For most of us, our address consists of a street number that makes it easy to find. But books that are set in England long ago or in rural areas will frequently refer to a house by the name given to it by a past resident, like ‘The Larches’. There did not seem to be any street numbering system and I used to wonder how people unfamiliar with an area found a house other than walking up and down the street looking at the house names or asking any local whom they met.

The lack of the traditional street numbering system is also seen in Japan but there is an alternative system that, while seeming strange to outsiders, has a definite structure that enables one to zero in on the location. Unlike the system in the US where the address starts with the smallest unit such as the name of the person, then proceeds to the house number and then to the street, then the city, then the state, and then the country, in Japan it goes in the reverse order, with the largest unit such as the city coming first and the name coming last. It seems to work well. I hear that Japan has a different way of entering a destination in its GPS system in order to find places, as this video describes.
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The chess world has been rocked with a potential cheating scandal with the world champion Magnus Carlsen, playing white, withdrawing two weeks ago from a tournament after losing against Hans Niemann, and then posting a cryptic tweet that observers interpreted as suggesting that Nieman had somehow cheated.. Then two days ago in a different tournament, this time played online, Carlsen, playing Niemann again, resigned after just one move, delivering another shock to the chess world.

On the surface, one would think that chess would be one of the hardest games at which to cheat. And that was undoubtedly true back in the day when there was no internet or cell phones and chess algorithms on computers were not that good. But nowadays powerful chess engines can quickly arrive at the best move in any situation, so much so that they are better than the best human players. when spectators follow chess matches, they get immediate information on the quality of a player’s moves against that of the chess engine.

The trick then is to convey that chess engine move move to the player. While various precautions are taken to prevent such communication, they are not foolproof.
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In response to my post about how some comment threads can go on and on and wander far into areas that have nothing to do with the original post, the resulting comment thread was a true marvel, an exemplar of that phenomenon, with around 70 posts dealing with such topics as Wookies, Klingons, free will, Batman, nunchucks, and other exotica. The amount of detailed knowledge introduced on some of these topics was truly impressive.

It was fun to read, even though I have almost no knowledge of most of the topics being discussed.

While Sri Lanka goes through major political and economic crises, their sports teams are achieving considerable success. I wrote about the men’s win in the Asia Cup cricket tournament on Sunday. This news overshadowed that on the same day, their women’s team won the Asia Netball Championships, defeating Singapore 63-53 in the final.

Netball is a game played in over 80 countries, primarily by women. It is similar to basketball in that the they have a similar court and ball and hoops at each end where you score goals. It is different from basketball in that you cannot dribble or bounce the ball. The player in possession has to remain stationary, hence ball progression is achieved entirely by passing to team mates, which makes team work and accurate passing very important. It is not a game where one virtuoso player can carry the team. There are seven players on a side and physical contact between opposing players is minimal.
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As regular readers are aware, some of the comment threads to my posts go on and on, with later comments having little or no connection to the original post. This is a common feature of internet discussion boards. Some recent examples are the one in which I referred to speculations that dinosaurs may have used fire. That generated 386 comments, most of them dealing with creationism and evolution and nothing to do with dinosaurs. A post on free will generated 105 comments. Even more surprising was the response to a posting of a New Yorker cartoon that has 102 comments. A mere cartoon!
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I just received two emails supposedly from the Geek Squad, the name of the technical assistance group of the Best Buy store. The first one was from a Brooke Lola who told me that my account had been auto-renewed and that my card had been charged the annual subscription fee of $349.99. If I didn’t authorize this, then they gave me a phone number to call but I had to do so within 24 hours. Then a few minutes later I got the identical message, except that it was from someone named Vernon Jarbine.

I have never dealt with the Geek Squad so of course I immediately suspected a scam and I checked my bank and credit card accounts to make sure that no such charge had been made. According to this article, this is one of seven variants of Geek Squad scams that are currently making the rounds.

The Geek Squad scam is just one example of the widespread tech support scam trend that cost Americans nearly $350 million in 2021 alone, according to the FBI [*].

Scammers prey on victims seeking technical help, or they use the names of recognizable companies (like Best Buy, Amazon, or Apple) to fool you into giving them money, personal information, or remote access to your computer. 

If you need help with your computer or other electronic devices, the last thing you want is to end up getting scammed. So how can you tell if you’re dealing with the real Geek Squad and not a scammer? 

In this guide, we’ll show you how to recognize and avoid the most common Geek Squad scams.

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I am currently in Boston visiting my grandchildren (and their parents of course) so blogging will be light.

Last week, the first trial began in a case that, back in 2016 when I was living in Ohio, exploded into the news headlines, involving a set of horrific murders. In a rural part of the state, eight members of a single family known as the Rhodens that lived in different homes in the region were found murdered, killed while they slept.

The murders were discovered on the morning of 22 April 2016, when Bobby Jo Manley stopped by the Rhodens’ cluster of trailer homes to see her ex-brother-in-law, Chris Rhoden Sr. Entering his trailer, she found the bloody bodies of Chris and his cousin, Gary. Chris’s ex-wife, Dana, was dead nearby, as were their children – Hanna, Chris Jr and Clarence, known as “Frankie” – and Frankie’s fiancee, Hannah Gilley.

The same day, Chris Sr’s brother Kenneth Rhoden, who lived about 15 minutes away, was also found murdered.

The killer or killers had spared Frankie’s three-year-old son; Frankie and Hannah Gilley’s baby, who was found covered in blood, trying to nurse at his mother; and Hanna Rhoden’s newborn. (Hanna and Jake’s two-year-old daughter, the subject of the custody dispute, was staying elsewhere.)

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