In the episode The Lying Detective of the latest season of Sherlock, one character referred Sherlock Holmes to the case of a famous serial killer named H. H. Holmes who had constructed a building with secret rooms that enabled him to kill his victims in various ways and dispose of the bodies undetected. I had never heard of H. H. Holmes but the reference seemed to be factual and my curiosity was piqued so I looked it up (on Wikipedia of course!) and the case is truly bizarre. Holmes’s real name was Herman Webster Mudgett and he was a bigamist and conman who adopted various names of which H. H. Holmes was one.
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Via Mark Frauenfelder I came across this nice card trick. I like it because it is very simple and does not require any manual dexterity. It enables you to look as if you can predict the outcome of a sequence of cards from a shuffled deck better than your opponent. It is not even a trick in the usual sense of the word but an exercise in logic that someone could work out. But thinking of it at all is what is clever.
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I have just returned from a trip to welcome our first grandchild! He was born on Tuesday and we managed to get there in time to see him a couple of hours after he was born. Everything went well and I had a wonderful few days with him and his parents.

Being a grandfather is a strangely wonderful experience, hard to describe really. It definitely feels like the passing of the baton to a new generation, more so than with the birth of your own children, because you are now much older and you know that you have not many years left to live. When your own children are born, you think that you will be around long enough to protect them until they reach adulthood. With grandchildren, you realize that your children have that responsibility because it is unlikely that you will be there that long.

While I have always had the sense that we have a duty to leave the world in a better place for future generations, that feeling gets even stronger when you see a grandchild entering it now and wonder what it will be like for him when he grows up.

Due to being busy having to deal with some matters, blog postings will be scarce for the next few days but should return to normal by the end of the week.

I do not drink alcohol. I have no objections to it and do on occasion drink a beer or some wine but usually only because there is no alternative or the occasion is festive, like toasting someone. My reasons for not drinking are that I do not enjoy the taste of alcohol and on one occasion when I had a little too much, I did not enjoy the sensation of being lightheaded and losing control.
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Those of us who work in academia tend to think of ourselves as the kind of people who subscribe to a certain standard of behavior. This makes us especially vulnerable to those in our midst who exploit that sense of camaraderie and trust. A University of California, Berkeley professor learned that lesson the hard way when, during her sabbatical in Paris, she rented out her home to a professor from another university who was spending some time in the Bay Area. Since he was a fellow academic, she did not bother to check his references or do any other kind of due diligence that she might have done for anyone else, and that was her mistake.
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There is nothing like new technology to spawn neologisms. Some of them are pretty good but some are downright ugly. In the latter category I would place one that I have been coming across recently: phubbing. This is a contraction of ‘phone snubbing’ and is used to describe the phenomenon of when one is ignoring the person one is with in order to communicate with the phone. I assume that there are extensions ‘to phub’, ‘be phubbed’, etc.
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