As a break from political news, I was going to write about the world chess championship title match that is just beginning in New York between the reigning champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway and Russian grandmaster Sergei Karyakin. The first game ended in a draw. Carlsen is favored but Karyakin is no pushover, currently ranked ninth in the world after becoming the youngest grandmaster ever at the age of 12.
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This is a touching video taken in an animal sanctuary in Thailand in which it looks like (to the extent that one can read an animal’s intentions) a baby elephant thought that the trainer who had rescued her just a year earlier and to whom she had grown close was drowning in a river and so swam out to rescue him
I had to travel out of town at short notice and this disrupted my blogging schedule. It should be back to normal by the end of the week.
I have written before about how, for the blind, darkness is not the prison that sighted people imagine it to be. The sense of sight tends to overwhelm all the other senses but in its absence, they develop and use all their other senses in ways that enable them to navigate their way through the world incredibly well, usually without the need of assistance from sighted people.
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Andrea James writes about something that I have noticed and that is that reducing the number of lanes on a road, what is called a ‘road diet’, and replacing the lost ones with a center lane meant only for turning left, can produce many benefits, not the least of which is that it reduces the number of opportunities for accidents.
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I wrote earlier about the “Rule of Three”, the idea that in a group setting that it takes the presence of at least three members of a marginalized sector to make them feel comfortable enough to speak up. But even then, it may take a conscious effort on their part to break through the dominance of the majority group.
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Yesterday was his birthday but I forgot to inform the whole world. To make amends, here he is in a recent photo.
The invention of the sandwich, of putting stuff between two slices of bread, is credited to the fourth Earl of Sandwich John Montagu (1718-1792) though this is one of those things where the claim of being the first has to be taken with a huge grain of salt since the idea of using some kind of bread as a wrapper for other foods dates back much farther. But for whatever reason, justified or not, his name is associated with it.
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Breakfast cereals are not for everyone. I myself rarely eat them, mainly because I find I get tired of it after a couple of days. Also, the cereal I eat when I do choose to do so is corn flakes that requires adding sugar and I am not a fan of eating sweet things in the morning. But what surprised me was this story that said that many younger people are turning away from cereal because it takes too much work.
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I am not a big fan of sweets (I have never been able to get used to the word ‘candy’ that is the term used in the US) and even then I only like a very few, like Cadbury’s milk chocolate bars or Kit Kat. Leigh Morland is annoyed at what is happening to chocolate bars.
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