Are some people trying to start a war with China?

The media has been agog with the sudden flurry of objects in the sky that have been shot down by the US military. There have been four so far in the space of eight days. The objects have been nothing if not varied. So far, we have had the large white balloon that started the process, followed by what was described as. a small car-like object, then a cylindrical object, and then an octogonal one. The Chinese government has acknowledged that the balloon was theirs but say that it was a meteorological balloon and not a spy device. No one has claimed ownership of the other three objects.

What is peculiar is that all four objects were essentially propelled by the ambient wind currents and thus drifted at very low speeds. Of course, this has spurred all manner of claims (seriously by UFOlogists and facetiously by skeptics) that these are probes sent by extra-terrestrials to gain data before they invade.
[Read more…]

How ‘died suddenly’ has been exploited by anti-vax ghouls

There is a new tactic being exploited by the anti-vax conspiracy theorists. They seize upon any news item about the ‘sudden death’ of someone (whether that person is a celebrity or not) to pump into action and spread rumors that the death was caused by the covid vaccines.

Results from 6-year-old Anastasia Weaver’s autopsy may take weeks. But online anti-vaccine activists needed only hours after her funeral this week to baselessly blame the COVID-19 vaccine.

A prolific Twitter account posted Anastasia’s name and smiling dance portrait in a tweet with a syringe emoji. A Facebook user messaged her mother, Jessica Day-Weaver, to call her a “murderer” for having her child vaccinated.

In reality, the Ohio kindergartner had experienced lifelong health problems since her premature birth, including epilepsy, asthma and frequent hospitalizations with respiratory viruses. “The doctors haven’t given us any information other than it was due to all of her chronic conditions. … There was never a thought that it could be from the vaccine,” Day-Weaver said of her daughter’s death.

But those facts didn’t matter online, where Anastasia was swiftly added to a growing list of hundreds of children, teens, athletes and celebrities whose unexpected deaths and injuries have been incorrectly blamed on COVID-19 shots. Using the hashtag #diedsuddenly, online conspiracy theorists have flooded social media with news reports, obituaries and GoFundMe pages in recent months, leaving grieving families to wrestle with the lies.
…

The use of “died suddenly” — or a misspelled version of it — has surged more than 740% in tweets about vaccines over the past two months compared with the two previous months, the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs found in an analysis conducted for The Associated Press. The phrase’s explosion began with the late November debut of an online “documentary” by the same name, giving power to what experts say is a new and damaging shorthand.
…

The “Died Suddenly” film features a montage of headlines found on Google to falsely suggest they prove that sudden deaths have “never happened like this until now.” The film has amassed more than 20 million views on an alternative video sharing website, and its companion Twitter account posts about more deaths and injuries daily.

This is despicable. The death of a loved one is already hard for people to deal with, especially when it is sudden and the person is young. To add to their grief by spreading falsehoods about them is unconscionable.

Why no freakout over sugar reduction recommendations?

The US government has proposed new standards for school meals that seek to reduce the amount of sugar (and salt) in them.

U.S. agriculture officials on Friday proposed new nutrition standards for school meals, including the first limits on added sugars, with a focus on sweetened foods such as cereals, yogurt, flavored milk and breakfast pastries.

The plan announced by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also seeks to significantly decrease sodium in the meals served to the nation’s schoolkids by 2029, while making the rules for foods made with whole grains more flexible.

The goal is to improve nutrition and align with U.S. dietary guidelines in the program that serves breakfast to more than 15 million children and lunch to nearly 30 million children every day, Vilsack said.

“School meals happen to be the meals with the highest nutritional value of any meal that children can get outside the home,” Vilsack said in an interview.

I am bracing myself for the right wing freakout along the lines “OMG! The government is coming to take candy away from our children!” although that is not at all what is being proposed. I am surprised that it has not happened already.
[Read more…]

Film review: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

I watched this film that has garnered a number of awards and eleven nominations for this year’s Academy Awards. It takes the intriguing scientific concept of the multiverse as its basic premise, that the universe splits and branches at various points and hence there are a huge number of parallel universes, of which ours is just one, that have different degrees of similarity to our own depending on how long ago those universes split away and evolved independently. As far as we know, if the multiverse exists, there seems to be no known connection between the various universes but in this film, the main characters can move between them.

