22 ing world youth goe championship

The 22nd wygc was just held in Barcelona. It's a pity that I coundn't attend any of the matches, although I could watch the finals realtime on KGS. In the senior category SONG Sang-Min (KR) won against the chinese player TANG Wei-Xing(CN). In Junior it went the other way round and the chinese player LIAO Xing-Wen(CN) won against the korean player NA Hyun(KR). Although many of the regular matches are accessible at the web page of the 22nd WYGC I can't find the finals, which I would otherwise link here. The matches were retransmitted through kgs, so they can be probably retrieved from there. I'm trying to remember the usernames. I think it was "wygc" for the senior final and "wygc1" for the junior final. This needs to be checked.

You can access all the data from the WYGC website and start wondering why you started playing GO so late :)

back from stockholm

Hello!

It's been two days since I've been back from my Stockholm trip and I'm just starting to have some time to write. Things will be very busy for me this week considering that I have to prepare two presentations for ISHPC 2005. We'll be leaving next Friday, but this time it will be a mega-trip to Kansai International (near Osaka). But more on this in a different post.

Stockholm is a beautiful city. I hope to post some pictures later. A great help to my appreciation of the city has been the fact that we got seven days in a row with good weather. That's actually a pretty distorted image of the city but for one I welcome these sort of distortions. Stockholm is very clean and beautiful, and beautiful are swedish ladies :) (footnote: important contribution to male appreciation of cities) To my surprise, there were many many people on the streets. It turns out they have such bad weather that when the good wheather comes everyone wants to go out and enjoy it. I don't want to wonder how gamlastan will look in the winter...

Everything went smoothly, except we should have taken a look at the airport before buying the ticket. stockholm-skavsta, like barcelona-girona, is about an hour away from the main city. Of course there are busses, but things start to get ugly when you acknowledge that your return trip is at 7:00am and you will have to take the 3:45h bus. And it gets worse when you are informed at 0:00am that the bus terminal is going to close and the railway terminal closes at 1:00am. So we were at Stockholm, 1:00am in the morning just walking around normalm until we ended at some place that served free american coffee (well, I guess it was not completely free but we made some mistake and got it free :)

But other than that, and the fact that my credit card was exhausted the day we arrived due to some calculus error I committed, the rest was ok. If you're lucky I will post some pictures from the trip, but now I want to concentrate on a different topic. See next post!

izzu

holiday transfer times

hi!

some updates... I just came back from the Colonia de Sant Jordi, which is a small harbour / beach town in southern mallorca, where my family tends to stay during the month of August. Here is a nice picture of the place, as seen from the Platja d'es Dolç (ie, the beach of the sweetwater)



So, that has been one week of sun. And what comes now? One week in Stockholm. There is something like a 15 degree difference so it should result in a very different type of vacation. In addition, not taking my computer with me this will also modify a lot the activities I have been performing last week in my free time. Among others, I've had time to work a little on my GO engine (I'll dedicate a post later), I've been reading Ishigure's In the Beginning, been reading some Haikus and Zen koans and, finally, I've been practicing a little of 日本語 (japanese).

Well, I'm going to end this post now, as I don't like these sort of update-posts which don't really say much other than hello! I'm alive!, as if somebody really cares. If I'm lucky and our hostel in Stockholm has free internet I'll try to describe a little the city and our adventures. If not, just wait for the 24th when we'll return :)

Until then, just some nice and very well known haikus; just for your pleasure
(both from basho, 芭蕉)

荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川
The sea is wild! The Milky Way extends,
Far over to the island of Sado

古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音
The ancient pond!
A frog plunged-splash!

First Post...

Hello Everybody :)

This is my new blog. For those who are here for the first time, Welcome! Most others may have reached trying to find my old blog Out-of-Order, which is no longer available due to server problems (php issues). Anyway, I never liked running php software on a personal account. Having powerful interfaces to the outside world can be something dangerous, you know..

This is my first post here, and my first for a while as I'm leaving today for two weeks. I'll be in Mallorca until the 16th and in Stockholm until the 24th. It's unlikely that I update my blog these days. However, many people have asked me to document my trip to Japan in September. I hope to be able to update my blog on a regular basis by then.

You may have noticed I have changed the title of my blog to izzumorphed. This is of course a word-play with isomorphism and izzu, which is my usual login (but was not available here...). As someone very involved in science (socially) and arts (personally), establishing isomorphism among diverse disciplines has always fascinated me. If you are curious, start grabbing a copy of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach and you'll know what I mean. There is really a lot to learn and do in the matter of cross-discipline influences (some refer to this as cross-pollination, but in general I hear this term used only referring to similar disciplines)

I have to go pack my baggage now. It's getting late I have not packed anything still.
To all, have a happy august and a nice vacation (if)

izzu