Judges have a difficult job. Author Ian McEwan has a long piece where he looks at cases in the UK where the law intersected with religious beliefs. He focuses on the decisions by one appeals court judge Sir Alan Ward who seems to be a remarkably humane and thoughtful judge and how he handled two cases where he had to go against the beliefs of families and the religious institutions they belonged to.
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It appears that when astronauts walked on the moon, they were very prone to losing their balance and falling over and finding it hard to get up.
The recent discovery in Patagonia of the fossils of a massive dinosaur of a completely new species was a great surprise. The word ‘massive’ is actually an understatement.
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In the US people have allergies to many things, the most common ones being pollen, dust mites, mold, wasps and bees, cats and dogs, industrial and household chemicals, and foods such as milk, nuts, and eggs. Growing up in Sri Lanka, I cannot remember anyone in my family or friends who had allergies, apart from a very few people who had asthma and thus had occasional breathing problems. No one seemed to have the need to avoid foods and plants, apart from varying degrees of lactose intolerance.
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While I am enthusiastic about self-driving cars and its promise of increasing the mobility of those unable to drive as well as the possibility that such cars may be better drivers than humans, via Machines Like Us I came across this article by Lee Gomes says that we should not overestimate what they can currently do, because the road tests that they have done so far that produced 700,000 miles of accident-free driving have been under very limited conditions. There is still a long way to go and some major technological hurdles to overcome.
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While police forces around the country have been massively increasing the numbers and size and scope of their weaponry, in the process becoming quasi-military forces without the training that the military receives, violent crime (and teen pregnancies) has been steadily and quite dramatically declining over the last four decades. It would be a mistake to think that this negative correlation has a causal basis in that stronger policing has led to the decline because the decline has been nationwide and benefited areas that changed their policing as well as those that did not.
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We have all felt it. The return trip from some place seems to be quicker that the outward trip, especially if you were going to a new place. I used to think that this was due to the fact that on the return trip we were now familiar with the route, which meant that we did not have to pay close attention to where we were going and that this somehow translated into the journey seeming to be shorter
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Whenever I go to the dentist, it seems like the Dr. Oz show is on their TV in the waiting room. It is an absolutely nauseating show where the host uses his impressive medical credentials to plug various products with wildly exaggerated claims. And yet apparently people take him seriously, making the dietary supplement industry highly profitable.
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Self-driving cars are already here and even legal on some public roads. It is likely that they will be better drivers than many of the humans that drive cars since they have faster reaction times and do not suffer from the impairments and distractions of people, such as talking on cell phones or even texting. They could be a boon for older and disabled people who will no longer be limited in their ability to go places.
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I like eating bread and butter. The problem is that butter from the fridge is hard and cannot be spread easily without tearing into the bread. So I usually have to plan in advance and keep the butter out a few hours before I eat so that it softens up. And then I put it back after eating because of the belief that if kept out too long, it will go bad.
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