It is pretty interesting how something that seems so simple requires a complicated engineering process to make because of the design constraints involved.
Are you, like me, somewhat of a grammar pedant and struggling to find gifts to give certain friends and relatives of yours who consistently say things that annoy you? Mark Frauenfelder has found just the thing. If the recipients spot the typo on the mug, they get a pardon. That error, he tells me, is an example of something called Skitt’s Law that says that “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself.”
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Sergey Karjakin stunned the chess world by beating champion Magnus Carlsen in the eighth game of their 12-game series, following seven consecutive draws. He thus takes a 4.5-3.5 lead. The fact that he did this while playing black adds to the surprise. Oliver Roeder describes what happened.
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We know that people can act irrationally out of anger, reacting completely out of proportion to some real or imagined slight and doing dangerous and threatening things as a result. The most obvious examples are of road rage, but we also have cases of people harming and even killing others in domestic or neighborhood disputes. But in most of those cases, people are acting out of anger.
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Now that the party conventions are over, the next major focus of media attention are the debates. There will be three presidential debates (Monday, September 26; Sunday, October 9; and Wednesday, October 19) and one vice-presidential debate (Tuesday, October 4) all lasting from 9:00pm-10:30pm Eastern time.
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The Olympic games are currently underway and I am ignoring it for many of the reasons Marcus Ranum writes about. In addition, I hate the fact that the TV presenters will endless hype some marquee event by saying it is “coming up shortly” when in fact they will string out the anticipation for an hour or more, using that time to inundate you with commercials.
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During every presidential election season, people look eagerly to see the effects of each party’s convention on the polls. Since the conventions are highly choreographed to show the candidate in the best light, that party candidate’s poll numbers usually rise in the immediate wake of the convention by about 3-4%.
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Thanks to the huge fuss generated by the issue of which public bathrooms transgender people can use, I have learned a lot more about the issue of bathrooms than I would have ever imagined. While the idea of public bathrooms separated by gender has, like any practice whose origins are lost in the mists of time, come to be seen as the natural order of things not requiring any explanation, this article by Terry S. Kogan, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, says that it was the result of a deliberate sexist ‘separate spheres’ ideology that saw women’s role as to be in the home to take care of children and do household chores.
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