The rise and fall of Malaysian chess blogs

First was a blogger called Andrew and he started a chess blog called GilaChess
Later a fellow called Hairul came along. Hairul was born Malaysian but he always wanted to be a Russian because Russians are so good in chess. So he called his blog Hairulov.

DAT Chess Centre came along and very promising at first. Even Andrew started silently contributing to this blog. Veteran writer Lim Chong started a series of articles "Chess Overboard".

But today all these blogs are totally irrelevant now. All they can do is provide news and tournament announcement and results. How many times do we want to read the same news?

They are now overtaken by others below.

Chess is Chess started by first Malaysian International Master Jimmy Liew. Sees things most others miss and tell it like it is.

Malaysian Chess - At It's Best? by someone calling himself Rationality. Everybody wondors who he is. Write with a superior attitude, that pisses others off. Then you start thinking...ya maybe he was right.

Chess Ninja is a very promising blog started by another anonymous blogger. Seems to be started after he/she got fed up with First GM and started replying to First GM in this blog.

First GM is started by Raymond Siew. He calls himself a mind coach and got into chess because his son is a promising junior. Easily one of the most prolific bloggers after Chess is Chess. Most of the time, only he himself understands what he is writing.

2010 Chess Odyssey by someone called Ilham. He stays away from all controversy and writes entertaining, informative and sometimes funny (like this one on Malaysian last round match against Bahrain which he described musically!)

The rest of the blogs are dead or of no importance.

Entanglement

When we delve into the quantum world, everything that we believe to be real is no longer true and logic goes right out the window.

Quantum entanglement describes the way two separate particles behave as though they are connected no matter how far apart they are. Speed of light is no a limitation so two particles that are entangled may be separated by millions of miles and yet able to instantly interact with each other.

Eventually we might be able to build super-computers that are many times faster than the fastest computers that exists today, using entanglement.

Schrödinger's cat

I first came across Schrödinger's cat when I picked up a book while waiting at a friend's house. This was a thought experiment proposed by Erwin Schrödinger, a theoretical physicist and one of the fathers of quantum mechanics.

A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with a device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat) containing a tiny bit of radioactive substance. There is equal probability that the material will decay. If it does, the cat is instantaneously killed by poison. Schrödinger proposed that the cat is neither dead nor alive until an observer opens the box and sees the cat as dead or alive.

That is, the act of observing determines if the cat is dead or alive. There is no separation of the observer and what is observed.

Eventually I started reading about quantum mechanics and string theory. String theory evolved into the M-Theory which requires the existence of eleven dimensions, hence the name of this blog.