8 mate) 24. Qf8 mate

Quite a fun one – I was pleased with N-g5-f7, and the Qb8-f8 mate idea is also quite neat.

Posted in Blog-ology, Chess, History, Nerdishness, Procrastination, Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Not much more than a decade until the bus pass*

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Austin

*assuming bus passes haven’t been abolished by then (see also a defence of bus passes here).

——————————————————————-

 

In which, in a post-academic-year reverie, I decide not to look forward, and try some looking back instead. So no surprise there, then.

The end of the academic year is always a slightly odd time in Universities. All in all, it is pretty quiet. Quiet in a noise-and-people on the streets around campus way (no students). Quiet in a no-dashing-about-like-a-maniac way (no need to rush to/between lectures/ lab classes/ tutorials). And quiet in a Marie Celeste kind of way (on any given day in July a fair fraction of my work colleagues are away at a conference somewhere).

All this quiet can make for a deal of dozing introspection, as you realise you have just completed another full year of University life. The ‘milestone’ nature of this then tends, inevitably, to lead you to recall the same milestone last time around.

The snag is that this comparison invariably reveals that, even if little else has changed, you are another year older.

Combined with the feeling that the passage of time speeds up relentlessly as you get older, this can be a bit of a downer. Or, put another way, the problem with these milestones is that they can become, well, millstones milestones.

Thus it can start to go from the mere whimsical musing of:

“Gosh – is that another year gone already?”

To the slightly less pleasant:

“Oh sh*t – another year gone. How the hell did I miss that?”

This year, said feeling is stronger than usual for me. The reasons is that I am closing in rapidly on one of those ‘symbolic’ birthdays that one dreads especially as one gets on a bit – you know, those ‘end of a decade’ type ones. If you can’t already guess which one, I can reveal that I was in fact born the very same week as the current President of the United States. We were even keeping pace for a while (sort of) when he was a junior faculty member, but he has since gone on to rather greater things, while I still have the exact same job, and job title, that I had in 1992.

Anyway, perhaps there is something about reaching mid-life (said he, with what you will recognise as uncharacteristic optimism) that triggers a need to look back and ponder the ways you spent your free time earlier on. In keeping with this, some people (like my parents, and me) find it hard to throw out personal ephemera, like letters, photographs, old school reports. tickets from epic family expeditions, and so on. For instance, I still have the US ‘Green Card’ issued for me in the late 60s, complete with picture of my seven year old self. But while one keeps the things, it is hard to connect with the past they speak to. As my mother said to me recently, in connection with such boxes of memorabilia and the memories they evoke:

“I almost don’t recognise that person that I was any more”.

This desire to try and understand one’s own personal history might partly explain why I have recently reacquired some sort of interest in chess, having hitherto not played a game, or even given it a thought, since I quit the game in 1979 in my late teens. I guess it could also be the periodic need, as one gets older, to prove to oneself that one’s brain can still adapt to something new (or at least ‘new old’). About a dozen years ago I took up Spanish classes for several years, probably for the latter reason. And I always admired my work colleague who, having been a committed grind ‘n’ bind and radioisotope type biochemist, went on Sabbatical and learned how to patch clamp when he was already past his 40th birthday.

Anyway, how has this re-embrace of the past been going? Well, results so far with chess are a mixture. I can still play, a bit, so my brain has not atrophied completely. Indeed, I played my first competitive game in 30+ years the other day (time limits and everything), and even managed to win.

That’s the good news.

The not-so-good news is that, after a few casual games with players of different playing strengths down at the local chess club, I can say that I now seem to play about as well as I did when I was 13 or 14.

So is that a cause for satisfaction, or more gloom?

I’m really not sure.

But it can be said that the chess club vaguely resembles a kind of pub with chess boards.

And that can’t be all bad.

————————————————————————

 

Non-chess fanatics should stop reading here.

For the Steves 1 and 2, here is my first shot at a competitive club game from last week. Minimal annotation, as I think the three of us are the only interested parties.

Notes:  White gave away a pawn on move 8, but in return he got some good pressure on the a- and b-files against the Black Q-side pawns. I was trying not to advance the pawns early as I was worried about creating weak squares on b5 or b6, but ended up getting quite tied down. Even exchanges of several pairs of minor pieces didn’t free Black’s position. On move 18 I decided I had to play ..a5, rather against my will, as after 18…Qc7 19 Rb1 would threaten to capture on b6, and if 19…Rfb8 then 20 Ra6! renews the threat and ties Black up completely, with possibly Rb5 and c4 to follow.

