Robert Ray Secular Invocation

Thank you Mayor and council members for this opportunity to provide an inspirational start to your meeting.Normally you would bow your heads for an invocation in this chamber, but I am going to ask that you raise your eyes and think about a few things today. When this body comes together to govern, they do so with the consent of the citizens of Oak Harbor. Oak Harbor is a very diverse community with many different views and opinions. My Secular Humanism, which is to say, reason and science ...

 The Difference Between Average and Great Chessmasters

Great players like Kasparov do not delude themselves into thinking they can calculate all these possibilities. This is what separates elite players from amateurs. In his famous study of chess players, the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot found that amateur players, when presented with a chess problem, often frustrated themselves by looking for the perfect move, rendering themselves incapable of making any move at all. Chess masters, by contrast, are looking for a good move—and certainly...