I realized that I have not had a break from blogging for almost two years. Since my daughter will be having a wedding reception this weekend and there will be many friends and family that I will be meeting, I will be taking some time off to enjoy their company.

Regular blogging will return after the Labor Day weekend but I will likely check in from time to time with some short posts and to clean up the spam in the comments.

But until then, here is a photo of Baxter, the Wonder Dog, taking a well-earned rest.

I am constantly amazed at the kinds of things that get made into serious competitions.

In this video, Schuyler Towne explains what this particular sport is and how it is done (via Boing Boing).

The son of a friend of is very good at solving the Rubik’s cube and takes part in the annual national contest to see who is the best in the US. In successive years he has come in 3rd, 2nd, 4th and 5th, but frustratingly has never won.

Here is a video of someone solving it in competition in 6.77 seconds.

What I learned recently is that the contest also has a category where people are required to solve the puzzle with their feet! Here is someone solving it in 31.56 seconds.

Being somewhat of a klutz myself with quite poor small motor skills, I find this amazing.

You have to be a bit cautious about YouTube videos of people claiming to be able to solve the puzzle quickly with their feet or hands. Some of them are hoaxes where they start out with an ordered cube, make it disordered while filming it, and then run the video in reverse. Make sure there is a lot of background stuff going on which unambiguously indicate forward time, and that there are no cuts.

Recently Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, speaking about the Tea Party, said: “They called our bluff and we blinked. We should have made them walk the plank.”

Similarly President Obama said to Eric Cantor during the debt ceiling discussions: “Eric, don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this.”

In both these cases, the speakers implied that they possessed the stronger hand so it does not make sense to say “Don’t call my bluff”. In such situations, you either call your opponents’ bluff or you want your opponent to think you are bluffing and call you on it. To say that you are bluffing and then warn them not to call you on it does not make any sense.

It seems like in both cases the speakers meant to say “Don’t think I am bluffing because I am not.” In other words, the people who are saying “Don’t call my bluff” should really be saying “I am calling your bluff.”

NPR had a story about people who get lost, stranded, and even die in Death Valley because their GPS devices led them astray. After repeated instances like this, a Death Valley Ranger investigated and discovered that the devices were using old maps with roads that had long since disappeared. People following the GPS devices ended up on dirt roads that led nowhere.

I have written before at how surprised I am that people put their faith implicitly in technology. I find it incredible that anyone would even go to a place like Death Valley without at least some backup plan in case the GPS failed. Apart from errors, what would they do if the device started obviously malfunctioning or stopped working?

Just recently I had to go to someone’s home. Their address was on Shaker Boulevard, which is a very long street with a wide grassy median with few crossover points, so I put their street number into Google Maps to get a rough idea of where the house was. I was surprised to find that the location given was two towns away from mine, since I was pretty sure that they lived in my own suburb. So I tried MapQuest and sure enough, it was very near my home. Google Maps had made an error. My habit of being skeptical and checking saved me from wasting time.

I also recently drove to a distant town for a wedding party and as is my practice before I left got directions from Google Maps or MapQuest and compared it with a physical map. But when I got to that town, construction had closed off many of the streets that I was supposed to go on. This did not bother me because I had a map and quickly found an alternate route to my hotel.

I don’t have GPS but was wondering what it would do in situations where its directions cannot be followed due to various reasons. For example, for people traveling in Death Valley, if they sense that the dirt road they are asked to go on is a mistake, what options do they have? Does anyone know?

This week marked the 40th anniversary of the infamous experiment that showed how quickly people can turn into brutes when given unchecked power over someone else.

The video in the link is worth watching for its interviews with some of the original participants.

One of the most sickening cases of recent times was that of a Pennsylvania judge getting bribes from a builder of juvenile prisons, in exchange for which the judge sent thousands of children, many of them first-time offenders convicted of minor crimes and some as young as 10, to the private jails.

About 4,000 of those convictions have now been tossed aside because he violated the constitutional rights of the accused, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. The judge was portrayed as not only corrupt but as “vicious and mean-spirited” who “verbally abused and cruelly mocked” the children whom he sent to jail.

His trial has ended with the judge being sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Another judge accused of a similar crime has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

Some of you may have read about a study that supposedly showed that people who used Internet Explore had lower IQs than those who use other web browsers. The hoax fooled many major news outlets like the BBC, which picked up and reported on it.

The hoax’s perpetrators explain why they did it and their surprise that so many people did not seem to question the results, as if it were fairly common knowledge that IE users were stupid. They listed eight things that should have quickly indicated to people, especially reporters, that the story was fake.

Christopher Budd explores what the widespread and uncritical acceptance of this hoax story might tell us about ourselves and the media.

Yesterday, August 6th was the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web, which was built on the foundation of the much older internet. The internet was the name given to the network of linked computers around the globe that was used in the early days primarily by research institutions to transfer data and send email.

The World Wide Web was a radical advance created by Tim Berners-Lee when he standardized the three protocols that now enable users to easily put up information on servers in a manner (using HTML) that other users can use their web browsers to find because of its unique address (the familiar URL), and then transfer that information from the remote servers to their own computers (using HTTP).

The internet and the World Wide Web certainly are the biggest revolutions in my lifetime, the one thing that I simply cannot imagine life without.

It is odd how society decides that some things are offensive. For example, raising your index finger is fine. Athletes often point to the heavens after a good play to thank their god for taking time out from his busy schedule to help them out. But the third finger pointing to the heavens is considered such a dire insult that it can result in murderous fury.

We know that certain words are not allowed on broadcast television. But when I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, they bleep out these words too, even though those shows are on cable and I watch them online.

But what surprised me is that when the people on these shows raise the third finger, it is pixelated. Despite the fact that many of the comedic segments on the show involve gestures that have obvious similarities to sexual acts and are not pixelated, ‘giving the finger’ is seen as so toxic that it gets special treatment.