Is there any limit to the silliness that the MAGA world will accept?

The ridiculous efforts to gin up right-wing outrage continues apace. The latest are the proposed regulations to make washing machines more energy and water efficient. Naturally, this has been seized on by right-wing media to suggest that our clothes will come out dirtier. This follows the general manufactured anger over similar developments like low-flush toilets. These are being used as examples of the ‘wokeness’ that is destroying the American way of life. They are even blaming the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on the management being more focused on being woke than financial matters. Yes, really.
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Death of an ivermectin influencer

Thanks to the internet and the rise of social media, we now live in a world where there are vast numbers of so-called ‘influencers’, people who try to tell others what to do in pretty much every area of their lives, even if they have no expertise or credentials in that field. What is surprising (to me at least) is that there are so many people willing to follow their advice.

Daniel Lemoi was one such influencer and he died on March 3, 2023 at the age of 50. He used his channel on the social media app Telegram to advocate for the use of the drug ivermectin, the deworming medicine that gained popularity as a prophylactic and treatment for Covid. While there is a version of ivermectin that has been developed to treat humans for certain specific ailments, he chose instead to use the version used by vets for large.animals like horses and cows, something that has been strongly discouraged by medical professionals. But its use took off after some people promoted it as an alternative to Covid vaccines and treatments.
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Controversy over claims of room temperature superconductors

Superconductivity is the phenomenon where the resistance to current flow in a material drops to zero. This means that there will be no loss of energy due to heat generation when current flows through the superconductor. Since resistive heat losses are one of the main limitations associated with any current-generated devices, superconductors open up enormous possibilities for technology that could revolutionize our lives. Unfortunately this phenomenon, first discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911, only seemed to work at extremely low temperatures close to absolute zero that required cooling with liquid helium, making it impractical for everyday use.

Creating materials that would be superconducting at room temperatures became the Holy Grail of this area of research and a big breakthrough came in 1986 when materials were found that were superconducting at around 90K (-183C) which could be reached using liquid nitrogen. Even higher temperature superconducting materials at about 203K (-77C) have been found but that required enormous pressures, of about 106 times atmospheric pressure.

Recent papers by a research team headed by Ranga Dias and Ahskan Salamat at the University of Rochester have claimed that they have found materials that are superconducting at temperature of 294K (17C) and at a pressure of 10 kbar or ten thousand times the atmospheric pressure. This is big news.
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Having fun with ChatGPT and Bell’s theorem

There has been a lot of buzz in the media about the AI software ChatGPT and its ability to turn out essays that have at least a superficial plausibility. I decided to give it a spin and gave it variations of the same prompt on a topic about which I knew something but was probably too esoteric for non-physicists, just to see what it would come up with.

Here are the prompts and what I got back.

Prompt: Explain Bell’s theorem

Bell’s theorem is a concept in quantum mechanics that describes the phenomenon of entanglement. It states that when two particles are entangled, the properties of one particle are intimately linked to the properties of the other, regardless of the distance between them.

This means that if one particle is measured and its properties are determined, the properties of the other particle are automatically determined as well, even if the two particles are separated by great distances.

Bell’s theorem suggests that this entanglement is not due to some hidden force or connection between the particles, but rather it is a fundamental property of the universe itself. It challenges our everyday understanding of physics and suggests that there are deeper truths waiting to be discovered.

The implications of Bell’s theorem are far-reaching and have been the subject of much research and study in the field of quantum mechanics. It has also led to the development of new technologies, such as quantum computers and quantum cryptography, which rely on the principles of entanglement to function.

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It does not snow in Sri Lanka

I was forwarded this photograph that purported to show snow in Sri Lanka.

As soon as I saw it I was skeptical. The catch is that Sri Lanka is a tropical island that is just a few degrees north of the equator, somewhat like Hawaii in climate, so snow would be very unusual even given the erratic weather patterns caused by climate change. Furthermore, I lived for many years in the area shown in the photograph and I cannot recall even needing a sweater at any time. It is at an elevation of less than 2,000 ft above sea level.

