Forrest M. Mims III is an award-winning inventor who attends conferences all over the world. This requires him to travel with all manner of gadgetry that contains exposed circuits and the like. Naturally this results in airline security becoming alarmed and he writes about his experiences, including one that ended up with him being put in a chokehold by the pilot of his plane.
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Donald Trump is a strange man, hard to pigeonhole into a simple ideological box.
All of us tend to be more kindly disposed to those who are nice to us and less so to those we think are being unkind. What makes Trump different is that, like in most things, he carries this to extremes. He seems to place great value on what people say to him and about him and as long as those things are complimentary, he responds in kind, sometimes with even effusive praise. But attack him or insult him, and he lashes back angrily. He does not do half-measures.
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Martin Shkreli is the former hedge fund money manager whom everyone loves to hate because his strategy is to buy up the licenses for out-of-patent drugs and immediately hikes their prices. The one that brought him the most infamy was when he abruptly raised the price per pill of the drug Darapim from $13.50 to $700. He was arrested recently by the federal authorities on charges of securities fraud. And there was much cheering in the land because, yea verily, Shkreli is an abominable excuse for a human being.
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Whatever one might think about the merits of beauty competitions like Miss Universe, many, many people take them seriously, not least the contestants from each participating nation. The format is one of round-by-round elimination, leaving just three finalists, which this year were Miss Colombia, Miss Philippines, and Miss USA.
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After the fiasco of the Muslim student in Texas who was arrested for bringing his clock in to school, we now have the case of a 12-year old Sikh boy again from Texas who was handcuffed, suspended from school, and spent three days in a juvenile detention center because of fears that his backpack that contained a built in battery pack that enables one to recharge a cell phone was really a bomb.
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He joins Rick Perry, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal in realizing that his campaign was going nowhere. Most public figures who abandon a race say they want to spend more time with his families but since he has no partner or children, he probably wants to devote all his time to his favorite pursuits such as creating more fear in this country, sending more troops to fight in all the existing wars that he helped start, and starting new wars.
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I have described Ted Cruz as a flat-out sophist and creepy and it is undoubtedly true that he is unlikable except to his ardent fans. But Carly Fiorina gives Cruz a good run for his money on both deception and unlikability. Her campaign team must have realized this because they have tried to soften her hard, grating image by filming a commercial of her with a whole bunch of dogs
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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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They had two sketches last night, the first one reminding us once again of the low-level of rhetoric we heard during the Republican debate earlier in the week. The actor who did the Donald Trump impression was pretty good.
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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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