Interests
The personal side of the site — several hundred pages of writing on philosophy, religion, chess openings, astronomy, and books. Topics that reward slow, careful attention: the same habit of mind I bring to database work, pointed at bigger questions.
Chess Openings
Nine opening guides covering the most important systems in practical chess — board diagrams, strategic ideas, key variations, and history for each.
Ruy Lopez
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 — White's most ambitious open-game weapon. Three-part series: overview, variations (Berlin, Closed, Marshall), and advanced play.
Sicilian Defense
1.e4 c5 — the most popular response to 1.e4 at all levels. Covers the Open Sicilian, Najdorf, Dragon, Scheveningen, and Classical variations.
Queen's Gambit
1.d4 d5 2.c4 — the backbone of classical chess. QGA, QGD, Slav, and the strategic themes that dominated world championship play for a century.
King's Indian Defense
1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 — Black surrenders the center, then counterattacks with ...e5. The sharpest, most dynamic response to 1.d4.
London System
1.d4 2.Nf3 3.Bf4 — the reliable, low-theory system that has surged in popularity from club level to World Championship.
Caro-Kann Defense
1.e4 c6 — Black's solid, principled response to 1.e4. Classical, Advance, Fantasy, and Exchange variations.
French Defense
1.e4 e6 — Black accepts a cramped position in exchange for a solid structure and counterplay along the c-file. Winawer, Classical, Advance variations.
King's Gambit
1.e4 e5 2.f4 — the great romantic gambit. White sacrifices a pawn for rapid development, open lines, and a kingside attack. Accepted, Declined, and the Falkbeer Counter-Gambit.
English Opening
1.c4 — the flexible flank opening. Control the centre from the side and transpose almost anywhere. Reversed Sicilian, Symmetrical English, and the Four Knights.
All Chess Opening Guides → · Computer Chess: how engines work →
Astronomy Notes
Notes on night-sky objects — history, mythology, what the science actually says, and backyard observing tips. Each page covers one object in depth.
Ring Nebula / M57
A glowing shell of gas in Lyra — what actually happens when a star like our Sun runs out of fuel. Includes the 1779 discovery-credit debate and Webb's 2023 view.
Pleiades / Seven Sisters
The most recognized star cluster in the sky. Blue reflection nebulosity, the missing-sister mystery, and mythology from ancient Greece to the Pleiades in Japan.
Andromeda Galaxy / M31
The Milky Way's nearest large neighbor — 2.537 million light-years away and on a collision course with us. Covers the 1920 Great Debate and Hubble's proof.
Orion Nebula / M42
The closest star-forming region visible to the naked eye. The Trapezium cluster, protoplanetary disks, and Webb's 2023 discovery of Jupiter-mass binary objects.
Hercules Cluster / M13
A ball of 300,000 stars held together by gravity. Home of the 1974 Arecibo Message — humanity's first deliberate radio transmission into deep space.
Betelgeuse
Orion's red supergiant and a future supernova. The 2019–2020 Great Dimming, its pulsation cycle, and what it will look like when it explodes.
Polaris / The North Star
Not just a fixed point — a triple-star system and Cepheid variable. How axial precession means Polaris won't always be the North Star.
Pale Blue Dot
Earth photographed by Voyager 1 from 6.0 billion kilometers away on February 14, 1990. Carl Sagan's campaign to take the picture, and the famous reflection it inspired.
Earthrise
December 24, 1968. Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders photographs Earth rising over the lunar horizon. The story behind one of the most influential photographs ever taken.
Cassiopeia ★
My favorite constellation. The unmistakable W of the northern sky — home to Cas A (the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way), the Double Cluster, and the Heart, Soul, Pacman, and Bubble Nebulae.
Whirlpool Galaxy / M51
The first spiral structure ever recognized — a grand-design galaxy caught interacting with its companion NGC 5195, with a black hole and a candidate extragalactic planet.
Draco
The Dragon winding around the north pole — the Cat's Eye Nebula, the chance-aligned Draco Triplet of galaxies, and Thuban, the pole star of the pyramid builders.
Veil Nebula
The glowing wreckage of a supernova in Cygnus — a blast wave still expanding thousands of years on, lit in ribbons of hydrogen red and oxygen teal.
Vega
The blue-white anchor of Lyra — once the zero-point of the brightness scale, ringed with a dusty debris disk, and both our past and future pole star.
Deneb
The tail of the Swan and top of the Northern Cross — one of the most luminous stars visible to the eye, blazing across more than a thousand light-years.
Altair
The eagle of Aquila — a near neighbor spinning so fast it is squashed into an egg, and the first main-sequence star beyond the Sun to have its surface directly imaged.
Summer Triangle
The great asterism of Vega, Deneb, and Altair — three bright stars at wildly different distances, framing the summer Milky Way.
Lyra / The Harp
Small but jewel-packed — Vega, the Ring Nebula, the quadruple "Double Double," and the patch of sky where Kepler hunted for planets.
Philosophy — The Big Questions
Four doorways into the questions that never close — mythology, religion, and ideology, each examined through philosophy. One clear voice that maps the arguments rather than picking sides.
Philosophy
Start here — the overview that ties the doorways together: the big questions, the thinkers who shaped them, and how myth, religion, and ideology connect.
Mythology
The Olympian gods and Iliad heroes as a doorway into philosophy — each figure tied to the question it raises, from Zeus and justice to Achilles and mortality.
Religion
How the great traditions answer the big questions, and whether the arguments for God hold up — Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, the problem of evil, faith and reason.
Ideology
Where the -isms come from and what each protects — liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and the social contract behind them, mapped even-handedly.
Books
A short shelf of books with notes — contemplative and philosophical reading alongside the reading lists in the philosophy and chess sections.
Browse the shelf
Titles with short notes on why each one earned its place, plus the philosophy reading list for the deeper end of the pool.
Curiosity, pattern recognition, and problem solving.
These interests are separate from Michael Paycer's SQL Server consulting work, but they reflect the same themes that matter professionally: clear thinking, strategy, patience, learning, and careful analysis.