My initial reaction was that this is one of the many doctored images that float around the internet, especially since there was no sign of snow on the trees or on top of the cars and buildings.

But a friend in Sri Lanka says that while it is not snow, it is not a hoax either, that the material used to resurface the roads results in a soap-like foam emerging after it rains. This apparently happens all over the globe but I have never encountered it myself.

Has anyone observed this?

Reducing the cost of insulin is big news

An estimated 26.9 million people of all ages (8.2% of the U.S. population) have been diagnosed with diabetes. A further 7.3 million adults ages 18 years or older (21.4 percent of adults with diabetes) are estimated to have diabetes but are undiagnosed. For people with diabetes, insulin is essential for them to live but in the US, insulin prices have been much higher than elsewhere in the world resulting in crippling costs for users, so much so that some people cannot afford to buy the drug.

One of the major achievements of Democrats and the Biden administration in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) at the end of last year was that it allowed Medicare to negotiate down the price of insulin for those over 65.
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John Oliver on the state of AI

He uses the current buzz around the use of AI in ChatGPT and Google and Bing search engines to look more broadly at the current state of AI and where it might be headed.

I had a list of four things that always seemed to be ten years away: AI, fully self-driving cars, sustainable fusion energy, and quantum computers. It is not that there have been no advances in these areas. Each field has advanced considerably but the delivery date for the fulfillment of all they promised keeps moving back as new difficulties aree encountered.

Recently I have been wondering whether AI has advanced far enough to be removed from the list. This judgment depends of course on what criteria one uses. The highest criterion for AI, that it achieves sentience (similar to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey) hasn’t been reached yet though it is getting close to where we might not be sure if it has reached it (by passing some version of the Turing test) or not.

I think I will keep it on the list for now.

The Havana Syndrome is still a mystery

The Havana Syndrome is the name given to the set of symptoms first reported by American diplomats in Havana that then spread to those working in other countries around the world, and even affecting Canadian diplomats. The symptoms included dizziness, headaches, and painful sounds in their ears. There were two questions. What was causing it? Was it due to the actions of a foreign governments? This issue was studied extensively by the US government and scientific researchers.

The US government has now released a report that says that they do not think it was caused by a hostile act by a foreign government.
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Hasan Minhaj on the lab leak and Dilbert stories

Minhaj returns as this week’s rotating host of The Daily Show where he was a correspondent for five years.

He argues that rich people like Scott Adams end up saying awful things because they are bored with their lives.

Minhaj said Adams is a prime example of “a certain type of rich person.” They have no problems of their own, so they invent new ones just to make their own lives interesting.

“I can guarantee you: J.K. Rowling had zero opinions about trans people when she was on welfare,” he said. He suggested a wealth tax would solve the problem.

“Rich people, this is for your own good,” he said. “The wealth tax is actually a shut-the-fuck-up tax.”

“Spend more time working, kissing your loved ones, getting groceries ― y’know, being a normal person,” he said. “Because normal people don’t hate Black people. We’re all too busy hating that one squeaky wheel on the shopping cart.”

Encouraging increase in wind and solar power generation

It is encouraging that energy from wind and solar sources are increasing at a rapid rate in the US.

National wind and solar capacity grew 16% compared to 2021. All told, renewables generated enough electricity to power 64m American households. The report comes as the Biden administration starts to make billions of dollars available for renewable energy projects. The administration has committed to decarbonizing the grid completely by 2030 and getting the US to net zero emissions by mid-century.
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In the past five years, the share of wind energy more than doubled from 15% to 34%. Over that same time, gas production has fallen from 49% to 34%.
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The US generated 683,130 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity from solar and wind last year, according to Climate Central’s findings, up from 588,471 GWh in 2021. The report shows that solar generation is understandably highest in the summer, while wind energy peaks in spring and fall.

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