Yesterday was his eighth birthday.

People of my generation will remember Billie Jean King well. Not only was she a terrific tennis player, winning a bucket load of titles and dominating the sport for a decade, she was also a tireless fighter for women’s equality in sports and elsewhere and was instrumental in getting the major tennis tournaments to give equal prize money for both the men’s and women’s contests. She was one of the most colorful players in the game. [Read more…]

In principle, there should be no difference between what one eats at the three canonical meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You should be able to easily switch the menus. But in actual practice, the interchangeability only applies to lunch and dinner, with the food eaten at breakfast being distinctively different from the other two meals. [Read more…]

Diana Nyad successfully completed, on her fifth attempt, her 103-mile swim from Cuba to the US. News reports emphasized that she was the first person to do so without a shark cage. David Shiffman, who studies sharks, says that the repeated mentioning of that statement may have given the impression that sharks pose a particularly acute danger when they do not. Jellyfish were more likely to have derailed her, as The Onion notes. [Read more…]

Via Gawker, I read this story and watched this news report.

I then watched an interview with the young men. The whole thing is quite heartwarming. [Read more…]

The serious problem of football players suffering brain damage from repeated concussions is becoming a big issue. The National Football League has managed to strike a deal with the players union that temporarily takes it out of the courts and as hard as it may be to imagine in these days when football is so popular, I think it is only a matter of time before we begin to view it that same way we now view gladiatorial contests of the past. [Read more…]

This something I just discovered and people are being asked to post photos of dogs. So naturally here is one of Baxter the Wonder Dog. After a long tiring day of eating and playing, he likes to make a nest of the blanket on the sofa, curl up in it, and rest as in the photo below. [Read more…]

About twenty years ago I was invited to be chief guest at the award ceremony for the Science Fair at the middle school in the district where I live. The invitation was not due to my non-existent eminence but because the head of the science department knew me (he had participated in the summer program I ran for many years to teach inquiry-based teaching techniques to area middle and high school science teachers) and knew I would be agreeable to doing it as a favor to him. [Read more…]

My university (Case Western Reserve University) has been listed by the organization Campus Pride as one of the top 25 LGBT-friendly universities in the US. [Read more…]

Some of you are having difficulties with the video clips. There could be a whole host of reasons for this but one easy thing to do is to go to the website Qualys. It checks to see if your browser plug-ins are up-to-date and if not directs you to the appropriate site to download the update.

I do this every few months or so.