It is always interesting to go back into history and try to learn the beginnings of the things we are interested in. In this case, we are going to explore the history of backgammon. By reading this article you will develop an understanding of the game of backgammon, discover its origins, different names and uses in ancient times. This wondrous game still develops as of present times and now has become an online addiction of many backgammon enthusiasts.

It is said to be an ancient game originating from Mesopotamia. It is interesting to know that the present-day Mesopotamia is located in Iraq, Iran and Syria. Backgammon is probably one of the oldest recognized board games in the history of the world. It was usually played on wood surfaces and it used stone markers. In addition, dices were made of stones, bones, pottery or wood. Backgammon did not only emerge during the Mesopotamian era, but even during the years BC. Sumerians, Persians, Egyptians and Romans enjoyed it.

Artifacts - Evidence of Backgammon’s Ancient Existence

The colorful history of backgammon can be associated to the kind of people who used to play this game such as leaders and aristocrats of ancient civilizations. There were evidences such as relics and literary books that were excavated from the lands of Greece, Persia, Rome and Asia. Some of these artifacts can be dated as far back as 3000 to 1788 BC. The rules were yet unknown but these artifacts like the gaming boards and dice reveal the vast history of backgammon.

In Egypt, they dug up gaming boards with dimensions of 3 by 6, 3 by 12 and 3 by 10. This game was later known as Senat or Game of Thirty Squares.

In the Sumerian civilization, they were able to discover wooden boards in the tomb of Ur al Chaldees. Found along with it was a pair of tetrahedral dice and this game became known as The Royal Games of Ur. This was found around 2600 BC while earlier in 177 BC, they found a cuneiform tablet containing the set of rules of ancient backgammon.

Backgammon Game during the Roman Empire

As one of the most prolific empire in the world, the Romans also contributed much to the history of backgammon. During their times, there were evidences of such a game named Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum which means “the Game of 12 Lines”. This particular game used leather boards and different sets of 30 markers each consisting of 15 ebony and 15 ivory bones. This game was recorded as early as 600 AD and was famed to be one of the derivatives of the Senat game of Egypt.

As time passed by, Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum was later on superseded by different variants such as using boards with 2×12 lines in lieu of the 3×12 lines. This new version gave close resemblance to today’s backgammon games.

The Roman Empire sent out conquests to different parts of the world and they brought along with them backgammon until it reached Britain in the 1st century AD and was tagged as Tabula, which is the generic name of the board used. This game became a popular pastime activity and was even favored by the great Emperor Claudius. In fact, whenever the Emperor traveled, he brought along in his carriage an alveus, which was a playing board of Tabula. In 50 AD, Emperor Claudius wrote an extensive history of Tabula. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, it did not survive.

The extent of popularity Tabula led to the gambling mania sweeping the whole of Rome. Henceforth under the rule of Republic, it was banned and declared illegal. There was a fine 4 times the stakes whenever Romans gamble and only allowed to gamble during the time of Saturnalia. However, this law was not followed much because of weak and sporadic enforcement.

By the time of 6th Century, Tabula became Alea, which is defined as “the art gambing with the use of dice”. In this regard, Alea is likely the first predecessor of contemporary backgammon though there were differences in movement and starting positions.

Backgammon Game in Asia

The Asians were not far from the trend of backgammon because in 800 AD in Southwest Asia, there appeared a game named “Nard” which was played in the same manner as Alea. Nard also made use of dice in moving markers and was alternately called Nardeeshir, Nard-i-shir and Nardshir. The term Nard was actually the Persian name for a wood similar to the board used in the game. Moreover, this game was referred to as “Takhteh Nard” which means combat on wood.

There was an ancient writing depicting the symbolism of the game and it revealed that this board game represented a year. Each side composed of 12 points represented the months of a year. While the 24 points corresponded to the hours of a day and the 30 checkers constituted the days in a month. In addition, the sum of each opposing side of a die depicted the 7 days of the week whereas the contrastive colors of the set of checkers presented night and day.

The Chinese counterpart of Nard was called T’shu-p’u and was believed to have been originating from West India. It reached China during 220 to 265 AD, which was the reign of the Wei dynasty. T’shu-p’u became popular starting from 479 to 1000 AD.

The Japanese called this game Sugoroku and little was known about the differences among the Chinese backgammon game, Nard and Sugoroku.

In summary, you may have noticed how far backgammon reached the different parts of the world due to the different conquests of the Romans and Arabs. Tabula became known to different cultures indicating that this game was brought about by the conquest of the Roman Empire. Nard was likewise spread throughout Asia due to the Arabian conquest of Spain, Italy during the occupation of Sicily. Nard was quite different from Tabula due to the incorporation of Senat. The only main difference was the use of dice. In Tabula, they used three dice while in Nard they made use of only two.

Now you will definitely enjoy a good game of backgammon because you know aristocrats and emperors used to play this fun game.

