Within the last two weeks, I have moved from Cleveland, Ohio to Monterey, California and am now pretty much settled in to my new home.

I drove across the country, a distance of 2,700 miles. Although that looks long, the drive was very pleasant and I managed to spend two days with very old friends in Missouri. The trip was not at all tiring, since I limited myself to about 400 miles or six hours of actual driving time each day. I enjoy driving long distances. It beats the hell out of flying.

For the first couple of days of driving, I listened to all nine Beethoven symphonies in sequence, followed by the Leonora, Egmont and Coriolan overtures, something I have wanted to do for some time. But the other five days of driving I drove in silence, without even the radio. I enjoy the silence of driving alone, allowing my thoughts full freedom to wander where they may.

The weather through the entire trip was also pretty much perfect in that it was cool and it only rained for about ten minutes. The traffic was light to moderate with no construction delays. The speed limits west of Nebraska tended to be 75 mph or 80 mph. Once you got to Wyoming, the scenery is spectacular, with Utah being particularly beautiful. I also made a slight detour to see the famous Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California (that was later named after the participants in the infamous 1846 tragedy who are now remembered as the Donner Party) and the view from the top of 7,000 feet was magnificent, with the Donner Lake far below.

Monterey is very pretty. From my living room, I have a beautiful view of the hills surrounding the area. I cannot see the sea, for which I have to drive about three miles. Locals tell me that the sea view areas, apart from being much more expensive, also tend to be foggy, whereas where I live tends to have clearer days. I will definitely not miss the Cleveland winters. As I get older, the risk of having a bad fall on ice and snow becomes much greater.

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.
…

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.

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.

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.
…

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.

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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.

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.

(I am 6 months pregnant)

Me after ordering my coffee:

Stranger at Starbucks: you know you should be drinking decaf when you’re pregnant.

Me: I’m… not pregnant.

Stranger: (horrified) I am so, so sorry!

And that’s what you get for giving unsolicited advice.

— Jax ⚡️ (@Diamond_Jax) August 2, 2019

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.

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.

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.

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.
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