Desi Lydic was last week’s the rotating host for The Daily Show and she had some thoughts about the wellness craze and how some influencers are promoting dangerous practices.
What strikes me is that the people who fall for these practices seem to act as if they are at war with their bodies, that their bodies are trying to kill them and they must be constantly vigilant to fight them, and are willing to do the most bizarre things that random people suggest.
The 1920s were a high point in people believing that they could communicate with the dead. This may well have been due to two major events: the First World War of 1914-1918 and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919. Both of them resulted in many millions of deaths, many of them sudden and of young people, causing deep grief among the survivors. One can well understand the yearning of people to somehow connect with the ones they had lost.
Naturally this created a market for those who could claim to channel the spirits of the dead and as a result there was a cottage industry of people conducting seances, where you go to talk with a loved one through an intermediary. Belief in this was widespread and indeed this form of ‘spiritism’, the belief in the existence of an afterlife where the deceased lived and could be communicated with, was viewed as a kind of religion that was independent of other religions and devoid of beliefs in any particular god. Belief in communicable spirits was supported by many eminent people of that time, including scientists such as Sir Oliver Lodge, whose son had died. Another notable believer was Arthur Conan Doyle whose son Kingsley had died during the war and Doyle believed that through a medium, he had been able to talk with him. His wife Jean also claimed to have the ability to communicate with the dead using the mode of spirit writing, where her hand would be guided over paper by the spirit.
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On hot days, if one parks one’s car in the sun for any length of time, the temperature inside can rise to values much higher than the ambient temperature, making the interior extremely hot to the touch. This is another example of the greenhouse effect, similar to what is heating up the Earth.
It’s only early April, but we’ve already had our first report of an infant found in a hot car in Tucson. We talk about this every Spring and Summer in Arizona: the dangers of cars heating up in the sun.
Afternoon temperatures are about 20 to 25 degrees lower now than they will be in June, but it’s still hot enough to raise the temperature up to 120 degrees in about 45 minutes.
The air inside the car heats up so fast because of the “greenhouse effect”. Here’s what it means:
Incoming solar radiation, known as “shortwave radiation”, shines through the windows and is absorbed in the car’s interior.The heat released from the interior is known as “longwave radiation”, and is much weaker than the shortwave radiation. The heat becomes trapped inside the car. Heat continues to enter the car, but struggles to exit.
It only takes 10 to 15 minutes for a car in direct sun light to heat up above 100 degrees when it’s 80 degrees outside, even if the window is cracked. When the air temperature climbs above 100 degrees here in June, the temperature inside a car can soar above 150 degrees to 170 degrees in less than an hour.
Take a look at this photograph that won a prize at the prestigious Sony world photography awards last week.
After being awarded the prize, the winner Boris Eldagsen declined it saying that the photo was AI generated and that he had submitted it to start a conversation about how to deal with AI in the art world.
“We, the photo world, need an open discussion,” said Eldagsen. “A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not. Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter – or would this be a mistake?
“With my refusal of the award I hope to speed up this debate.”
He said this was a “historic moment” as it was the first time an AI image had won a prestigious international photography competition, adding: “How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it?
In his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote that the Guide says that: “Space … is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Although I am aware that space is big, evidence of its vastness still continues to surprise me. Just yesterday, I was listening to a news report about the launching of a rocket to study three of the moons of Jupiter. I was startled when they said that it will take eight years for it to get there. Somehow, the fact that Jupiter is part of the same planetary system as the Earth made it seem like a nearby neighbor, farther than the Moon but not by that much. But if the distance to Jupiter is so much greater than what I intuitively felt, you can understand why interstellar distances seem almost inconceivable.
It is hard to comprehend things that are outside our human scale: the vary small, the very fast, deep time, and deep space. We have developed methods to get some idea of what things are like under those conditions but they are still not intuitive.
Sri Lanka has a lot of snakes, many species of which, like cobras, are venomous. There is also a lot of folklore surrounding them and many of them likely originated as tales made up to scare the daylights out of children, like ghost stories. I vividly recall one story that was told about the Russel’s viper. The story was that if anyone in your household encountered a viper and killed it (and killing a poisonous snake was often the chosen method of getting rid of them), then seven other vipers would come to your home and they would hang like a chain from the rafters of the roof if your house did not have a ceiling or from a fixture, each one clasping the tail of the other, until they lowest one reached you where you were sleeping and bit you. Needless to say, that story was enough to give small children sleepless nights.
