As if the pandemic had not already given us enough to worry about, we now have rats coming up through toilets via the waste pipes. This is apparently because, due to the pandemic, there is less rubbish around to provide them with food so they are going farther afield in search of it. This is apparently being reported all over the UK but they will surely come here too.
Forget the Four Horsemen. This is far more terrifying.
I noticed that used copies of my latest book The Great Paradox of Science are available on eBay at about $10 higher than the list price set by the publisher and about $15 higher that the discounted price set by major retailers.
Since my book is readily available, why would anyone try to sell a used copy at a higher price than a new one?
I have never used eBay. Is there some weird marketing strategy that people use on that platform that I am unaware of?
I try not to let trivialities get under my skin but some things just do. A few days ago one of those things got past my defenses again. It happened when I drove into a gas station just behind another car. As is often the case, there are two pumps next to each other. If you are the first to arrive, it makes sense to pull up to the further one so that the person behind you can pull up to the rear one and both can fill up at the same time.
But this person seemed oblivious to this basic point. He pulled up to the first one and stopped. I was annoyed at that person for this demonstration of a lack of awareness of the impact of one’s actions on others. One sees examples of such obliviousness all the time in different situations and these tend to trigger my annoyance. I am not one to explode with anger at such things (like the women who attacked a flight attendant) so I did not blow my horn and urge the person to move forward nor did I glare at him to indicate my displeasure nor yell at him. I just looped around to get to another pump island which had the nozzle on the same side as my gas tank.
While he was filling up, I noticed that he did something else annoying, and that was to wait until his tank had finished filling to then do some extended shopping inside the store, thus blocking the two pumps for even longer than necessary.
I was also a little annoyed at myself for feeling irritated by such a small thing, since it indicates a lack of maturity on my part.
I recently posted about how cartoons depend so much on shared knowledge for their humor. But the increasingly fragmented nature of our information sources means that we can no longer take anything for granted. I recall a colleague of mine who had been teaching English for a long time saying that he could no longer depend upon his students having a shared background anymore that he could build upon. One positive reason for this lack of commonality is that the student bodies are now more diverse and the different backgrounds can add richness to the classroom experience.
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When the Guinness Book of Records initially came out, it consisted of information that could settle the kinds of debates that one has with friends about some bit of trivia, like how old was the oldest person who ever lived. But then people started doing feats of endurance (like “How long can you dance?”) or pointless (like “How many people can be on a single bicycle?) just to get themselves mentioned in the Guinness book. I shudder to think how much energy and time people have spent over the years just in the effort to get the moment of fleeting fame of getting mentioned in the book.
But with the internet, this has been cranked up to 11, because now you don’t have to go through the tedium of getting approved judges and the like to ratify your claim. Now you can simply do something bizarre, post it on social media, and hope to become a viral sensation. This has taken off with so-called ‘challenges’ where people duplicate the same stunt. We saw before the ice-bucket challenge (where people filmed themselves having a bucket of ice water poured on their heads) and now we have the milk crate challenge. But this one carries risks that doctors are warning about.
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Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) is considered a pioneer in abstract art. In an example of art-within-art, director Nastia Korkia chose to display his 1932 work Dramatic and Mild in what was once the dingy break room of a Moscow power station and film the reactions of the viewers where only one or two people could see it at a time after standing in line for a long time.
This article describes the background to this unusual exhibit.
Whether it’s the Mona Lisa being crowded by selfie-happy tourists at the Louvre, or perhaps, more recently, a digital, from-your-desk tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, setting is an inescapable vital part of how we respond to an artwork. Capturing a scene in which three disparate elements – the Wassily Kandinsky oil painting Dramatic and Mild (1932), a small room, and an exceptionally fit security guard – come together in the context of a unique exhibition, this short from the Russian director Nastia Korkia invites viewers to contemplate the central role of place in the experience of art.
On its surface, Korkia’s film – eponymously named for the Kandinsky painting at its centre – is an unfussy exercise. It chronicles a small slice of the 2017 ‘Geometry of Now’ arts festival, which was held inside the decommissioned power station-turned-art-complex GES-2 in Moscow. With a fly-on-the-wall observation style, the short unfolds almost exclusively within what was once (and still very much looks like) a small workers’ lounge, where Kandinsky’s painting is on temporary display. However, that painting doesn’t make a cameo until the very end, as Korkia’s focus is on the people and small interactions that percolate in the space.
This article describes how people in some communities are becoming violent in their opposition to schools requiring masks for students and school personnel. What struck me though was the photograph accompanying the article. Notice how the middle school student is stooped over as he walks.
When you hear the sound of an ambulance, you are expected to make room for it to pass. There are plenty of video compilations on the web about how drivers in different countries react to the sound of an ambulance and in some cases, drivers seem to ignore the siren. Most of us try to make way as quickly and as safely as possible, but may not pay as much attention as to whether what we are doing is strictly legal since we may think that yielding immediate right of way to the ambulance takes priority over minor traffic rules, and that we would not be penalized.
But in the UK at least, you can be fined for making way for emergency vehicles if you break a rule. The link gives you the things that you should not do, such as:
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Diving, like gymnastics, involves a lot of acrobatics in the air and it takes place too quickly for me to be able to judge it in real time, which tells you something about how difficult it must be to judge the event. The only indicator I have for how good it is at the very end. In the case of gymnastics, it is the landing. In the case of diving, it is how small a splash the diver makes upon entry into the water. In the Tokyo Olympics Chinese diver Quan Hongchan broke all manner of records with her gold-medal winning performance. Even an ignorant observer like me could tell that she was spectacular.
My family knows that they should never buy me any gifts for my birthday, Father’s day, Christmas, or any other occasion. The reasons are simple. Some gift giving traditions are purely driven by commercial considerations to benefit businesses and I do not want to be part of this mindless consumption. I also do not see the point of giving gifts to adults who can well afford to buy anything they need or want for themselves. I also know that it is very hard to buy a gift for me because the things that I might like are very unlikely to be guessed by even those close to me because my wants are few and highly specialized. I hate getting clothes and books because I know that there is a 99% chance that I will not wear those clothes or read those books.
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