The World Chess Championship ended on Wednesday when current champion Magnus Carlsen defeated challenger Sergey Karjakin in the first of the tie breakers that consisted of four rapid-format games all played on the same day. In which each player was allocated just 25 minutes apiece, with 10 seconds added after each move. The regular rules under which the first 12 games ere played lasted up to seven hours.
[Read more…]
In the heated debate about mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, some anti-immigrant groups are demanding that they not be given any services at all, including education. Some student groups in colleges are calling for them to be made ‘sanctuary colleges’, similar to proposed ‘sanctuary cities’, that will protect such students from being thrown out of the country.
[Read more…]
I showed a nice cartoon earlier that suggested a good way to respond if you see someone being harassed. I later saw this news story in which people responded pretty much the same way when a woman in a store who was wearing a hijab came in for abuse from another person.
[Read more…]
A new paper by João Magueijo and Niayesh Afshordi has been published that suggests that the speed of light has not had the same value over the age of the universe but instead could have been much higher, even infinite, at the very beginning of the universe when the cosmic temperature was extremely high. (You can see the paper without a journal subscription here.) Their suggestion is made in response to the well-known problem that the universe seems to be remarkably homogenous and isotropic over its entire size. This suggests that all the parts of the universe were in contact at one time in order for that kind of equilibrium to be reached. The problem is that the fastest communication possible is with light and that speed is not sufficient to create that kind of homogeneity.
[Read more…]
There is a weird story coming out of Virginia where two young black men went to a CVS store to buy some cheese and suddenly found that all the store employees had disappeared, as if they had been abducted by aliens or been raptured. They looked everywhere for them and finally the police arrived to join in the search to find that the employees had locked themselves in a back room out of fear.
[Read more…]
The original 12-game series has ended in a 6-6 tie with each player winning one game and the rest all draws. The last game had Magnus Carlsen playing white and observers had hoped he would go for a win against Sergey Karjakin but he seemed to be content to play for a draw after just 30 moves lasting only 45 minutes.
[Read more…]
After I watched and linked to the clip of Nelson Mandela giving Kenneth Adelman and Ted Koppel their comeuppance at an event in City College, New York during Mandela’s first visit to the US after being released from prison, I became interested in seeing more of that event and found these two clips of it. The clips are illustrative of how the US media serves the US establishment. It was more of an ambush than a town hall but Mandela turned the tables on Koppel.
[Read more…]
Cuba is going through nine days of mourning for the death of its long time leader Fidel Castro, whose ashes will be taken around the country before being laid to rest in the same cemetery as Jose Marti, the freedom fighter who is revered through Latin America. Castro is viewed with great admiration throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia and you can be sure that his funeral will be attended by a huge number of national leaders. Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau issued a warm statement of condolences, recalling that his father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, was a friend of Fidel’s.
[Read more…]
In the December 2016 issue of Harper’s Magazine (subscription required) , Andrew Cockburn writes about the constant threat inflation that is practiced by the US government, whipping up one scare after another in order to support the vast expenditure on new weapons system, many of which do not work and cost vastly more than originally budgeted. We had the Soviet Union and president Kennedy’s infamous ‘missile gap’ and then when that threat waned, we had the war on drugs and then the war on terror and now we are in a retro period in which Vladimir Putin and Russia are back as the new scary monster that will destroy us if we do not spend more on fighting them.
[Read more…]