Reader G. sent me the link to this video of someone trying and failing miserably to parallel park and giving up after spending more that five minutes, even though the space was so large you could have parked an ocean liner there. I have seen and posted videos like this in the past but this is absolutely the worst I have seen. It is excruciating to watch.
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Growing up I recall people frequently saying that Sri Lankans would take anything if it were given to them free, including a cold. It turns out that Sri Lankans may not be the only ones who are drawn irresistibly to free things. Dan Greenstone, a lover of books and the possessor of many, has a hilarious article about what happened with his wife’s gift to him of a Little Free Library, a concept to increase literacy that is popular in many neighborhoods, where people set up a box in a public place stocked with books where any passerby can take a book and replace it with another.
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People have mixed feelings about their high school lives. For some, it was a pleasant experience, for others a time of torment. Most of us, even those with positive memories, would not seek to relive those experiences, though we may wish we had done some things differently and fantasize about an alternative history where we did not waste opportunities.
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There are a whole lot of new bloggers who have joined the Freethoughts Blog network recently and I feel guilty that I have not been keeping up with them. I just discovered that Marcus Ranum, whom many of you will recognize because of his spirited contributions in the comments here, has his own blog where he has been posting since June 26.
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While the fatal crash involving a Tesla car on autopilot mode attention has naturally focused attention on whether self-driving cars can be trusted, we should not lose sight of the dangerous levels of outright stupidity that human drivers are capable of. I was reminded of this when a few days ago I was stopped at a red light and looked in my rear view mirror. In the car behind me the driver had his cat perched on top of the dashboard exactly between him and the windshield.
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We know that mirrors can mislead by seeming to switch left-right symmetry but we do not expect it to change the shapes of things. But Mark Frauenfelder brings to my attention this fine illusion by Kokichi Sugihara that makes what looks like circles get reflected as squares and vice versa.
Can you figure out how this illusion works? The solution is given below the fold.
Athletes playing for teams are expected to wear uniforms and those playing in individual sports have some restrictions too. But what is astonishing in this day and age is when those requirements are aimed at exploiting women’s sexuality. The most notorious were the rules for beach volleyball that at one time required women to wear skimpy bikinis.
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Via reader Norm, I got this short clip to an advertisement for a new game called Knockerball.
I am not a big basketball fan and know little about the finer points of the game. In fact, I did not watch any of the games played by the Cleveland Cavaliers during their championship-winning season that ended a week ago. I did not even watch the deciding game 7, preferring to work on my computer while occasionally checking the score. But when I saw that the score was tied in the dying moments of the game, I decided that it was time to tune in and after doing so, even an ignorant person like me realized that I had just witnessed a play for the ages.
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I was doing some yard work in the front recently and on the same afternoon noticed on two different occasions young mothers walking along the sidewalk with their toddlers in tow. As is often the case with children at that age, they were chatting away about all the wonderful things they saw around them. But the mothers were oblivious because they were completely absorbed by their cell phones, staring at them as they walked along.
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