20 Ra4?! threatens to put a R on c4, but better is almost certainly 20 Rab3 forcing 20..Rb8, and then 21 Rb5 followed by Qa4 and c4 with a total blockade of the pawns on the Q-side white squares. As played Black got in the freeing move 20…d5, but then went wrong with 22…Rc8 (22…Bc3! and if Rb4 moves then 23…a5) and REALLY wrong with the blunder 23…Qd6 (…de: has to be played first).

White’s big chance was to take on d5 on move 24. Instead, he got confused (we were both getting short of time, me slightly more than him) and blundered with both 24 Rb5 and 25 fe: (de: at least keeps the pawn, so that …Qd3 can be met by Ra3 or Rb3). The continuation White selected allowed Black’s Q in down the Q-file and also brought Black’s Bishop into the game to great effect.

The final error was 26 Bb6: ?? allowing 26…Rb6: ! If White recaptures with 27 Rb6: then …Bd4+ and mate next move, so White loses the Bishop and his position is hopeless.

J Haines (White) vs A Elliott (Black)         July 2011

1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Bc4 Nf6 4. d3 g6 5. 0-0 Bg7 6. Nc3 Nc6 7. a3 0-0 8. b4? cb: 9. ab: Nb4: 10 Be3 Nc6 11. Ra3 Bd7 12. Qb1 b6 13. Nd5 Nd5: 14. Bd5: e6 15. Bc6: Bc6: 16. Nd4 Qd7 17. Nc6: Qc6: 18. Qa2 a5 19. Rb1 Ra6 20. Ra4?! d5 21. f3? h5 22. R1b4 Rc8? 23. c4 Qd6? 24. Rb5? de: 25. fe:? Qd3: 26. Bb6:?? Rb6:! 27. Rba5: Bd4+ White resigns

Posted in Chess, Family business, Nerdishness, Procrastination, The Life Scientific, Universities | 27 Comments

Job or vocation

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Austin

I have recently been doing a bit of live on-line virtual commentating. Strange but true.

I’m not sure exactly why. Perhaps it is another of my frustrated ambitions to be a sports commentator (of which more later). Or an online journalist.

Or perhaps it’s just an excuse for not blogging.  *Coughs*

Note: those who are not chess enthusiasts may wish to skip the next two paragraphs.

Anyway, this last week I have been supplying some spontaneous as-it-happens online updates on the games of the World Chess Championship final eliminator match. The six-game match  was between the Israeli (and former Russian) Grandmaster Boris Gelfand, something of a chess veteran at nearly 43, and and the much younger Russian GM, former child prodigy and rising star Alexander Grischuk. I was following the games live online (chess and the internet turn out to be rather a good mix for this) and found myself supplying “Sit-Rep” updates on my favourite English chess internet forum.

For my small number of chess-enthusiast readers (I can think of three, but then again that’s probably half the regular readers of this blog) here are links to where you can find my comments on Game 2, Game 5 and the final, and decisive, Game 6 (start at the first comment and carry on down the thread). Gelfand’s narrow victory means that next year’s World Chess Championship match will be contested between two players over 40. This has, understandably, been a popular result with chess players over 40.

Anyway, enough chess. Why am I telling you this?

Well, the reason is that in a roundabout way it got me thinking, again, about the difference between having a job, and having what one might term “a vocation”.

To state the obvious: for most scientists who work in laboratories, especially over an extended period, science is more than just a job.

Some express this by telling you science is “their hobby” as well as their job.

Others express their obsession – and for many it is certainly close to that – in a different way. One question I used to ask my friends who had made “Principal Investigator” (PI or lab head), usually in the pub after a few beers, was what they would do if they won several million pounds in the lottery tomorrow.

Would they keep working at the University?

Rarely, if ever, did any of them say they would quit work. Or even work at something else.

A more typical response was from the yeast molecular biologist who told me:

“Well, I’d buy a nicer house, of course. And I’d stop taking any salary from the University. But I’d keep coming to work – of course I’d keep the lab. It’d be great to live off the interest on the winnings and just do the research full-time – not having to please anyone else by doing any teaching or administration. That’d be brilliant”.

Now that, I would say, is what would be called – were it medicine, for instance – a vocation.

Or how about the following story:

Around a dozen years ago now, I attended a FASEB Summer Research Conference in Colorado. These were/are small events (less than 200 participants), a bit like the perhaps better-known Gordon Conferences, and taking place in the Summer in the empty ski resorts of the rockies (and now in other locations too). The Calcium one I attended ran (and may well still run) biennially, in alternate Summers to the Calcium Signalling Gordon Conference.

At these FASEB Summer meetings, like at the Gordon Conferences, it is a tradition to have an outdoors-y activity on at least one of the free afternoons. This activity usually seems to involve water, so at the Gordon Conferences in New England I have been canoeing a couple of times, as well as hiking. In the Rockies the equivalent watery activity was  whitewater rafting, and as this conference was in Snowmass Village, outside Aspen, it was rafting down the Roaring Fork River.