In general in the world, people listen to crap. Most people listen to the kind of crap that they play on the radio or on MTV. Most people that like music a lot or have music as a hobby will agree that this music is crap. Well, at least it’s mainstream and that generally means that the people that listen to it doesn’t really care. If you do care you will soon develop your own taste.

Internet makes music more and more accessible. This means that it is easier and easier to find music in any genre which would make it easier and easier to develop your own taste. This is not anything revolutionary or something that I came up with, it’s the Long Tail theory from Chris Andersson.

This should mean that in the future more and more people will think the music that is being played on the radio is shit. We will have a new music revolution and it will crush the big record labels as more and more people will care for nische music and that will demand more artists and a lot more records, a lot more Kinds of records. It will demand a lot less Britney, Madonna or Blink (do they even exist?).

Ok, this blog has been rather below the demands for a serious blog. From now on, the quality will improve, A lot, I promise.

Once, all spam was porn. Most people would complain about the spam but my general reaction was, Wow, free porn. I think the spam today has lost touch with reality. For a while I even used to get great ideas for my stock purchases (yes I do quite a lot) but now. I don’t know if it is my spamfilters that get the rest or if spam in general has changed but I only get russian dating mails. Don’t they know I’m married?

The Busby SEO challenge is a competition where SEO:s try to beat each other at the keyword Busby Seo Challenge. The competition finishes in August and the site on top of the search at that moment is the winner. For more info read here: the busby seo challenge.

The vision begins on a nuclear submarine in outside Martinque a small island in the Caribbean. The Captain of this mighty vessel is the only female in charge of a ship like this. The submarine is one of nine built, they are called Los Angeles Class. These nine submarines are the biggest underwater vessels ever built outside the Soviet Union. With its internal nuclear reactor and a life containing system that renews the environment almost perfectly it can literary stay under the surface for several human generations. Alana Flockins, the captain, is well aware of the exact size of the honor it is to be the captain of such a vessel, especially since she is the first female captain of one of them. The reason Alana became captain is not that the United States finally realized that it was time for female commanders to get a chance at running these boats. Nor is the reason that she was the most qualified captain for the job. The reason is not even that she had a lot of leverage and high up contacts that could make her get the assignment. The reason is that she stole it.

On the beach in the bay that soon will become world famous stands a man with an, for this climate, unusually warm suit. The suit is gray and the man a bit pale so the suit suits him. On top of his nose rests a pair of dark sunglasses and he is humming a tune. If someone would stand very close they might hear a Hey now or a Uhu being hummed. The reason this man, that we still don’t know the name of, is standing on this beach is that he is in charge of a practice drill that just started to take place just here. In 6 minutes 400 Navy seals will hit the beach in full power and the Bay of Pigs will change owner, again. It will not really change owner of course as this is only the practice round, the real invasion is not until Sunday.

Exactly 7 days after the practice invasion of the Bay of Pigs a man is sitting in a cathedral watching a video tape of the mentioned practice invasion. He doesn’t look very happy. What he does look though is funny due to his massive sideburns and sunglasses. He looks a bit like the King. He is of course not the King though; the King hasn’t been around for a long time. The reason that he isn’t looking happy is that the practice invasion seven days ago was a real failure and today is the day for the real one. Everything had f**ked up totally, the seals hadn’t made it up on the beach, the helicopters never arrived and for some reason there was four guys beating a fat kid to death with round rocks in the background on the tape. The man from the beach with the suit doesn’t look too warm as he is standing next to the man with the sideburns even if his fingers are grabbing for a sweat stained collar. This was a f**k up and he was in charge of it. The sideburned man doesn’t seem to think of it that way at the moment, he is too focused on how to make today’s invasion go smoothly. The first thing, he decides, is that they need a whole lot more herring.

Seven days before the man watching the tape seven days after the practice invasion of the Bay of Pigs Alana Flockins is seated at the helm. She likes to sit here in the early mornings thinking of the sunrise, she can’t see it of course because they are 300 feet below. It might seem obvious that the reason they stay below all the time is that they stole the sub and are wanted for that by the authorities. The truth is that they are wanted for so much more than that. Alana Flockins, the nuclear submarine captain, is not only a mutineer and a nuclear submarine thief. The signs are obvious when you see her, her left eye got poked out years ago in a bar brawl in Boston. She lost her right hand in a horrible accident involving a gold bar and a closing bank vault door. One of her legs happened to be cut off just below the knee and is now replaced with a teak side table one. She wears a black patch to cover her missing eye and finds it very useful to have a small hook, she had made out of sterling silver, where her hand used to sit. On her right shoulder sits a bird she found flying outside the lush green coast of Brazil and not to forget on her head rests a triangular hat. You see, Alana Flockins is a Pirate.

