I am one of those people who, once I start to read a book or watch a film, find it hard to stop until I finish it, even if the book and film are becoming tedious. Something really awful has to happen for me to stop. Tedium alone is not sufficient. Librarian Nancy Pearl, who sometimes appears on NPR as an engaging reviewer of books, says that she too used to find it hard to stop reading a book but now she has adopted a ‘rule of 50’.
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Some time ago, I wrote about how the alt-right coalition of fascists, neo-Nazis, and bigots was luring in young people by appealing to their sense of irony and fun, or ‘lulz’ as some say these days, acting as if the rhetoric of hate was not something to be believed in but was being used just to annoy and irritate those who were derisively labeled as ‘social justice warriors’ (though why that term is seen as an insult baffles me). The claim that they were ‘fighting political correctness’ was another shield used to deflect criticisms of this stance.
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In a previous post, I lamented the fact that much of the media jump straight from a glib interpretation of an actual news event to mindless speculations about the future and what actions are indicated. The main problem with that is wrong analysis leads to wrong actions, just like a wrong medical diagnosis leads to wrong treatment.
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The scourge of false rumors circulating widely and rapidly via social media is now well known, with Facebook in the US being blamed for much of it. But in India, another vehicle is being used to spread rumors with deadly results. That medium is WhatsApp, a phone and chat application that uses the internet. It is used widely in developing countries because if you have access to free wifi, you can make free phone calls to anywhere in the world.
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Queues are a fact of everyday life and understanding what makes the length of lines vary and how to minimize wait times is of course an important factor for any establishment that has to deal with customers. One of the things that fascinated me in my first statistics course was queuing theory that dealt with this very question. I remember one particular insight. If you look at any train or subway station that has three escalators that carry people between the platform and the street, you will find that it is almost always the case that two of them are going from the platform to the street level and only one the other way. This does not matter if the street level is above or below the platform, nor does it depend on the time of day. The reason is quite simple. People coming to catch a train arrive at random times and thus can be accommodated with a single escalator but when a train arrives at a station, it disgorges a whole bunch of people at once and this requires more exit capability. The 2-1 arrangement is designed to take care of that.
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Yesterday’s elections in Mexico resulted in an easy victory for Andrés Manuel López Obrador (often referred to as just ‘Amlo’) for the presidency, gaining 53% of the vote. The two significant features are that he is a leftist and that the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) that has ruled the country for most of the last century came in third with just 16% of the vote. Amlo is a friend of Jeremy Corbyn and is likely to make fighting poverty the centerpiece of his policies.
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We know that the Trump administration, so quick to callously separate children from their parents at the border, is dragging its feet on reuniting the children with their parents now that the policy has been suspended. Some observers are charging that the process of reuniting families is more poorly organized than reuniting families separated by the war in Syria. On June 27, a federal judge, fed up with the foot-dragging, ordered the government to reunite all families within 30 days (i.e., by July 27) and children under five years must be reunited within 14 days (i.e., by July 11).
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Here are the main points from a scathing document issued in April 2018 titled Human Rights Record of the United States in 2017. While the report is quite accurate in its description of the state of affairs, what is noteworthy is that it was issued by the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. The report explains in its introduction why it was issued.
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The agility of cats is truly amazing. There is a cat in our neighborhood that occasionally wanders into our backyard when I and Baxter the Wonder Dog are there. The cat, seeing Baxter, will watch him warily. If Baxter happens to see the cat, he will dash towards it barking loudly, as he does with any intruders, including birds and squirrels, on what he considers his territory. I never worry about this because this scene has played out many, many times and there is not a chance that Baxter will get even close and the cat will simply leap over the fence and escape.
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