This performance by Eric Chien was enough to win him the FISM Grand Prix at an event held in Hong Kong recently. I assume that this trick was done on a stage in front of judges without camera trickery and CGI. But I am not sure if this video is taken from that stage performance or was created independently in a studio. Anyway, it is fun to watch.
On a national exam for year 13 students in New Zealand (which is the equivalent of high school seniors in the US) students were asked to write an essay based on this Julius Caesar quote “In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.” Some students were upset because they did not know the meaning of the word ‘trivial’ and felt that it was too hard a word to be used on such tests and have signed a petition in protest.
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Joost Vles writes about a subject that I have long had an interest in and that is queuing theory. I have noticed that airports and banks tend to favor the single line system but grocery stores go for the separate queues. He points out what should be obvious but that some people do not seem to realize, and that is that a single long queue where the people break at the head of it to go to the next available server is better than each server having their own queue.
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In Mississippi, a run-off election is scheduled for November 27 since no candidate obtained the required 50% of the vote. The contest will be between incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democrat Mike Espy. I wrote before about how Hyde-Smith had already got herself into trouble by saying that “”If [Tupelo cattle rancher, Colin Hutchinson] invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Her opponent Espy is black and given the racist history of public hangings of black people, especially in the deep south, the comment was seen as reprehensible. She dismissed criticisms by saying it was a joke.
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As yet another sign of the blue wave, it looks likely that Orange County in California, long a stronghold of the Republican party, will not be left with even a single Republican congressperson. The latest result called has Democrat Katie Walters Porter defeating Republican incumbent Mimi Walters by running on an unabashedly progressive platform. In the last remaining uncalled Orange County race in the 39th District, Democrat Gil Cisneros has taken the lead over Republican Young Kim and seems likely to eventually win.
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This story has received widespread coverage but I felt that I had to comment on it because these kinds of things infuriate me. Last year, I read the heartwarming story of a homeless man who gave his last $20 to a woman whose car had run out of gas. The woman and her boyfriend posted this story online and started a GoFundMe page to raise money for the homeless man and received over $400,000.
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Ohio is becoming notorious not just for producing horrific murder cases, it also leads the way in how gerrymandering produces results that do not come close to reflecting the voting preferences of its citizens and last week’s election results demonstrated this very clearly. Republican officials have abused their power to draw districts such that all the Democratic-leaning voters were crammed into as few seats as possible, leaving few left over in the other areas. The results are stark, with Republicans winning a huge majority in the state houses while actually trailing in the popular vote.
I have written before about the Byzantine political intrigues in Sri Lanka that has led to political turmoil. A measure of how things have deteriorated can be seen by a fight that broke out in the Sri Lankan parliament when some members rushed at the Speaker.
He pays another visit to Stephen Colbert’s show.
I wrote yesterday about how the incumbent Republican for Maine’s 2nd district Bruce Poliquin sued to stop the second and third choice votes of the third and fourth place candidates from being counted and argued that he should be declared the winner based on his plurality of just the first choice votes, where he had a slim 2,000 vote lead over Democratic challenger Jared Golden. He clearly seemed to think that the 23,000 second and third choice votes would go against him.
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