Meanwhile in the chess world …

The championship match between Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana has so for resulted in eleven straight draws, breaking the earlier record of eight straight draws before one person won. The 12th and last regular game will be played on Monday. If that game also ends in a draw, then the match will be decided on Wednesday in a series of increasingly rapid-fire games in the following order.
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Dine-and-dash dater gets his just desserts

Remember the story I wrote about back in August of the Los Angeles man who would use dating apps to arrange dinner dates with women at nice restaurants and after eating an expensive meal would leave the table on some excuse and vanish, leaving the women with huge bills? He had defrauded at least ten women over a period of two years.

Well a court has sentenced him to 120 days in jail, three years of probation, and banned him from using dating apps and websites.

At least for the next three months, he won’t have to pay for his meals.

That’s pretty impressive speed work

I knew that in Formula One car racing the pit crews can do things incredibly fast but I was not aware that they could remove all four tires and replace them with new ones in less than two seconds. Watch.

This made me curious about what holds the tires in place that enables such a quick turnaround. Magnetism? Or is there a single clasp that holds each tire in place?

(Via David Pescovitz.)

Impressive trick

This performance by Eric Chien was enough to win him the FISM Grand Prix at an event held in Hong Kong recently. I assume that this trick was done on a stage in front of judges without camera trickery and CGI. But I am not sure if this video is taken from that stage performance or was created independently in a studio. Anyway, it is fun to watch.

(Via Seamus Bellamy)

Taking advantage of the kindness of strangers

This story has received widespread coverage but I felt that I had to comment on it because these kinds of things infuriate me. Last year, I read the heartwarming story of a homeless man who gave his last $20 to a woman whose car had run out of gas. The woman and her boyfriend posted this story online and started a GoFundMe page to raise money for the homeless man and received over $400,000.
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Family murders in rural Ohio

Ohio has developed a reputation for producing grisly serial killers and psychopaths. Jeffrey Dahmer is perhaps the poster child for but there are so many competitors for that dubious honor. I don’t usually comment on such things but two years ago in April 2016, there was a particularly bizarre case. That was the systematic execution style murder of eight members of a family in four different homes. Seven of them had been shot in their beds. The case remained unsolved but just yesterday authorities finally announced arrests and the information that was released was startling.
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The strange world of advertising

I normally do not watch commercial TV but for the past six weeks, I have been watching season 3 of The Good Place on NBC rather than waiting for about a year to watch all the episodes commercial-free on Netflix. As expected I have found the commercials to be annoying though I understand the business model that requires TV networks to use them to pay for the programming. I just wish the commercial breaks were not so frequent. Maybe fewer but longer breaks, say one at the beginning of a half-hour episode, one in the middle, and one at the end.
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World Chess Championship live!

The second game in the 12-game contest between champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana is currently underway in London. The first game was a marathon seven-hour game with 115 moves that ended in a draw, with analysts feeling that Carlsen had a chance of winning while playing black but blundered late in the game.

You can watch the second game via a livestream below along with commentary by two analysts. The actual board is in the small box with the large board being used by the analysts who seem, along with Carlsen, to have been taken by surprise by the 10th move by Caruana who is playing black. There is also a live blog of the game

It has been a long time since I played chess seriously, or at all for that matter. I am not sure of the rules of these championships. Given the power of computers now, are the players during their breaks allowed to consult computers and friends or are they kept isolated from all contact with the outside world? I would expect the latter but just don’t know.