I suspect many readers of this blog are as wearied as I am from being bombarded with news headlines about the the Windsor family’s internal fights. It seems like it never ends.
This 11-year-old clip from the Australian sketch comedy team The Chasers pokes well-deserved ridicule at the media’s obsession with the most trivial details about that annoying family. And that was long before the current media binge about whatever the hell is the latest topic in this long-running soap opera.
Today in San Francisco, Elon Musk went on trial because he has been sued by some Tesla shareholders over this Tweet he sent out on August 7, 2017.
Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018
This Tweet that he was planning to take Tesla private by purchasing all the shares at $420 and that he had secured the funding to do so caused the stock price to rise sharply but the deal did not materialize and the stock price plunged a week later when it appeared that he did not have the funding deal.
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We may think that it is easy to imagine empty space. We look around us and remove every item that we can see and that leaves us with empty space. We tend to treat empty space as a cavity of some kind, some region from which all matter and radiation has been removed. And that is fine as long as matter and/or radiation exists in some other part of the universe, so that we can envisage the space between things. But what if there was no matter or radiation anywhere in the universe? Would space still exist?
Albert Einstein in a letter to Karl Schwarzschild on 9 January, 1916 said no.
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I did not watch the highly popular show Game of Thrones, anticipating that it would be too dark and gory for me, but I enjoyed this clip of one of the characters in the series Jon Snow invited to a dinner party at the home of Seth Myers and trying to learn how to make small talk.
The Italian film star has died at the age of 95. She was stunningly beautiful and was constantly being pursued by men including her co-stars. I am sure that I am not the only one of my generation who would go to see her films just to see her.
Mostly famously, rich recluse Howard Hughes, based on some photos that he had seen of her, tried everything in his power to try and persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him, including asking her to come to the US for a screen test.
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I watch a lot of police procedurals and a standard scene is where an experienced detective interviews someone and then later tells a colleague that the person is lying. They say it confidently, and the viewer is led to believe that their wide experience with people who lie makes them capable of detecting when someone is telling falsehoods, that subtle clues reveal it. I don’t play poker but I am told that good players can tell when someone is bluffing by picking up on subtle indicators. There are also apparently TV shows whose central characters are people who are professional detectors of when people are lying.
But this article says that it is very hard to know when someone is lying.
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I hate to see food wasted. I really, really hate it. I will try and eat everything in the fridge, even if I don’t like it, if the alternative is throwing it away. I will cut out the bits of food that are spoiled and eat the rest. It is not that I am cheap. It is just that I think that throwing food away should be the absolute last resort. It really bothers me that so much food is wasted in the US. Part of it is due to the sheer size and complexity of the food distribution system in which the producer and consumer are separated by such vast distances that some wastage is inevitable in storage and transportation. This is perhaps understandable as an unavoidable consequence of creating complex societies.
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It is widely held that mathematics at the highest levels is a young person’s game and that once one hits the age of forty, one has pretty much exhausted one’s potential for any creative contribution to the field. The famous mathematician G. H. Hardy said, “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game… I do not know of an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty.”
This was partly why it was such a shock when in 2015 a paper appeared in the prestigious journal Annals of Mathematics claiming to have solved a major unsolved problem and that the author was the nearly 60-year old Yitang Zhang, an untenured part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who had published only one paper in the past in 2001.
So what did Zhang do? He proved a long-standing conjecture in number theory involving prime numbers that dates back to the nineteenth century. Alec Wilkinson wrote a long article in the New Yorker about Zhang, the theorem he proved, and how it came about.
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I know that prejudice exists. I know that some people carry their prejudicial animosities to extremes. But despite that awareness, I am still surprised when I read reports like this.
A woman was arrested for stabbing an 18-year-old girl in the head multiple times on a Bloomington Transit bus in Indiana.
Billie R. Davis, 56, repeatedly stabbed the teen using a pocket knife while she was waiting for the bus doors to open at the intersection of West Fourth Street and the B-Line Trail at around 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday, according to police.
…According to the police’s review of the stabbing, footage from Bus No. 1777 showed no interaction between the two women prior to the attack.
…A passenger who witnessed the attack reportedly followed Davis off the bus and updated police on her location. Davis was arrested near the intersection of Kirkwood Avenue and South Washington Street.
According to an affidavit of probable cause, Davis said she attacked the 18-year-old for being Chinese.
“Race was a factor in why she stabbed her,” the affidavit read, according to The Herald-Times. “Davis made a statement that it would be one less person to blow up our country.”
…According to the affidavit, Davis had the intention to kill the teen as footage shows her unfolding her knife and stabbing the victim seven times in the head.
The actions of people like Davis baffle me. Her thinking that Asians are trying to blow up “her” country is not what puzzles me. Thanks to Trump and the Republicans whipping up nativist and anti-Chinese sentiment, such beliefs are sadly all too common. But did she carry a knife with her all the time in the event that she ran across some Asian she could kill? Or was it a spontaneous action that was caused by having an Asian person next to her that caused her to whip out a knife she happened to be carrying?
It is all so pointless. Don’t these people do a simple cost-benefit analysis of their actions? After all, killing one Asian would still leave millions of them alive so the benefit is slight. But the cost to her personally would be huge because she is surely going to prison fr a long time.
Following up on yesterday’s post on the small arms of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, I remembered an old clip by Eddie Izzard where she talks about dinosaurs.