Apparently it is not uncommon for Russian car owners to mount cameras on their dashboards to record everything as they drive along. This makes for some remarkable videos and someone has made an interesting compilation.
It struck me that such videos of what an accident actually looks like might make good viewing at driver training schools, and be quite persuasive about the importance of defensive driving.
Just two days after my post on the variations on the Nigerian 419 scam, I got the following comment that gave me the good news that the criminal syndicates behind this fraud have been captured and that I am now eligible to get $50,000.00 to compensate me for my trouble..
Here’s the comment that I dispatched to the spam folder: [Read more…]
Today is Father’s Day.
In our family, I resolutely discourage celebration of Father’s Day, seeing it as a purely marketing gimmick to get people to buy useless stuff. I have said this so strongly that my children know not to give me a gift or even send a card and that it is perfectly fine by me if they forget it altogether and not even wish me on the phone, since I too usually forget it until I read the newspaper comics for that day, since some cartoonists use it as a theme, often in sappy ways. [Read more…]
I am surprised at the fascination that Americans have with food and the number of my friends and acquaintances who avidly watch cooking shows. Food is one of the great pleasures in life and I like it as much as the next person but watching it get made carries with it as much interest as watching a carpenter make a cabinet. Once you have admired the skill of the expert, interest wanes, at least for me. I would never have guessed that one day there would be entire TV channels devoted to just food. [Read more…]
A new book by Ken Segall titled Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success describes the introduction in 1998 of the iMac, the computer that anchored Apple’s comeback. Here is a passage from an excerpt of the book. [Read more…]
Some interesting reflections from a professional safecracker who works on the right side of the law, helping people and companies that have inadvertently locked themselves out of their own safes. It turns out that some vaults in banks have a ‘time lock’ that once set and the door locked, only unlocks the vault once the required time has elapsed. Such a device caused a panic when a bank executive locked her own child inside the vault. [Read more…]
A couple of years ago, I wrote about my inability to understand the appeal of the Spelling Bee competition. It seemed to me to be not worth the enormous amount of time that people expend on it. A recent NPR report examines the extraordinary success of the ethnic South Asian community in this contest. [Read more…]