Ted Danson learns how to floss

I have written before about my admiration for the comedy series The Good Place. During a break in the shooting one of the actors William Jackson Harper tried to teach Ted Danson how to floss, which is apparently the name of a dance move. Danson does it about as well as an old out-of-it guy like me might be expected to do, much to the amusement of two other actors in the show Kristin Bell and D’Arcy Carden.

You call this is a debate?

Mississippi is going to have a run-off election on November 27 to decide its senate seat. This should have been an easy win for the incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith against her Democratic opponent Mike Espy. But Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the seat to replace Thad Cochran who had to retire due to ill health, had managed to make the race more competitive by various bone-headed moves such as wearing a confederate cap and praising a secessionist general from the civil war, suggesting that suppressing the votes of liberals would be a good idea, and worst of all, saying that she would gladly be in the front row for a lynching. The last was particularly egregious given that state’s history of public lynchings and the fact that her opponent is black.
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Creating the lone wolf terrorist

The investigative public television series Frontline has partnered with the investigative journalists at ProPublica on a series that they have called Documenting Hate where they chart the recent actions of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. Their first episode Documenting Hate: Charlottesville premiered in August and I reviewed it here. Yesterday they showed the second episode Documenting Hate: New American Nazis and you can see the full episode online here.
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The never-ending election

It is now two weeks since election day and four Congressional seats are still undecided as votes are still being counted. Perhaps the most turbulent one is in Utah where Republican incumbent Mia Love is locked in a tight race with Democrat Ben McAdams. The lead kept switching as votes came in from various districts and the latest reversal has McAdams up by just 739 votes out of nearly 270,000 cast. He seems to feel confident enough that this lead will hold up to declare victory when the final votes are certified later today.
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What makes up the mass of the universe?

Most of the known visible mass in the universe (i.e., excluding dark matter) is made up of protons and neutrons. We know that protons and neutrons are themselves made up of yet smaller particles called quarks and gluons. The gluons are massless so you would think that most of the mass of the universe would be quark mass. But that is not the case. In fact, quark masses are a small fraction of the total mass of each proton and neutron. So where does the rest of the mass come from?
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That’s pretty impressive speed work

I knew that in Formula One car racing the pit crews can do things incredibly fast but I was not aware that they could remove all four tires and replace them with new ones in less than two seconds. Watch.

This made me curious about what holds the tires in place that enables such a quick turnaround. Magnetism? Or is there a single clasp that holds each tire in place?

(Via David Pescovitz.)

Backsliding democracies

Authoritarian governments are bad enough but it is disturbing when we have ‘backsliding democracies’ where countries actually choose authoritarian leaders in elections, as John Oliver points out in a survey of the current trend around the globe. He looks at the characteristics of authoritarian societies before getting to the issue of whether the US is one or heading towards becoming one.