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…]
Here is a rather tragic story about a school nurse who would not let a student having an asthma arrack use his inhaler because he did not have an updated medical release form in his file. The school called the mother to come but by the time she did the student had collapsed on the floor. [Read more…]
A man pickets a restaurant when they tell him to stop eating so much at their ‘all you can eat’ fish fry. [Read more…]
I read the works of psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980) voraciously when I was younger. His wrote about how humans suffered from a sense of alienation due to their estrangement with nature and with other people, and that this was a source of many mental problems and destructive behavior because they sought to fill that need by various means that did not address the fundamental problem of alienation. In his writings he suggested alternative ways of achieving fulfillment by connecting people with one another in deep and meaningful ways. [Read more…]
We have probably all seen someone make a rude silent gesture to another person who could not see it. The question is whether something is rude even if no one sees it. In other words, does an act become rude simply by virtue of the intent of the actor or by the response of the audience? This happens sometimes in intercultural exchanges where a gesture or a statement that is not at all rude in one culture is offensive in another. [Read more…]
I am currently attending a conference and so blogging will be a bit more erratic than usual.
When I travel on work, I often eat alone at restaurants. I don’t mind it in the least and, being somewhat introverted, even welcome the chance to be alone after mingling with people all day. I usually take a book with me as a companion, the main problem being that the lighting in restaurants is usually very dim and I have to specifically ask to be seated at a table near a light. The backlighted iPad comes in useful here. [Read more…]
A girl walking along while talking on her phone falls into sinkhole that suddenly opens up. A taxi driver sees it happen and climbs down into the hole to try and get her out. Fortunately she survives and is seemingly unhurt by her experience.
It is really nice the way people take risks to help total strangers in distress. (Via Gawker.)