She is sitting at the helm all alone; there is not a single person awake except Alana. Normally, on a ship this big, there are always a number of people awake but on the Armageddon, that’s not the case. There is really no reason for people to work around the clock, maybe in the navy there is but if you are not really expecting full out war, why would you need to be careful when you have nuclear capacity. Alana would never fire a nuclear missile, everyone on the Armageddon knows this and the leaders of the world probably knows too, they on the other hand can’t be sure though. That they can’t be sure is what makes it all possible, if they would be certain she will never launch they could just grab the sub. Well, they could if they have some sort of underwater grapnels a boarding dock so that they can board a ship on the bottom of the ocean. A really tricky nation might try to pinch it while they are doing some of their plundering but so far there has been only very limited plundering done. As a matter of fact the few nations that would have the capacity of doing a grab and run here are actually trying to make sure that no one tries to do just that. The United States for example, that used to own it, fears more than anything that it would end up in the hands of one of their enemies and would rather wipe it of the surface of the earth before that happens. They keep a close watch on all the other ships in the area and if any one of them would make a suspicious move the Tomahawks would start raining of the Caribbean. This keeps people pretty much in the positions they are, for good or bad.

Anyway, I ended up buying a Samsung in black. Now I have installed it and I am very happy with both the contrast and the colours, even if the sound could be a bit better. But that could be solved later with the right sound system. Actually, I didn’t really want to have a TV to use for watching films or cable, but because I want it for the computer. If I buy a wireless mouse and a wireless key then I don’t have to use the little laptop screen – instead I could do everything on the TV. So now I have plugged the computer to the TV and I am doing all the surfing that way. I decided to throw away my dvd-player and watch all my movies from the computer as well. Fact of the matter is that I haven’t even installed TV. I will probably stop watching the stupid cable. The only thing that I like about that is the poker. Both celebrity poker and just live poker with pro’s is so interesting. That would be my only reason for watching TV.

Apart from that I find it so annoying with all the commercial breaks – it is so ridiculous to watch a movie that has like eleven breaks in it. The commercials aren’t even well made in my opinion, and I never feel the urge to buy anything they try to sell. Also, I am sick of cables, several screens, and all the little machines around everything. The sparser the technique is the better. So I have hidden the cables carefully, hid the computer and taken down all the stuff that was on the wall earlier. Now I am just going to enjoy the only screen that I have, for both movie watching, poker playing, surfing, mailing and all of that. It feels great!

This is the first in our series of Poker room reviews and it is a review of Pokerloco. Pokerloco is one of the smaller poker rooms in the Ongame network. They have a reputation of having great bonuses so for all you pros and semi-pros it’s a pretty decent place to play.

The playerbase is fairly bad at poker and this can give you a good edge of course. Especially on the lower limits where you can find plenty of fish.

The site and client have that annoying poker green color and it feels a bit old fasion. To me this is something that matters a bit but the cheery avatars make up for it.

How good is it? its a 3 out of 5, try it out here: Online Poker.

Layout:

Oh my, this is a mess. You need a lot of intuition to handle this baby. Every page is packed with blocks of text, mostly adds, that makes it hard to use. It is just to spammy. When it comes to userpages the base layout is so foul it seems to give even the best web site designer problems, I have seen a lot of MySpace pages and about 5 of them have been decent, not a single one would have been acceptable as a real site. The idea with block of text or links or adds filling every square inch of a site just doesn’t cut it.

Feel:

Even though it looks like shit and the first impression is that every person using myspace must be blind it feels real in a way other sites don’t. Maybe it’s just the massive amount of user but I can think of a few other reasons more.

It is so easy to use, in a way, every housewife, pensionist and schoolkid can get an instant website. If you don’t know anything about css it’ll look like myspace-standard-ugly but it’s still an instant site.

You can see what people like, everyone is parading their favourite artist and best friends around on their sites. Even if you’ve never met this guy you know that he is a Ladytron fan and likes to hang out with Mike with the moustache.

Even important people use it, Sean Combs does it, David Spade too, everyone. Or at least some guy does it in their name, but it still feels important.

Useful?

A few bands have made a break on MySpace but that seems rather impossible now, it as turned out to be mostly bands spamming each other about gigs, new songs or different tools for spamming bands on myspace.

For the standard user it might be fun to be on the friendslist of a band you like or get a comment from a good looking girl but when if we are going to be truthful: It doesn’t mean anything, a MySpace friend just means someone you can spam and all good looking girls on myspace are guys trying to sell you stuff.

Ok you can of course use it to keep in contact with your real friends all over the world but come on, a blog or an instant messenger will do that better.

Aceproject.org is owned by a number of international organizations such as International IDEA and UN. The primary function of the site is the ACE Encyclopaedia which offers knowledge on elections and similar topics.

Content

The content of the election database is extensive. With huge resources this site has gathered information on elections in almost every country and with really high academic standards. Aceproject is definately a worldclass site when it comes to the material, but that might be expected with such heavy founders.

The layout

The layout is ok, it isn’t very easy to find your way around the site and it doesn’t look that exiting. I get the feeling that the only priority has been gathering the election information. Extra points for the ease with which you can choose language and that it is available in several languages I haven’t even heard of.

Useful?

Very, if you are looking for any kind of electoral information you can find it here. It easily competes with all other encyclopaedias in the election area and the extra weight of the organizations supporting it gives it trust.

Summary:

Go there if you are looking for information on: election