Excessive academic pressure

In Sri Lanka entrance to the university is determined by a single nationwide examination that is held at the end of the 12th grade. Students choose a set of subjects depending on their prospective field of study. I, for example, took physics, chemistry, pure and applied mathematics as my four subjects. Since the number of spaces at universities is highly limited, there is intense pressure to study to get in and this leads to a proliferation of things like private tutoring and commercial tutoring centers.
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Reflections on the Democratic debate

As usual, the Democratic debate was far more substantive and featured a lot less childish back-and-forth than the Republican one. (You can read the transcript here.) They quickly got past the whole data breach snafu that had exploded just the previous day, with Bernie Sanders giving his explanation for what happened and apologizing for what his campaign had done.
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How Ken Burns would have told the Star Wars story

I must admit that I am not a big Star Wars fan. For example, I do not know who Boba Fett is, a character who seems to pop up frequently in discussions about the film, and this ignorance undoubtedly puts me beyond the pale. But I know enough and recall enough of the first three films (#4,#5,#6) to enjoy this imagination of how the same story could have been told by this eminent documentarian.
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Meanwhile, on the Democratic side …

… the Democratic party establishment is clumsily trying to undermine the Sanders campaign.

Today is the day of the third Democratic debate. (It will take place at 8:00pm Eastern Time and will be shown on ABC.) We have spoken about the struggle between the Republican party establishment and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and the difficulty the party has had in advancing the interests of its favorites Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Less attention has been paid to the fact that the Democratic party establishment has been doing something similar, supporting Hillary Clinton and trying to counter the strong appeal of Bernie Sanders, especially among the young.
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The conservative fight is now in the open

The Republican primary race picture is getting a little clearer. There are really only three players in the game: Donald Trump (the insurgent who represents those who are angry and fed up with pretty much the whole world but are incoherent), Ted Cruz (the religious and anti-party establishment conservative), and Marco Rubio (the neoconservative and backup party establishment conservative), with Jeb Bush as an asterisk.
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Michael Moore talks about his new film

On Stephen Colbert’s show he discusses his new film Where to Invade Next which hasn’t opened yet and that looks interesting. He goes to various countries, mostly in Europe, to find out their good ideas so that we can adopt them. I had not been aware that in Portugal, for example, they have not arrested anyone in the last fifteen years for drug offenses, even if it is the possession and use of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. He claims that drug use and drug-related crime have decreased in that time.
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Where people like and don’t like to be touched

In our social interactions with others, there is often some touching involved, such as handshakes, hugs, pats, kisses, and so on. Clearly the limits are also influenced by the relationship of the two people and some things that are acceptable with friends may not be so with acquaintances. Complicating matters are gender and culture, with some societies seeking to eliminate contact entirely between strangers or acquaintances. This whole area is full of pitfalls that accompany inappropriate touching and I tend to take the cowardly way out and let the other person initiate the level of touch.
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The auctioning of the presidency

Election observers will long remember the night of the 2012 election when Republican strategist Karl Rove on Fox News went completely off the rails and challenged the results from Ohio. The Republican propaganda TV channel Fox News had called the state for Obama and this pretty much sealed the election and Mitt Romney’s defeat. Rove’s insistence that something must be wrong resulted in the infamous walk by Megyn Kelly through the halls of the studio and down to the room where the statisticians were to ask them whether they were sure of their call, to which they replied that they were 99% sure and refused to budge.
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