There is something fascinating about watching time-lapse films of plants that show them moving. Plants move so imperceptibly slowly that they seem inert so it is disconcerting to see them growing and moving towards water and sunlight as if they have a sense of awareness. Here is a case where an almost dead plant comes back to life after being given water.
(Via Rusty Blazenhoff)
One of the biggest puzzles is how some drivers do not seem to realize when they are behind the wheel of a vehicle weighing several tons, they can cause mayhem on a large scale. Unfortunately, it is mainly those who deliberately want to do so that realize the potential that a motor vehicle has as a lethal weapon. An error or loss of concentration can result in the deaths of innocent people. This is why the use of cell phones while driving has become such a menace. That people actually read things on their phone and send and receive text messages while driving is something I find utterly incomprehensible and so I am glad that more and more states are passing laws that issue stiff penalties for doing so.
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Donald Trump, the Republican party, and their propaganda arm Fox News have been relentlessly promoting xenophobia by arguing that immigrants are coming to the US to kill people. But researchers Pajau Vangay and Dan Knights noticed something interesting and that is that the microbes in the guts of immigrants have a much greater microbe diversity than those of Americans. But the longer the immigrants live here, their guts change to match more closely the narrower gut diversity of the locals, and this narrowing gets more pronounced in the guts of their children. This is not necessarily a good thing because wider microbe gut diversity seems to be good for your health.
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Some readers may recall me discussing a book manuscript that I have been working on, the title of which is THE GREAT PARADOX OF SCIENCE: Why its theories work so well without being true and may have been wondering what was happening concerning it. I am pleased to say that Oxford University Press will be publishing it and should appear at the usual retail outlets sometime in mid-2019, though early orders can be made some months before. I will keep readers posted because, as described below, the book deals with topics that should be of interest to many of you.
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I have long been curious about the way memory works and as time has gone by become more convinced that we rarely remember things as they happen but instead we reconstruct memories each time we recall an event, adding some details and eliminating others, and the new story becomes recorded as the memory. Hence I am always wary of relying too much on my own or other people’s memories, especially of things that happened a long time ago, and usually look for some corroborating evidence.
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Yesterday China opened the world’s longest bridge across the sea, connecting Hong Kong with Macau on the mainland. It is 55km (34 miles) long. It required the construction of two artificial islands so that the bridge can go underwater at places to allow for shipping traffic. It is not the longest bridge overall, just the sixth longest but the five longer ones are also in China. The bridge does not allow private vehicles to use it, just buses, trucks, government vehicles, and other vehicles with special permits, so traffic should be light.
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An iceberg has been observed that is in the shape of a square about a mile along a side.
It turns out that this kind of geometrically symmetric icebergs is not unprecedented.
Such objects are not unknown, however, and even have a name – tabular icebergs.
These are flat and long and form by splitting away from the edges of ice shelves.
Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist with Nasa and the University of Maryland, said the process of formation was a bit like a fingernail growing too long and cracking off at the end.
They were often geometrically-shaped as a result, she said.
“What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square,” she added.
These scientists are missing the most obvious explanation, that this is a monolith sent to us by highly advanced extra-terrestrial beings, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey to make us more intelligent about the need to take action to save the planet.
If you subscribe to Netflix, you know that as soon as you turn it on, your home page will show still images for various shows that they are promoting for you specifically to watch. I knew of course that they use some kind of algorithm to determine your likes and dislikes, presumably based on your past viewing history. What I had not realized was that they are also trying to deduce whether I am a person of color or not and if they felt that I was, they would show a different still image featuring actors of color, even if they had just minor roles in the film or TV show. Here is an example.
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This is a documentary about three identical triplets who, in 1979 at the age of 19, found each other by chance. The events depicted are already known and some older readers might recall the case that made such a big splash in the media. The filmmaker has presented it in such a way that it is like a film in three acts, starting out in one way before somewhat abruptly revealing facts in the second act that takes the film in a different direction. The film raises some disturbing ethical issues but I cannot discuss them without revealing what the film is all about which I will do after the trailer.
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In a recent episode of Radiolab, they discussed the topic of deception and at the 48:51 minutes mark, they referred to work by two psychologists about how people lie to themselves by compartmentalizing two contradictory beliefs in their minds and allowing only one into consciousness. They mentioned the work of Harold Sackeim and Ruben Gur who had developed a list of 20 questions that they would ask people to respond on a 1-7 scale with 1 being ‘not at al;’ and 7 being ‘very much so’.
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