It was only recently that I learned the metaphorical use of the term ‘gaslight’, that arose from the 1944 film Gaslight where the plot involved a husband tricking his wife into thinking that she was going insane. The term ‘gaslighting’ is now used more generally to describe a form of psychological abuse that seeks to undermine a person’s confidence in their own memory or perception or even sanity.
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Via David Pescovitz I came across this video of sea lions playing volleyball. (I initially thought they were seals because I was not aware of the differences between seals and sea lions but this article explains it. One thing that puzzles me is that the article says that sea lions are brown but these appear to be black.) They show extremely impressive skills, even spiking the ball and using strategic placing. I was pretty bad at this sport, never quite getting the hang of how to use my hands clasped together to control the direction of the ball.
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The random viciousness of some people never ceases to astound me. Take this story.

Pinnacle Park reopened Tuesday after being closed since the weekend for public safety. Nails were found hammered into tree roots along 2 miles of park trails.

The 1,100-acre forested park is owned by the town of Sylva, with a total of 18.5 miles of trails popular with hikers and trail runners. More than 60 spikes were found along a 2-mile section of trail, said town manager Paige Roberson Dowling.
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Today is the 12th anniversary of my beginning to blog, starting at first on a platform provided by my university before moving in 2012 to Freethought Blogs. It has been a very rewarding experience for me. I have made the online acquaintance of many highly knowledgeable, insightful, funny, and thoughtful people among those who have read and commented.

Thanks to all very much for providing the stimulus to write. I feel that I have become a better (and quicker) writer because of the constant writing and editing and feedback.

As some of you may know, there is a blogger named Richard Carrier who used to be on this network but left after certain allegations were made about his behavior. He has now filed a lawsuit against FtB and other skeptical networks and some individual bloggers such as P. Z. Myers.

In order to fight the lawsuit, a GoFundMe page has been set up for contributions. You can read more about the case here.

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.