As children, we did not question the validity of this preposterous theory and the fact that it seemed like it required a lot of coordination and hard work by the vipers just to get at you when they could instead easily have have waited for you by hiding in the grass or under some furniture until you passed by before striking, even allowing for the improbability that there existed some kind of viper committee that organized these revenge attacks and recruited members to carry them out, like some kind of commando snake strike force. There was something so frightening about the idea of snakes slowly lowering themselves down from the roof at night while you slept that it banished any critical inquiry.
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It has long been clear that Republicans were using the abortion issue as a vote getting strategy. That seemed to have worked for a while to rally especially the religious zealots to their cause. But what has happened, as often occurs when a party panders to a fanatical base, is that the zealots get out of hand and push the issue much further than the party leaders would have liked. We see that with gun control measures. People in general approve of common sense gun control measures but Republicans are in the grip of the extremists so that now they cannot do anything at all, however reasonable, that might anger the extremists even if they say they want the right to openly carry bazookas and hand grenades in the streets.
What the Republican establishment seemed to have wanted is to place restrictions on abortion to make it very difficult to get while not blocking it entirely, because that policy of making it access harder seemed to have some appeal. They attacked the Roe v. Wade ruling by portraying it as allowing ‘abortion on demand’ (though it did not) and called for its overthrow. They got that result by packing the US Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices who hid their beliefs during their conformation proceedings, and exulted over victory of their stealth strategy.
But the zealots essentially want to outlaw any and all abortions at any time and without any exceptions, even for rape and the health of the mother. These moves to so severely restrict abortion access are not popular as can be seen in how it galvanized voters to largely reject Republican candidates in the 2022 mid-term elections.
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Adam Conover was the host of the excellent show Adam Ruins Everything that ran from 2016 to 2019 where in each episode he took apart a popular belief, tackling a wide variety of subjects, using research and experts and humor. A lot of humor. It was similar in spirit to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight except that Conover has a goofier sense of humor and did not sit behind a desk and had a lot of actors and high production values to help make his points
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He now has a podcast on YouTube where he does similar debunking and it is also worth checking out. In the episode below, he does a brutal takedown of all the recent hype surrounding AI, with the hype about self-driving cars part of the collateral damage.
Maria Konnikova looked at the research done by anthropologists on the sizes of social groupings. The research initially studied why non-human primates spent so much time on grooming one another but then got extended to humans.
[I]n the nineteen-eighties, the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis (now known as the Social Brain Hypothesis) had just been introduced into anthropological and primatology discourse. It held that primates have large brains because they live in socially complex societies: the larger the group, the larger the brain. Thus, from the size of an animal’s neocortex, the frontal lobe in particular, you could theoretically predict the group size for that animal.
Looking at his grooming data, [anthropologist and psychologist Robin] Dunbar made the mental leap to humans. “We also had humans in our data set so it occurred to me to look to see what size group that relationship might predict for humans,” he told me recently. Dunbar did the math, using a ratio of neocortical volume to total brain volume and mean group size, and came up with a number. Judging from the size of an average human brain, the number of people the average person could have in her social group was a hundred and fifty. Anything beyond that would be too complicated to handle at optimal processing levels.
Environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert had an interesting article in the New Yorker about the little-known world of caterpillars and other insects. I have to admit, caterpillars had not figured much in my consciousness but was impressed to learn that they undergo a dizzying array of transformations in their very short lives.
From a caterpillar’s perspective, humans are boring. The young they squeeze out of their bodies are just miniature versions of themselves, with all the limbs and appendages they’ll ever have. As they mature, babies get bigger and stronger and hairier, but that’s about it.
Caterpillars, for their part, are continually reinventing themselves. They emerge from tiny, jewel-like eggs and for their first meal often eat their own egg cases. Once they reach a certain size, they sprout a second head, just behind the first. They then wriggle free of their old skin, the way a diver might wriggle out of a wetsuit. (In the process, the old head drops off.) In the course of their development, they will complete this exercise three, four, in some species sixteen times, often trying out a new look along the way. The spicebush swallowtail, for example, which is found throughout the eastern U.S., emerges from its egg mottled in black and white. This color scheme allows it to pass itself off as a bird dropping. After its third molt, as a so-called fourth instar, it turns green (or brown), with two yellow-and-black spots on its head. The spots, which look uncannily like a pair of eyes, enable the swallowtail to pretend it’s a snake.
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