Somehow or other, I have got on the mailing list for WebMD, the medical information site that is often the first one that is returned by search engines when you look for information on anything health related. I get emails from them regularly and on the surface, it has all the signs of being a reliable objective source of authoritative health-related information.
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This year’s Nobel prize for physics was awarded today to two experimentalists Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo and Arthur B. McDonald of Queen’s University in Canada for their independent work that showed that neutrinos have mass. You can read the official announcement form the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences here.
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As the dangers of not having children vaccinated become more well known, states are starting to cut back on the categories of exemptions given to parents who want to avoid vaccinating their children but yet want them to attend the same schools as other children and thus put them at risk. Vermont is the first state to remove the exemption based on parents’ philosophical beliefs. But since it keeps the religion exemption intact, some parents are suddenly ‘finding religion’.
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Yesterday brought news from NASA scientists that they had evidence of flowing water on Mars
Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars, according to researchers who say the discovery raises the chances of being home to some form of life.
…Scientists are unsure where the water comes from, but it may rise up from underground ice or salty aquifers, or condense out of the thin Martian atmosphere.
“There is liquid water today on the surface of Mars,” Michael Meyer, the lead scientist on Nasa’s Mars exploration programme, told the Guardian. “Because of this, we suspect that it is at least possible to have a habitable environment today.”
One of the poisonous side effects of the fact-free atmosphere that has been created by the Republican party is that evidence in support of any theory is no longer considered necessary. As long as prominent people are willing to make strong assertions confidently and their targets have already been suitably demonized, these statements are given a presumption of credibility. The examples are legion. Obama is a Kenyan, Muslim, Marxist plotting to install a dictatorship in the US is perhaps the most egregious example and best known. Others are that Christians are being persecuted in the US, climate change is a hoax, Planned Parenthood sells baby parts for profit, 9/11 was an inside job, Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons and was responsible for 9/11, Obamacare has death panels, airplane contrails are really ‘chemtrails’ in a secret government spraying program, immigrants from Mexico are responsible for a crime spree of murders and rapes, the list goes on and on. It seems like there is no major issue, whether natural or human-caused, that escapes the paranoid fantasies of a significant minority in the US.
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You may be familiar with the neologism ‘gaydar’. The idea is that people who supposedly have this quality can intuit accurately a person’s sexual orientation simply by observing them. I had heard about this and naturally was curious to see if I had this ability. But a few casual attempts on my part to do so had such variable results that I concluded that even if there were such a thing as gaydar, I certainly did not have it.
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The theremin is perhaps the first truly electronic instrument. It is played without actually being touched. Instead, by moving one’s hands near the instrument, one changes the inductance of the circuitry and thus the resonant frequency, and so can control the pitch and the volume. It is not an easy instrument to master.
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The internet is great for quickly spreading news all over the world. Unfortunately, it also makes it possible to spread false stories and I too have been burned by taking seriously stories that later turn out to be hoaxes. But how does one tell truth from fiction? One option is to simply wait. The more widespread a story becomes, the more likely it is that someone will investigate it and issue a debunking if warranted. But if you do feel the need to act on the story quickly, Pete Brown, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, supplies six ways for you to investigate it yourself.
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