In this animation, they show how the arrival of coal and petroleum-based industrialization around the beginning of the 19th century led to a very rapid rise in atmospheric CO₂ levels from a level of about 280 ppm (parts per million), which had been stable for millions of years, to about 412 ppm.

We have to go back about 2.5 million years to find a time when the level was as high as the current value and at that time there were no ice caps and glaciers, and consequently ocean levels were 55 ft higher than they are now. That should give us some idea of how dangerous it would be if we do not do something soon to combat global warming.

About 95 million people (close to 25% of the US population) have got Covid so far. That is the official number. The actual number, if one includes unreported and undiagnosed cases, will be higher though how much higher is unknown. I think all of us have either had covid or know several people who did, so ubiquitous has it become.

I have not had it so far and have put it down to luck, though it is true that I am cautious and try to avoid situations where the risk of contagion is high. I do know people who have not got it even though close family members have got it on several different occasions. Have they also just been lucky? Or is there something else that might be enabling them to avoid getting infected?
[Read more…]

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were the first people to walk on the moon. That was a major scientific and technological achievement that involved great personal risks to the two astronauts so one can imagine how annoying it must be to Aldrin to have some idiot get in his face saying that the whole thing was fake and calling him a coward and a liar and a thief, after luring him to a venue under false pretenses that it was an interview for a documentary, hence the camera and sound people around. So Aldrin, at the age of 72, punched the guy in the face.

I had not been aware of this incident that took place 20 years ago.

Of course, the nutters will point to the fact that Aldrin did not take up the offer to swear on the Bible as ‘proof’ that he did not walk on the moon. These people are willing to believe in a magic man in the sky without any evidence whatsoever but will not accept something for which there is tons of evidence, showing that you cannot argue with people who are not reality-based.
[Read more…]

It appears that there may be a link between one’s blood type and susceptibility to getting covid.

Blood type doesn’t affect much in our daily lives. In fact, most people don’t even know whether they’re Type A, B, AB, or O. But the seemingly-banal detail might be a factor in who is most susceptible to Covid 19. That link was established pretty early on in the pandemic and scientists didn’t let it go. Additional research has buttressed the possibility of a link.
…

Where are we now, in 2022, on blood type and Covid? Additional research and review papers have confirmed that we’re in more or less the same place: It looks like there really is an association between Type A blood and susceptibility to Covid and Type O blood and less susceptibility. Yet no research so far has been able to pin down the molecular goings on that explain the mechanism behind why this might be so.

“It’s pretty clear that Type O is protective to some degree. I don’t think that having Type A or Type B is the problem—it’s just that they don’t have Type O,” says Mark Udden, MD, professor of hematology and oncology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

My own blood type turns out to be O+, which puts my mind at ease a bit. But despite that, I still wear an N95 mask whenever I am in an indoor public space and am not sure when I will feel comfortable going without. On my recent trip to Boston, I wore it almost all the time in the planes and in the airport, removing it only to eat or drink. But I noticed very few people wearing masks, probably about 5%, even in a high vaccination state like Massachusetts.

More and more people I know have got covid, though fortunately they were vaccinated and the cases have been mild. Many got it after flying. So I was a little concerned about my two trips to see my grandchildren and their trip to CA, all during the summer. But all those took place without any incident.

In 1929, Albert Einstein, at that time living in Berlin, gave a wide-ranging interview to George Sylvester Viereck that was published in the Saturday Evening Post. The interviewer seemed like a star-struck teenager and was unduly fawning but nevertheless obtained some interesting quotes from Einstein. One of them (“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”) was been widely circulated.

Einstein’s views on free will are also interesting.

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will.
…

I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.

I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime; nevertheless I must protect myself from unpleasant contacts. I may consider him guiltless, but I prefer not to take tea with him.
…

My own career was undoubtedly determined, not by my own will but my various factors over which I have no control – primarily those mysterious glands in which Nature secretes the very essence of life, our internal secretions.
…

I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.

[Read more…]

When I get into my car and shut the door, its closing makes a solid kind of sound. I had never given much thought to it, thinking that the sound of closing was an incidental byproduct of the door’s design and manufacture. It appears that I was mistaken. In an article on the sounds that cars make, John Seabrook writes that much thought goes into creating that particular sound.

The engine’s sound isn’t the only thing that the engineers work on. Many prospective buyers’ first experience of a car or a truck is the CLICK ker-CHUNK that the driver’s-side door makes when they close it, followed by a faint harmonic shiver given off by the vehicle’s metal skin. The door’s weight, latches, and seals are carefully calibrated to create a psychoacoustic experience that conveys comfort, safety, and manufacturing expertise.

Who knew?
[Read more…]

In my book The Great Paradox of Science, chapter 1 has the title Did dinosaurs have tea parties? in which I speculate about possible dinosaur culture.

We think of many of the dinosaurs as impressive in their size and the way they dominated the world in their time, roaming freely over the Earth with everything as their prey and with few predators to fear. But we don’t associate them with any culture. We don’t associate them with discovering fire or building homes or creating artifacts such as pottery and tools for their use.

But [how do] we know that they didn’t do any of these things. Could it be that they were actually more advanced than we give them credit for and did at least some of those things but that all the evidence has disappeared over the long time since they were wiped out?
…

After all, humans have been around for a mere two million years (and modern humans only for 200,000 years) and thus produced all these things in a much shorter period than the dinosaurs who roamed the Earth for around 150 million years. Why do we believe that dinosaurs did not do anything at all during that time other than eat, sleep, and reproduce? Why could it not be that they too developed some kind of society, however rudimentary, whose traces have disappeared in the 65 million years that have elapsed since they went extinct?

[Read more…]