From reader Jeff I received this link to another such episode. We see again a situation where the driver at an event in Virginia that attracted car enthusiasts, manages to make a total hash of parking even though the space available is huge. What makes this distinctive is that her car ends up on top of the car behind and that both cars are very expensive. The offending car is a Mercedes Benz while the victim car is a Ferrari costing around $300,000.
[Read more…]

Death is a difficult subject for many people to deal with to deal with and some shy away from the word itself and resort to euphemisms when referring to the death of someone they know. Chris Raymond lists 101 alternatives for death, dead, or dying, some of which are jocular and used only for the deaths of strangers or people one dislikes.
[Read more…]

Reader G. sent me the link to this video of someone trying and failing miserably to parallel park and giving up after spending more that five minutes, even though the space was so large you could have parked an ocean liner there. I have seen and posted videos like this in the past but this is absolutely the worst I have seen. It is excruciating to watch.
[Read more…]

Growing up I recall people frequently saying that Sri Lankans would take anything if it were given to them free, including a cold. It turns out that Sri Lankans may not be the only ones who are drawn irresistibly to free things. Dan Greenstone, a lover of books and the possessor of many, has a hilarious article about what happened with his wife’s gift to him of a Little Free Library, a concept to increase literacy that is popular in many neighborhoods, where people set up a box in a public place stocked with books where any passerby can take a book and replace it with another.
[Read more…]

People have mixed feelings about their high school lives. For some, it was a pleasant experience, for others a time of torment. Most of us, even those with positive memories, would not seek to relive those experiences, though we may wish we had done some things differently and fantasize about an alternative history where we did not waste opportunities.
[Read more…]

There are a whole lot of new bloggers who have joined the Freethoughts Blog network recently and I feel guilty that I have not been keeping up with them. I just discovered that Marcus Ranum, whom many of you will recognize because of his spirited contributions in the comments here, has his own blog where he has been posting since June 26.
[Read more…]

While the fatal crash involving a Tesla car on autopilot mode attention has naturally focused attention on whether self-driving cars can be trusted, we should not lose sight of the dangerous levels of outright stupidity that human drivers are capable of. I was reminded of this when a few days ago I was stopped at a red light and looked in my rear view mirror. In the car behind me the driver had his cat perched on top of the dashboard exactly between him and the windshield.
[Read more…]

We know that mirrors can mislead by seeming to switch left-right symmetry but we do not expect it to change the shapes of things. But Mark Frauenfelder brings to my attention this fine illusion by Kokichi Sugihara that makes what looks like circles get reflected as squares and vice versa.

Can you figure out how this illusion works? The solution is given below the fold.

[Read more…]

Athletes playing for teams are expected to wear uniforms and those playing in individual sports have some restrictions too. But what is astonishing in this day and age is when those requirements are aimed at exploiting women’s sexuality. The most notorious were the rules for beach volleyball that at one time required women to wear skimpy bikinis.
[Read more…]