Given the acclaim that the film has received and that the multiverse is the driving idea, I anticipated enjoying it but found the film to be a huge disappointment. It started out trying to make some points about why some people are moving from universe to universe (because they are trying to stop a very bad person from doing some very bad thing) but about two-thirds of the way through, the screenwriters seemed to lose interest in that and instead turned the film into a fairly standard family drama involving the strained relationships in families and the way they play out in the various universes.
[Read more…]

Football kills and you cannot make it safer

The recent incident in an (American) football game where Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest after getting hit hard in the chest during a tackle has once again highlighted how dangerous this sport is. Football authorities and fans tend to quickly label these as isolated events and any actions they have taken in the wake of them have focused on extra protective gear or changing the rules to reduce some dangerous practices.

But Irvin Muchnick writes that those remedies merely skirt the fundamental issue and that is that this sport kills.

One month and a day before Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin came frighteningly close to becoming the second in-game fatality in NFL history, he was ejected from the Amazon Prime Thursday night game for an illegal hit on New England Patriots wide receiver Jakobi Meyers. See it for yourself on YouTube. Hamlin, a defensive safety, blasted Meyers helmet-to-helmet, preventing a touchdown catch in the end zone. As everyone reading this undoubtedly knows, on the aborted Jan. 2 edition of ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” Hamlin made a clean tackle against a Cincinnati Bengals receiver, and then collapsed seconds later, likely from commotio cordis, or percussion-induced cardiac arrest.
[Read more…]

The skills of a cult leader

When we think of cult leaders, we tend to think of those with large followings. But that same kind of phenomenon can occur with smaller numbers, even within households, because the kinds of skills used by a cult leader to control others can be seen in abusive relationships where the abused person seems unable to escape from the clutches of the abusers, even though on the surface they seem to have the ability to walk away. The abuser seems to know exactly what buttons to push with each captive, which combination of threats and affection work to keep them from leaving.

I was struck by the case of Larry Ray who has just been sentenced to 60 years in prison for trafficking. It starts with his daughter Talia asking her seven dorm roommates at Sarah Lawrence College if her father, who had just been released from prison, could stay in their dorm for a short while and they agreed.
[Read more…]

What is empty space?

We may think that it is easy to imagine empty space. We look around us and remove every item that we can see and that leaves us with empty space. We tend to treat empty space as a cavity of some kind, some region from which all matter and radiation has been removed. And that is fine as long as matter and/or radiation exists in some other part of the universe, so that we can envisage the space between things. But what if there was no matter or radiation anywhere in the universe? Would space still exist?

Albert Einstein in a letter to Karl Schwarzschild on 9 January, 1916 said no.
[Read more…]

Detecting lies and liars

I watch a lot of police procedurals and a standard scene is where an experienced detective interviews someone and then later tells a colleague that the person is lying. They say it confidently, and the viewer is led to believe that their wide experience with people who lie makes them capable of detecting when someone is telling falsehoods, that subtle clues reveal it. I don’t play poker but I am told that good players can tell when someone is bluffing by picking up on subtle indicators. There are also apparently TV shows whose central characters are people who are professional detectors of when people are lying.

But this article says that it is very hard to know when someone is lying.
[Read more…]

Wasting food

I hate to see food wasted. I really, really hate it. I will try and eat everything in the fridge, even if I don’t like it, if the alternative is throwing it away. I will cut out the bits of food that are spoiled and eat the rest. It is not that I am cheap. It is just that I think that throwing food away should be the absolute last resort. It really bothers me that so much food is wasted in the US. Part of it is due to the sheer size and complexity of the food distribution system in which the producer and consumer are separated by such vast distances that some wastage is inevitable in storage and transportation. This is perhaps understandable as an unavoidable consequence of creating complex societies.
[Read more…]

A case study of dogged perseverance in mathematics

It is widely held that mathematics at the highest levels is a young person’s game and that once one hits the age of forty, one has pretty much exhausted one’s potential for any creative contribution to the field. The famous mathematician G. H. Hardy said, “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game… I do not know of an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty.”

This was partly why it was such a shock when in 2015 a paper appeared in the prestigious journal Annals of Mathematics claiming to have solved a major unsolved problem and that the author was the nearly 60-year old Yitang Zhang, an untenured part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who had published only one paper in the past in 2001.
 
So what did Zhang do? He proved a long-standing conjecture in number theory involving prime numbers that dates back to the nineteenth century. Alec Wilkinson wrote a long article in the New Yorker about Zhang, the theorem he proved, and how it came about.
[Read more…]