Perhaps because of my memories of being a new graduate student in the US, my attention was drawn to the strange and sad case of a Chinese student Yingying Zhang, who came to the US for graduate studies in April and disappeared soon after on June 9. What is puzzling is that footage from street security cameras show her waiting at a bus stop and then getting into a car that stopped for her. The car’s owner has since been identified as being until recently a promising physics graduate student and he has been taken into custody.
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This video below shows what can happen when two drivers both try to enter a Taco Bell drive-through line at the same time and then each refuses to yield to the other, ending up blocking the line for everyone and the police having to be called in. The video was taken by a driver who was stuck behind as the people in the two contesting cars demanded that the other back down, and the videographer could not believe that this standoff was over Taco Bell food.

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Jack Sock is a tennis player who was on the court for his first round Wimbledon match. When a young boy in the stands gestured for a souvenir, he threw him a towel. But an old man in front of the boy caught part of the towel and wrested it away from the boy. This was caught on camera and distributed on Twitter and has understandably caused widespread disgust because it was easily identified as a jerk move. Adults should really know better.
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People are usually taught some version of the Golden Rule, originating in religion or philosophy or just common sense. It is stated in various forms but usually boils down to the precept that one should behave towards others the way that you would like them to behave towards you or, even more extreme, that one should love everybody.
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My post a couple of days ago about the first Sri Lankan to climb Everest sparked an interesting discussion about these climbs. Would you like to see what it is like to get to the top of Mount Everest but think it’s too damn dangerous? Well, you can follow the trek taken by most climbers to get to the summit and, once you get there, have a 3D view of the world below you.
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I am usually not a big fan of those contrived situations that are meant to make people more sensitive or empathetic by revealing something about themselves. But I found this exercise by the creators of Brave New Films, where they invited 40 strangers into a large room and posed 50 questions, was rather well done in showing how we all share so many similar life experiences that transcend the distancing that occurs when we pigeonhole others into boxes based on their appearance.
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All of us have had the experience of having to deal with someone who just rubs you the wrong way. The simplest way to deal with them is to cut them out of your life but sometimes, for a variety of reasons, you cannot do that. How should you deal with them in a way that does not make you grit your teeth and leave you stressed out afterwards? Christine Carter offers five suggestions.
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Cricket fans in India are notorious for being highly enthusiastic that sometimes crosses over into being bad sports, getting angry when their team is doing badly. There was an infamous event in a 1996 World Cup tournament semi-final game against Sri Lanka that was being played in India. When India started doing poorly and were heading for defeat, fans halted the game twice by throwing bottles on to the field at the Sri Lankan fielders. The last straw was when some fans set fire to the stands. The match referee, the great West Indian cricketer Clive Lloyd, called off the match and awarded the win to Sri Lanka.
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Pakistan has emerged the winners of the cricket tournament, notching a surprisingly easy win over India in the finals. India had clinically dispatched Bangladesh in the semi-finals, bowling them out for 264 and then reaching that total for the loss of just one wicket. In the other semi-final, Pakistan also beat England easily, reaching the target score of 212 with the loss of just two wickets.
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When we switched over to the new server last week, there were some glitches about comments. Marcus Ranum alerted me to the fact that some comments by long time commenters were going straight to the spam folder and not even being queued for moderation, so I went into that folder and rescued them. While doing so, I had to read a lot of genuine spam and two things struck me. One is the sheer volume of spam and the other is the quirky nature of so many of the comments, their peculiar choice of words (‘fastidious’ and ‘peer’ seem to be popular for some reason) and their general lack of grammar and coherence.
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