Tom Scott explains what is known as the Two Generals problem in computer information theory, something that I had never heard of before, and how it can have real world implications, such as a recent case where the lack of awareness of the need to address this problem led to a food delivery company sending multiple orders to the same addresses.
I have written before about the Nextdoor website that connects people in your neighborhood and enables them to share information, ask for advice, etc. It provides quite an interesting insight into your neighborhood.
But today, I got this message from a resident.
Free · Free fortune reading based on kabbalah and unique techniques
I took advantage of a free fortune reading advertised on Nextdoor and based on the Kabbalah. Just wanted to say to anyone who may be interested in this service (free or otherwise) that the reading was very spot on, and offered a bit of insight for me to further consider. I did not pay for this service (Kabbalah reading) but will be setting an appointment for a fuller reading in the future. This was quite a unique take on the system of numerology.
All life on Earth is carbon-based which of course makes this molecule of considerable interest for scientists. A carbon atom has 6 electrons which means that it has four electrons in the valence shell and results in it being able to form different kinds of chains and combinations, such as buckminsterfullerenes (often shortened to just ‘fullerenes’, more popularly known as ‘buckyballs’) that consists of 60 carbon atoms in the shape of a geodesic sphere.
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While on my drive to California, many of the hotels I stayed at provided guests with copies of USA Today and the major story one day was a massive lawsuit brought by 800 people against the Boy Scouts of America for sexual abuse, with the accusations spanning nearly eight decades and covering almost every state.
Lawyers began collecting the accounts this spring as they prepared a suit, which they filed on behalf of a client who alleges his former scoutmaster plied him with drugs and alcohol before repeatedly sexually abusing him.
At a news conference Tuesday morning, the lawyers said they have nearly 800 other clients who were abused while Scouts. The suit says at least 350 abusers do not appear in the Boy Scouts’ disciplinary files, citing that as evidence that the organization has not adequately vetted its volunteers and hidden the extent of the sexual abuse scandal.
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Cartoonist Ruben Bolling describes the terrible difficulty that investigators are having finding a common link connecting all the terrorist acts we have seen recently.
James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine is a usually sober political analyst, not given to taking sensationalist positions. But in a new article he writes that recent events have pushed him over the edge and convinced him that Donald Trump is in a serious state of cognitive impairment and that there are only two jobs in which he would not be forced out of his job for what his words and actions indicate about his mental state.
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Anyone who has ridden the bicycle knows how hard it is to learn to do so. I learned to ride in the time-honored way, with my father holding the seat to keep it from falling to the side and running behind me as I pedaled, and then after some time slowly letting go without my knowledge, while still running behind to catch me if I fell. After a few such attempts, I was able to ride alone. The feeling of exhilaration at not toppling over is something I still remember. I used the same method to teach my younger daughter but my older daughter learned to ride on her own, pedaling a bit and putting her foot down when in danger of falling over, until the pedaling parts got longer and longer and suddenly she was off.
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While Donald Trump feuds with the prime minister of Denmark over his idiotic proposal to buy Greenland, over in the UK his acolyte Boris Johnson is trying desperately to persuade European leaders that the UK should be allowed to exit the EU without the imposition of the Northern Ireland backstop. They are having none of it, which should have come as no surprise since that is what they have been saying all along.
The European Union has rebuffed Boris Johnson’s attempts to tear up the Irish backstop, in a coordinated response that appeared to close the door on further meaningful Brexit negotiations.
…The president of the European council, Donald Tusk, accused the British government of failing to admit that its policies would lead to the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland.
…Tusk, who is also expected to meet Johnson this weekend, wrote: “The backstop is an insurance to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland unless and until an alternative is found. Those against the backstop and not proposing realistic alternatives in fact support re-establishing a border. Even if they do not admit it.”
In a sign of the EU’s carefully coordinated response, the European commission issued its own statement minutes later saying it shared Tusk’s view.
It is hard to be funny when you are talking about the massive destruction that is being caused by the indiscriminate use of pain-killing drugs, and Minhaj’s episode of Patriot Act on this topic is only sporadically funny. It seemed like he felt obliged to throw in some jokes since his is technically a comedy show, but his heart was not really in it, especially since he has known people who succumbed to early deaths due to these highly potent drugs like fentanyl, where even a tiny amount can kill you and many users are not even aware that the drugs they are taking contain fentanyl mixed in.
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In a previous post, I mentioned how Anthony (‘The Mooch’) Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s short-lived communications director, is convinced that Trump’s mental state is deteriorating. As if on cue, Trump this week provided him with a huge piece of evidence in support of his thesis. I am talking about the bizarre Greenland episode.
Greenland is described as an autonomous country within the kingdom of Denmark with a devolved parliament. What this means, as far as I can tell, is that while technically not an independent nation, it has almost all the powers of one. It has a very small population of about 56,000, about 88% of whom are Greenlandic Inuit or Inuit-Danish mixed. Its land area is about 2.17 million square kilometers, roughly the size of Saudi Arabia.
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