I hate corporal punishment. I was fortunate to have parents who did not believe in it and have never used it on my own children. I did go to a private boys school in Sri Lanka that allowed its principal and vice-principal to cane students and there were some teachers who also hit students with rulers or slapped them even though they were not authorized to do so. [Read more…]

You may recall that I posted a video of Ravi Fernando solving a Rubik’s cube while juggling it along with two balls. [Read more…]

Some time ago I wrote about the tragic situation in which a school nurse would not let a student use his asthma inhaler, even though he had collapsed in front of her, because the school did not have a medical release form on file. I later discussed a study about how these kinds of situations arise when people see their roles as primarily that of rule enforcers, fearful of repercussions if they use their judgment to defy the rules. [Read more…]

As I have mentioned before, I am not a very sociable person. It is not that I am anti-social, shunning all human contact. It is that I am better described as asocial, someone who can interact with others on occasion and when necessary, but am perfectly comfortable being alone with my books, my thoughts, and of course the internet, where you can interact with the world without interacting with actual people. [Read more…]

Netball is a game played the world over (including Sri Lanka) but as far as I am aware, only by women. It is superficially similar to basketball in that the goal is to throw the ball though an elevated hoop. The main difference is that you cannot move while you have possession of the ball and must pass it to another player within three seconds. This means no dribbling but actually results in a fast-moving game with plenty of passing since the non-ball carriers have to move rapidly around the court to try to get free to accept a pass from a team mate or block an opponent from passing or receiving. [Read more…]

I am not a natty dresser. I almost never wear a tie or jacket. My hair is usually ruffled. My clothes are inexpensive and off-the-rack from department stores that aim at the mass market. I never iron my clothes so they frequently look rumpled and I often wear them until they are so worn and frayed that there is a real danger of holes appearing. I hardly ever polish my shoes, with the result that they look scuffed all the time. I would not go so far as to say that people cross the street when they see me approaching but clearly I am not going to be on the cover of GQ magazine. Disheveled is the word that probably best describes me and I have little interest in putting in the effort to become sheveled. [Read more…]

This is pretty impressive. Incidentally Ravi Fernando, the person doing this trick, is the son of one of my oldest friends, going all the way back to middle school days in Sri Lanka, and so I was really pleased to stumble across this video on a news site quite by accident. [Read more…]

Yesterday morning we had a mixture of rain and sleet that resulted in the streets and sidewalks having the kind of icy slush that makes walking tricky. As I was making my way across campus for a seminar, I slipped and fell. It occurred at almost exactly the same time as a plane slid off the tarmac and ended up stuck in the grassy median while taxiing to the terminal at the Cleveland airport, which gives some indication of the slipperiness. [Read more…]

These tricks do not involve skilled sleight-of-hand but are the kinds of things any one can do with friends or at parties, and are kind of fun.