Man dies in taco eating contest

Last month I posted about the weird practice of food-eating competitions and said that it can’t be good for people to force-feed themselves to excess.

Well, the worst has happened. A man has died while taking part in a taco-eating contest.

Dana Hutchings, 41, of Fresno, died Tuesday night shortly after arriving at a hospital, said Tony Botti, a Fresno sheriff spokesman.

An autopsy on Hutchings will be done Thursday to determine a cause of death, Botti said. It was not immediately known how many tacos the man had eaten or whether he had won the contest.
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Matthew Boylan, who watched Tuesday’s taco eating contest from his seat in the stadium, told the Fresno Bee he quickly noticed Hutchings because “he was eating so fast compared to the other two [contestants]”.

“It was like he’d never eaten before,” Boylan said. “He was just shoving the tacos down his mouth without chewing.”

He said Hutchings collapsed and hit his face on a table about seven minutes into the contest, then fell to the ground. The eating contest ended immediately.

This is not a ‘sport’ that should be encouraged.

The weird obsession of Ohio State University

Anyone who lives in Ohio will immediately recognize the solecism I committed in the title of this blog post. The university insists that it be referred to as The Ohio State University and woe unto anyone who merely calls it Ohio State University. Why this obsession I don’t know. Perhaps it has something to do with wanting to be seen as unique is some way. All I know is that it causes endless amusement and trolling by people who deliberately drop the ‘the’ like I did above. It is not unusual for people to sarcastically place heavy emphasis on the word ‘the’.

But Cory Doctorow says that the university has turned that obsession up to 11 by filing a trademark application for the word ‘THE”. You can read more about it here.

Good luck with that.

The problem with e-scooters

Sometimes the stupidity of some people just amazes me. Take this tragic case of a 30-year old man who was killed because he was riding his e-scooter on an expressway in France. These vehicles are just motorized versions of the scooters we used to play with as children where you had to propel yourself forward by pushing on the ground with your legs. I have not seen them on the streets in the US but they seem to be popular in Europe.

The details that I have highlighted are just appalling.

A 30-year-old man has been killed after being hit by a motorbike while riding his e-scooter on a French motorway.
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The accident happened around midnight on Friday on the A86 at Velizy-Villacoublay, 4km from Versailles to the south-west of central Paris.

The scooter rider was not wearing a helmet and was reportedly travelling in the fast lane when the motorbike hit him from behind. Initial police reports said it was not clear if the scooter had lights.

[Read more…]

High-rise suburb

This is not a suburb consisting of high-rise buildings. It is a suburb that is itself in a high-rise location.

In Djakarta, Indonesia there is a small town of 78 identical two storey homes that is located ten storeys high on the roof of of a parking garage.

It’s Thursday and the residents of Jakarta’s Cosmo Park are out jogging, watering their plants or walking their dogs along neat asphalt roads.

Neighbourhood kids pedal their bikes under frangipani trees and peach-coloured bougainvillea to the pool and tennis court. Apartments, comfortable and modern, sit side by side, with barbecues and toys stacked outside.

Quiet and orderly, it feels like any other suburban idyll – but there is one difference. Cosmo Park is a village in the sky, perched 10 storeys up on top of a shopping centre and car park, a world away from the heaving megalopolis below.

It is a surreal urban bubble, where normal life unfolds at an abnormal altitude. To access ground level, resident drive their cars down a ramp. A tall metal fence runs around the perimeter to make sure no one falls or drives off. Peer beyond the fence and you can spot the city’s landmarks below.

The indignities that pregnant women face

There are many stories of people being mortified when they ask someone, even someone they know, whom they think is pregnant how far along they are only to discover that the person is not pregnant at all. But women say that they have been astonished at how the visible signs of their pregnancy seem to give total strangers the impression that they have license to make personal remarks and give advice. Someone named Jax tweeted her response when some officious stranger gave her unsolicited and unwelcome advice.

Her tweet prompted a lot of responses from other women recounting their own experiences and how strange it was to suddenly find people thinking that their bodies were now communal property.

It is not just pregnancy. I have a friend whose chemotherapy resulted in hair loss, a common side effect. She described how a strange woman at a store asked her if she had had breast cancer and a mastectomy and my friend did not rebuff her but answered yes. She was astonished when the woman then asked her which breast had been removed! That was too much even for my always courteous friend.

It s weird how some people cannot recognize personal boundaries.

Sporadic blogging coming up

I have just received the proofs of my forthcoming book THE GREAT PARADOX OF SCIENCE: Why its conclusions can be relied upon even though they cannot be proven (notice how I manage to insert a plug for it at every opportunity?) and have to meet a tight deadline to check for errors and make corrections as well as create the index.

As a result, I will be posting infrequently during breaks from doing all those things.

Marching band illusion

Magician Franz Harary demonstrates a fun illusion. As usual, I have no idea how it was done. I am assuming that the illusion is legitimate and this is not some CGI fakery.

I did notice the sudden appearance of shadows under the platform at the 0:38 mark but that still does not explain where the marchers came from.

More evidence of drivers with expensive cars behaving badly

I wrote last month about studies that show that rich people do tend to behave like jerks, supporting a prejudice that I have long held based on personal observations. In particular, people who have expensive cars tend to be rude drivers.

There is an example of this from the UK where the driver of a Mercedes Benz couldn’t be bothered to wait in line at a stop light to make his turn, but instead decided to go into the lane for traffic going in the opposite direction so that he could make the turn immediately.
[Read more…]

How to cheat at flipping coins

I had known that some people could call a coin toss correctly far more than was likely by chance alone but thought that they somehow knew how to take advantage of the slight asymmetry between the heads and tails sides in coins. Maybe some do have that skill but others take advantage of an optical illusion as shown in this video.

It looks like it could be easy to learn so beware of betting on coin tosses unless you are the one doing the tossing and thus can be sure that there is no cheating.