The field of psychology has been reeling because of problems with replicability, in that studies that claim to see certain effects have later had doubts cast upon them when efforts to replicate them failed to do so. Part of the problem is of course dealing with human subjects. But one of the theories that seemed to be pretty robust was based on a study by Roy Baumenister and Dianne Tice that suggested that people have a finite reservoir of will power and that when that is depleted by using it on some tasks, then we have reduced ability to overcome new challenges until that reservoir is replenished.
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Last year I wrote about the mysterious attacks that had been made on the home of an 85-year old man who lived in Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland. Over a year or more, the man’s house had been pelted several times a week, and the police were baffled as to who was doing it and how and why.
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Last Sunday, people in the US moved their clocks one hour ahead as part of the biannual ritual associated with Daylight Savings Time. And each time we do this, people complain about the disruption it causes. To add to the confusion, some states such as Arizona and Hawaii do not make any change.
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Today March 14 is so-called ‘pi day’ where in the month/day format in the US for the date gives 3/14. The number pi (the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle) is a source of endless fascination because it is so basic and yet so ubiquitous in all areas of science and mathematics and everyday life. Here is a fascinating article by Xiaojing Ye on the search for obtaining increasingly precise values of pi. It contained many nuggets of information that were quite new to me.
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Thanks to reader Reese, I learned that Ray Tomlinson had just died at the age of 74. Who was Tomlinson? He was the person who invented email. In 1971 he was working on ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, and fooling around trying to find more uses for it when he invented it.
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The discovery by the Hubble telescope of a galaxy that is 13.4 billion light years away is an exciting development. This is not only because it is further away than anything we have seen so far but also because it suggests that stars and galaxies were being formed at the very earliest stages of the universe, which is currently calculated as being 13.81 billion years old.
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I have been reading about the increased number of incidents in which pilots of planes report that they have been blinded by laser beams aimed at the cockpit from the ground. I was surprised by this since the lasers one uses in everyday life are quite low in power and it is not easy to aim them. But it turns out that these lasers, which can be easily purchased online, are more powerful than the ones used in meeting presentations and are getting even more powerful. Authorities are treating them as dangerous practices and urging a crackdown.
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