Branching Investigations

For my previous Flickr Friday post, Kitchen Sicilian, I had a choice between two equally worthy photos. Good thing that I'm running this series on chess and sociology, because it gives me the chance to use the other photo. On top of being a great scene, the photo shown below brings the social implications of chess in the USSR/Russia into the mix.

Yekaterinburg chess players © Flickr user Dmitry Kostin under Creative Commons.

In my previous post in this series, Correlating Chess with the 'Real World', I wrote

Another avenue to explore the connections between chess and society is video.

As is often the case when I start exploring some aspect of chess, the investigation branches into other areas, which themselves branch off. Sounds like chess itself, doesn't it?