Gavin and Tara Hills are Canadian parents of seven children who had been frightened away from vaccinating all of their children ages ranging from 10 months to 10 years because of all the alarmist rhetoric they read on the internet.
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The rise in incidence of preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough due to people not getting their children vaccinated has resulted in some states trying to tighten up the loose standard for getting exemptions. But that effort has stalled due to fierce opposition from the anti-vaxxers.
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I came across a fascinating story about a tiny bird that puts human endurance records to shame. It was a about a small songbird called the blackpoll warbler that every autumn makes a non-stop flight from Vermont to Puerto Rico, a distance of 1between 1,400-1,700 miles that takes it three days to complete. This is a a pretty amazing feat for a bird that weighs just 12 grams.
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The Bloodhound SSC (which stands for SuperSonic Car) aims to break the speed record for land (and air), reaching speeds in excess of 1000 mph. The current record is 763.035mph, just above the sound barrier, set in 1997. The attempt is slated for later this year.
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Kevin Drum has done some excellent writing about the case for a causal relationship between the amount of lead in our environment and violent crime, bringing to greater public awareness research done by Rick Nevin and others. I wrote about his article for Mother Jones on this topic last year and he now has a follow-up article looking at more research by Nevin, a leading proponent of the lead-violent crime linkage, that extends that argument to rural areas, saying that rural crime skyrocketed in the late 1800s because lead paint wasn’t readily available before 1880.
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There is a very strange news story emerging from a Cleveland suburb near where I live. Since March 2014, someone has been throwing eggs at the front of a house occupied by an 85-year old man. This was not some isolated random prank by a child or a by a disgruntled trick-or-treater who decided to get their revenge long after Halloween. This has been a sustained attack of more than 100 eggs. These eggs were projectiles launched from a distance and hitting the house with remarkable accuracy.
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Scientists and atheists are among groups of people who value rational thinking, the former because being rational and logical in one’s thinking is essential if one is to be able to navigate one’s way through the complexities of trying to understand the workings of nature, the latter because taking a rational approach to life would make the absurdities of religious beliefs and the behaviors they generate more manifest. But of course, none of us can be purely rational beings in every aspect of our lives. The emotional centers of our brains respond to stimuli in ways that can overpower the centers that govern rational and logical thinking, as all of us can testify from personal experience when we have done soothing impulsive and stupid.
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To follow up on the discussion on this blog two days ago on the need to end the practice of clock shifting twice a year and stick with one time setting, John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight uses his regular segment How is this still a thing? to look at the history of this practice and argue that it is high time we got rid of it.
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I grew up in Sri Lanka where there was none of this business of changing clocks twice a year because being close to the equator, the days were pretty much the same length the whole year round. It is only countries that are far from the equator that do this and even then not all do so. So it took me a while to get used to this practice.
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In Cleveland yesterday March as usual came in like a lion with a mixture of snow, rain, and sleet that covered things with an icy mess. While temperatures went above freezing after a long, cold period, later this week will see it plunge again, as winter socks us one last time before going out like a lamb. Dennis Mersereau has been monitoring the weather and he says that we just coming to the end of a weird winter in the US, highlighted by this chart. He says that despite our subjective impressions in the eastern part of the US, for the contiguous US as a whole this winter will be warmer-than-average and drier-than-average.
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