Winter temperatures finally arrived this week in Cleveland, with daytime highs hovering around the freezing mark. This follows the warmest December on record. The snowfall was the third lowest on record with pretty much no snow at all, just three-tenths of an inch, very much below the average of 14.1 inches.
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The World Health Organization declares that Guinea is now free of the disease, two years after it made its appearance there, triggering a global panic. The disease killed over 11,000 people in that country and in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Liberia was declared disease-free in September while Sierra Leone was cleared in November.
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Blogging will be light during the holiday break but if you too have time on your hands, I think many people will find enjoyable this 46-minute documentary made (I think) in 1997 that looks at Andrew Wiles’s quest to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. I did not understand almost all of the sophisticated mathematics involved but that did not matter.
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Those of us who live in the northeast of the US have all been remarking on how warm it has been, with temperatures often running at twenty degrees Fahrenheit over normal. Today is expected to be in the mid 60s, about 30 degrees above normal. It is truly strange to see people wearing shorts and walking their dogs past green lawns on Christmas Eve in Cleveland. In response to yesterday’s post, commenters who live in Australia also weighed in with how much of a heat wave they are going through right now.
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2014 had the record for the warmest year ever but its hold on that title will be short-lived since it looks like 2015 is going to eclipse it quite easily. In the UK, the British gambling firm Ladbrokes has for the first time ever stopped offering bets on a white Christmas, instead offering bets on record temperatures instead.
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Forrest M. Mims III is an award-winning inventor who attends conferences all over the world. This requires him to travel with all manner of gadgetry that contains exposed circuits and the like. Naturally this results in airline security becoming alarmed and he writes about his experiences, including one that ended up with him being put in a chokehold by the pilot of his plane.
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In our social interactions with others, there is often some touching involved, such as handshakes, hugs, pats, kisses, and so on. Clearly the limits are also influenced by the relationship of the two people and some things that are acceptable with friends may not be so with acquaintances. Complicating matters are gender and culture, with some societies seeking to eliminate contact entirely between strangers or acquaintances. This whole area is full of pitfalls that accompany inappropriate touching and I tend to take the cowardly way out and let the other person initiate the level of touch.
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There is something vaguely creepy about Ted Cruz.
It is more than the smug expression that is his standard face. He also has the sly expression of someone who thinks he is way smarter than you and can argue better and thus can make you believe what he says. This confidence is shown in the way he flatly distorts things and uses his skills in sophistry to try and make his lies sound truthful.
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Residents of a North Carolina town reject solar power plan because they think it will use up all the sunlight and kill the plants.
A town meeting in Woodland, North Carolina heard public comments on a proposed solar farm in which citizens, including a retired science teacher called Jane Mann, spoke out against the proposal.
Ms Mann opposes the solar expansion because she believes it would lower her property values. She also said that plants near solar farms do not thrive because there wasn’t enough sunshine left over for them to photosynthesize. She also evinced a belief that solar panels cause cancer. Her husband added that solar panels “suck up all the energy from the sun.”
One of the features of science is that most of the time the community of scientists in any particular sub-specialty will agree on the basic paradigms that govern that field. While there will always be some scientists who refuse to accept the paradigm, most work within the consensus. This changes when the paradigm begins breaks down due to the fact that anomalies start to proliferate and no progress is made on major problems. Then more and more scientists start to look for new paradigms that promise to radically change the way they view the world. Those periods of scientific revolutions are exciting but rare.
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