Pearls Before Swine produces another one.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Pearls Before Swine produces another one.
Today came the news that Brigid Kosgei had smashed the women’s marathon record that had stood for 16 years by a massive 81 seconds, with a new time of 2:14:04. What I found interesting in the report was this little item.
Some will also point out that Kosgei was wearing the Nike Next% training shoes, which have been estimated to give between 60-90 seconds of performance benefit over other shoes.
Ricky Gervais is an atheist, stand up comedian, and actor. He made a pretty funny film with an interesting premise called The Invention of Lying that I reviewed favorably back in 2010. More recently, though, he has joined with those comedians who are ticked off with audiences who do not find humor aimed at marginalized groups to be funny. They claim that they are being silenced for their edgy humor by those who can’t take a joke.
[Read more…]
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the prize this year has been awarded to Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed for his efforts to bring peace between his country and neighboring Eritrea and for his efforts towards bringing “reconciliation, solidarity and social justice” to the region.
Giving the Peace prize to current politicians is always a dangerous thing since they can then go on and do things that make a mockery of it. For example, the committee awarded the prize to Barack Obama in 2009 even though he had done nothing to deserve it and indeed soon after announced the surge of 30,000 troops sent to Afghanistan and increased the drone killings. Of course, nothing could be worse than giving the award to war criminal Henry Kissinger, something the prize committee was roundly and deservedly condemned for.
[Read more…]
Parallel parking, when done by a skilled driver, can be a thing of beauty. Some time ago, I reproduced some instructions that I found on the internet that guarantees perfect parking every single time. I have followed those instructions and found that my success rate is much higher than it used to be, though not 100% since sometimes I have to pull out and start again.
But I have to humbly bow before the expert in the video below who squeezes into a space that I would not have even dreamt of trying to get into.
[Read more…]
Yesterday there was a town hall style forum with nine Democratic presidential candidates talking about LGBT issues, similar in format to the earlier town hall on climate change where each candidate came on serially for an allotted time. During it, Elizabeth Warren showed that she is becoming increasingly comfortable thinking on her feet and dealing with difficult questions.
Here she is responding to one such question.
I have been struggling, and failing, to keep up with all the convolutions generated by the Brexit negotiations and the turbulent politics accompanying it. Polly Toynbee, a columnist for the Guardian, writes that despite the factional fighting at the recent Labour party conference, when compared to what is going on with the Conservatives, the chances for the Labour party to do well in the next UK election (which she thinks will be very soon) are good. I have no way of gauging if this surprisingly optimistic (to me at least) view is justified and hope that some of the readers who are more familiar with UK politics will chime in.
[Read more…]
Earlier today, I got this email.
Hello,
Where are you presently?. I need your help for something very urgent so please get back to me via email as soon as you get this message.
Thanks
The signature line was that of an old friend of mine from Sri Lanka and with her correct professional affiliations and degrees, and the return email address was the one I had for her in my address book.
But I am cynical enough to suspect scams and although I had not seen this one before, I looked it up and sure enough, it was one.
I quickly emailed my friend’s brother to tell him to inform his sister by phone that her email account had been hacked. He wrote back that that had indeed happened and unfortunately his own daughter had fallen for the scam and given the scammer some information though not much. My friend in Sri Lanka and her niece (and who knows how many others) have now got to go through the tedious business of trying to stem the damage.
I am just passing this on to alert others that one should never respond to such emails or give information without contacting the sender and confirming that this is genuine. If email is the only means you have to reach your friend, then you can reply and ask them to give you information that a scammer could not possibly know.
The conservative columnist has been souring on Donald Trump for some time but Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds seems to have sent him over the edge and he excoriates Republicans in Congress for enabling his behavior.
Donald Trump, an ongoing eruption of self-refuting statements (“I’m a very stable genius” with “a very good brain”), is adding self-impeachment to his repertoire. Spiraling downward in a tightening gyre, his increasingly unhinged public performances (including the one with Finland’s dumbfounded president looking on) are as alarming as they are embarrassing. His decision regarding Syria and the Kurds was made so flippantly that it has stirred faint flickers of thinking among Congress’s vegetative Republicans.
[Read more…]
Given the extremely high cost of housing in some of the major metropolitan areas in the US, there has been a spurt in the tiny house movement, where very small available parcels of land are being used to build tiny homes, some as small as 120 square feet. There are even TV shows that feature these homes. These houses are quite ingenious in how they maximize the use of space.
On the surface, this option looks appealing for people who like to live a minimalist lifestyle. But it does have its drawbacks, as this person recounts about her own experience in living in a 240 square foot one. She was forced into this option because of high rents rather than it being a lifestyle choice.
[Read more…]