What grinds my gears

Whenever there is discussion about the burqa, all such discussion is immediately shut down with people putting their fingers in their ears and shouting "choice" and "religious freedom" and refusing to hear anything else. However, the fact is that a Muslim woman wearing a burqa is not a personal choice. It may oftentimes (especially in the west) be masqueraded as a personal choice, but in practice it's not. In Islamic religion and culture, the burqa is a symbol of submission to Islam and Allah, and a sign of purity and modesty. Moreover, not wearing a burqa is in many Islamic cultures a sign that the woman is a prostitute, or at the very least not chaste. In the most totalitarian Islamic countries a woman not wearing a burqa in public leads to punishment. Even in more liberal Islamic countries it's usually taken as a sign of the woman not being chaste, in other words a "slut", if not outright a prostitute. In many of these countries women wh...

I find chess engines, and how they have advanced in just the last ten years, really fascinating. In 1997 the chess computer Deep Blue gained a lot of notoriety for being the first computer to beat a world-reigning chess master, Garry Kasparov , in a tournament of several games with long time controls. (More specifically, 6 games were played, and the score was 3½–2½ in favor of the computer.) Since then, however, chess engines have advanced in major leaps. Note that Deep Blue was a dedicated computer for the sole purpose of playing chess. It could calculate approximately 200 million nodes (ie. chess positions) per second. Modern top chess engines will run on a regular PC, and their calculation speed on such a PC, even when using eg. 4 cores, is less than 10 million nodes per second, only a small fraction of what Deep Blue was capable of. Yet these modern chess engines, running on a regular PC, are significantly stronger than Deep Blue was, and would easily beat it (and even th...