So, with eight of us in a raft, plus the guide, life-jackets on, off we went.

It turned out to be a rather ill-fated trip. Our guide (who was kind of a blowhard, in US parlance) soon managed to get us stuck fast on a big rock in mid-stream, with several metres of fast-flowing, and at least shoulder-deep, water on either side.

“Climb out onto the rock” he yelled “we gotta get out so we can float the raft off.”

Which we did. Unfortunately, his instructions didn’t extend to telling us ahead of time that we would have only a second or two to get back INTO the raft once it was un-stuck.

The predictable upshot of which was that off went the raft, with only half of the passengers in it – leaving me, and three other calcium types, stuck on the rock in mid-stream.

As we stood there wondering what to do, a raft appeared full of folk from a different conference.

“Jump!” they yelled.

Being the nearest to their raft, I did. Luckily I landed in the raft, rather than in the river, and on top of what I later discovered was a molecular microbiologist. I was a bit winded, but at least I avoided the fate of my three fellow maroon-ees. who eventually had to be thrown a rope and then wade/be hauled out to the riverbank through shoulder-to-head-high (and very cold) water.

After all this, you might think we, or at the the three that got a soaking, would have been excused the rest of the excursion – but no such luck. We all, it transpired, had to complete the trip. So back we went in our raft, with our guide, and off we went again.

Our guide sensed that he was not exactly Mister Popularity by this stage. So in true guide-leader style, he decided to get us involved in a game to foster team spirit and togetherness.

“Hey Guys” he yelled,  “I gotta really great game we can play. Everybody has to think of the TWO JOBS you’d most like to do in the world. You know, if you could do ANY JOB. Any job at all. Then we’ll go round the raft and people can say what theirs are. Best job wins!”

“OK – who wants to start?”

Cue silence.

Well, I am known for always being prepared to fill up conversational gaps with random verbal static. [This is known in the Elliott family as “Irritable Vowel Syndrome”]. So I piped up.

“Sports commentator on cricket on the radio“. I said. “Or a cricket writer for the Guardian“

And then we moved on to the next person.

Or rather – we didn’t.

I bet you can guess the punchline.

Yup. Not one single person out of the other seven scientists in the raft could think of a single job they would rather do that be a scientist. Any job at all.

Which helps to explain why I find it so tragic that – as we have discussed repeatedly here at Occam’s Typewriter, and before that on Nature Network – the supply of people who want to do scientific jobs, who have trained for many years to do them, who are really good at them, and who truly have a passion for them, far exceeds the supply of jobs there are for people to do science.

I think I would say that this is the biggest problem I have seen, close-up, over the course of my career in science.

What should, or could, be done about it, though, I have no idea. Perhaps other people do.

 

Posted in Chess, Conferences, Nerdishness, The Interwebz, The Life Scientific, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

More family business

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Austin

Just a quick heads-up that my dad has posted an extended comment (or I’ve posted it for him) on the previous blogpost about his 7th decade of scientific publication.

The comment has some links to more early 60s x-ray crystallography / Elliott history, and also to an interesting book review Gerald wrote of Georgina Ferry’s excellent biography of Max Perutz.

The comment was almost long enough for a post of its own (!), but for continuity I’ve left it with the original post, hence the alert here.

While we’re on the subject, I do often get asked what it is like working in the family trade. I wrote something about this in another comment on the last post.

One thing I DIDN’T mention there was that, when I was a young academic, Gerald used to contrive to come along to any conference talk or research seminar I did that was within reasonable range of Oxford. [I think I may even have sometimes had to tell him not to sit in the front row.]

One such seminar that I particularly remember was in the Department of Human Anatomy in Oxford at the tail end of the 80s. My hosts had, somewhat unfortunately, scheduled my talk at the exact same time that there was a compulsory meeting for all those who were involved in teaching medical students – which basically meant everyone who might have been interested in my seminar.

I therefore had to do my piece to an audience of seven people, of whom one was the person who had invited me, another was my dad, another was my mother’s next door neighbour (a distinguished biologist, I should say), and another one was fast asleep and snoring audibly.

I like to think this is something like the rock ‘n’ roll folklore about doing gigs to one or two bored punters (or even overtly hostile ones) in an empty hall. I dare say Senor Crox/Henry, OT’s resident King of the Mighty Hammond Organ, knows the kind of thing I mean.

Anyway, while I was always pleased (mostly!) to see my dad at my talks, on that particular occasion I was really very happy that he showed up.

One should never dismiss family solidarity.

Posted in Family business, History, Humour, Procrastination, The Life Scientific, Uncategorized, Universities | 1 Comment