Costa Rica Chess

Chess is a recreational and competitive game for two players. Sometimes called Western Chess or International Chess to distinguish it from its predecessors and other chess variants, the current form of the game emerged in Southern Europe during the second half of the 15th century after evolving from similar, much older games of Indian and Persian origin. Today, chess is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide in clubs, online, by correspondence, in tournaments and informally.

The game is played on a square chequered chessboard with 64 squares. At the start, each player (one controlling the white pieces, the other controlling the black pieces) controls sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king, whereby the king is under immediate attack (in "check") and there is no way to remove it from attack on the next move.

The tradition of organized competitive chess started in the sixteenth century. The first official World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his title in 1886; Viswanathan Anand is the current World Champion. Theoreticians have developed extensive chess strategies and tactics since the game's inception. Aspects of art are found in chess composition.

One of the goals of early computer scientists was to create a chess-playing machine, and today's chess is deeply influenced by the abilities of current chess programs and by the possibility to play online. In 1997, a match between Garry Kasparov, then World Champion, and a computer proved for the first time that machines are able to beat even the strongest human players.

www.gameknot.com lurhahs

Film - Costa Rica Production Services

Costa Rica is a remarkable destination for film, video and photoshoots. As a tropical destination, Costa Rica offers an incredible amount of diversity in a country the size of West Virginia. Solitary beaches, majestic volcanoes, lush rain forest, and spectacular waterfalls are all easily accessible. Costa Rica's long tradition in eco-tourism and conservation has promoted the development of an impressive amount of hotel infrastructure in rural areas making it easy to access and work in remote areas of the country that offer the natural and preserved locations that filmmakers and productions seek in a tropical location.

It worked for directors Ridley Scott, Frank Marshall and Robert Rodriguez in their search for New World locations, the Congo, and a tropical paradise. Costa Rica can easily be labeled the best tropical film location closest to the United States facilitating inexpensive travel for crew and equipment as opposed to going further south or to Asia.

Although Costa Rica has no formal film commission the government, through several different agencies, has always been very supportive of film activities and production in Costa Rica. Non-union Costa Rican film crews, no minimums on foreign crews, competitive rates on rooms, and easy international access offered by all major US airline carriers make Costa Rica a location destination you should consider for your next film and stills project.

Costa Rica World Cup Soccer Profile

Ticos stay on target(excerpt from fifaworldcup.yahoo.com)

The rising stars of the North, Central American and Caribbean Zone, Costa Rica are now without question one of the most feared teams in the region. This reputation was confirmed in 2002 when the Ticos not only finished top of the final continental qualifying group - by a full six points after suffering only one loss in 10 matches - but also became the first nation ever to defeat Mexico at home in a FIFA World Cup qualifier.
This momentum led them with high hopes into the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan where they performed admirably, beating China and drawing eventual semi-finalists Turkey before falling to a rampant Brazil 2-5 in one of the most enthralling matches of the finals. They went no further than the group stage thanks only to goal difference, but there was no questioning their top-notch skills or attacking verve.

This capable result was not enough for demanding coach Alexander Guimaraes, who left after the finals and was eventually replaced by former U.S. coach Steve Sampson –though his tenure was not to last long.
The Ticos also had a storied, if short, FIFA World Cup history even before the turn of the new millennium. Their only other appearance at the finals was in 1990 where they beat Scotland, lost to Brazil, and then came from behind to defeat Sweden on Hernan Medford's dramatic late strike. This sent them into the Round of 16, where the Central Americans were brushed aside 4-1 by Czechoslovakia, but not before a nation's football optimism was rightly roused.

Qualifying for Germany 2006 has gone according to plan, though not altogether smoothly for Costa Rica. Steve Sampson was sacked as coach in June of 2004 after some stunningly bad results to start off the campaign, and Jorge Luis Pinto has only just managed to right the ship. After losing their first two qualifiers in the semi-final round to Honduras and Guatemala, the Ticos rebounded to actually finish top of Group 2.
They will hope to be more consistent in the final hexagonal group -- where they are expected to claim one of the three automatic trips to Germany 2006.

Debunking the "Mystery" of the Stone Balls

The stone balls of Costa Rica have been the object of pseudoscientific speculations since the publication of Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods in 1971. More recently, they have gained renewed attention as the result of books such as Atlantis in America: Navigators of the Ancient World, by Ivar Zapp and George Erikson (Adventures Unlimited Press, 1998), and The Atlantis Blueprint: Unlocking the Ancient Mysteries of a Long-Lost Civilization, by Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath (Delacorte Press, 2001). These authors have been featured on television, radio, magazines, and web pages, where they do an incredible disservice to the public by misrepresenting themselves and the state of actual knowledge about these objects.

Although some of these authors are often represented as having "discovered" these objects, the fact is that they have been known to scientists since they first came to light during agricultural activities by the United Fruit Company in 1940. Archaeological investigation of the stone balls began shortly thereafter, with the first scholarly publication about them appearing in 1943. They are hardly a new discovery, nor are they especially mysterious. In fact, archaeological excavations undertaken at sites with stone balls in the 1950s found them to be associated with pottery and other materials typical of the Pre-Columbian cultures of southern Costa Rica. Whatever "mystery" exists has more to do with loss of information due to the destruction of the balls and their archaeological contexts than lost continents, ancient astronauts, or transoceanic voyages.

Hundreds of stone balls have been documented in Costa Rica, ranging in size from a few centimeters to over two meters in diameter. Almost all of them are made of granodiorite, a hard, igneous stone. These objects are not natural in origin, unlike the stone balls in Jalisco, Mexico that were described in a 1965 National Geographic article. Rather, they are monolithic sculptures made by human hands.

The balls have been endangered since the moment of their discovery. Many have been destroyed, dynamited by treasure hunters or cracked and broken by agricultural activities. At the time of a major study undertaken in the 1950s, fifty balls were recorded as being in situ. Today, only a handful are known to be in their original locations.