The daring young man on a flying lawn chair

What happens when you have a crazy ambition – and achieve it?

Anyone in the US above a certain age will remember the strange story of a man who in 1982 attached 42 helium-filled balloons to a chaise lawn chair so that he could float up into the sky and drift slowly over the countryside. It was an insane idea but he actually carried it out. But he rose much higher than he anticipated, to over 16,000 feet, so that he was in the flight path of commercial jets whose pilots radioed back to airport control about seeing a man in a lawn chair.

Back in 1998, George Plimpton wrote about Larry Walters’ flight. It is not that Walters did not take precautions. He included a parachute plus “a two-way radio; an altimeter; a hand compass; a flashlight; extra batteries; a medical kit; a pocketknife; eight plastic bottles of water to be placed on the sides of the chair, for ballast; a package of beef jerky; a road map of California; a camera; two litres of Coca-Cola; and a B.B. gun, for popping the balloons.”
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Dangerous food trends

It is quite astonishing to me how much attention some people pay to their diets, even if they have no medical condition that requires them to be careful about what they eat or drink. This feeling that certain diets can be the pathway to good health and longevity has been exploited by some to promote various fads that can, in fact, be dangerous. This article describes some popular fads that one should be very wary of.

This article warns that excessive fears about food, that come under the heading of ‘clean eating’, can lead to obsessive behavior and all manner of problems.
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The varied responses to the monk problem reveals important insights

I was a little surprised at the length of the comment thread in the post about the logic puzzle involving the monk Gaito going up and down a hill. On the one hand, I thought that there were some excellent explanations of why there had to be at least one instant where the monk was at the same location at the same time. These involved visualizing the situation in slightly different ways, such as instead of having one monk go up and down on two different days, having two monks going up and down on the same day or using graphs or films and so on.

But clearly these arguments were not persuasive enough for some and I have been trying to think why this might be so. In my teaching experience, it is often the case that what seems obvious to you as a teacher is by no means so to the student. It is no use repeating the same explanation more slowly or (worse) more loudly or (much worse) exasperatedly. There is clearly some opposing argument that the student finds persuasive that makes them reject your argument and yet they may not be able to identify and articulate what it is. Instead they feel that there must be some flaw in your reasoning that they cannot put their finger on. It is more fruitful as a teacher to try and figure out what their argument might be, rather than reiterating your own.
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Why are crazy and dangerous fads so appealing to some?

On The Daily Show, Desi Lydic explores the ‘raw water’ fad.

This is a classic ‘first world’ issue. Many millions of people around the world suffer terribly from the lack of easy availability of clean water and yet people in the US, fortunate to have water freely and plentifully available at the turn of a faucet, are willing to spend good money to spurn this luxury and buy water from springs in which all manner of disease-causing parasites may lurk. I was already astounded that people actually buy bottled water but this takes that absurdity to a whole new level.

It seems like all you have to do is throw around words like ‘natural’ to make people think it is better and words like ‘probiotics’ to make them think you have science on your side. And a big bonus is if you wear robes and act like some mystic guru because we all know that such people have access to divine truths, right?

You can read more about the raw water fad where you will learn that Mukhande Singh’s birth name is Christopher Sanborn.

When did Earth begin to become oxygen rich?

When the Earth first formed into a solid sphere with an atmosphere, that atmosphere was deficient in oxygen. The question of when and how the planet became oxygen rich is an interesting and important one and recent research challenges some old ideas about the earliest appearance of oxygen.

The “Great Oxygenation Event” that infused the gas into our atmosphere is commonly thought to have occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, when a rise in cyanobacteria released a huge amount of oxygen through photosynthesis. But it’s been difficult to get any more precise in terms of dating the first appearance of this life-giving gas; after all, how are scientists supposed to detect such a small quantity of oxygen from so long ago?
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Taking stock of the pandemic

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a global pandemic. In the two years since then, we have passed one grim milestone after another. As of yesterday, there have been 483 million cases worldwide or 6.1% of the total population of 7.9 billion. There have been a total of 6.2 million deaths.

When one looks at the per capita death rates, apart from Peru (which has the highest rate), Brazil, and Chile, the rest of the top 20 countries for cases are in Europe or the US. In fact, the highest ranking country outside Europe and the Americas is at #35 with Tunisia. A similar pattern holds for infection rates.
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Pandemic lessons from Hong Kong

The covid-19 pandemic is going to be a rich source of data for how to deal with any future pandemics. The prevalence and degree of severity of the disease has varied widely across the globe, as have the ways in which various countries responded to it, and this has given rise to so-called ‘natural experiments’, those in which one can isolate and study the effects of individual factors without having to actually do experiments.

One of the firmest lessons is the importance of vaccinations for everyone but especially the need to vaccinate those segments of the population that are most likely to suffer adverse effects and death. In the case of covid-19, it was the elderly and the immunocompromised who were most at risk.

But there is also the question of how far to go with trying to isolate regions in order to keep the virus out of the country. The countries that practiced severe lockdowns and strict border controls (such as China, New Zealand, and Hong Kong) were initially able to keep the numbers extremely low while many other countries were suffering badly, but now the situation seems to be reversed in that the previously affected countries are seeing a decline while those initially low case number countries are seeing a spike.
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Second Republican governor vetoes ban on transgender sports

The bans on transgender athletes being proposed by Republican state legislatures are so cruel and unnecessary that even some Republican governors are taking a stand against them. Utah governor Spencer Cox has just joined fellow Republican governor Eric Holcomb of Indiana in vetoing such legislation. In doing so, he offered some heart-warming words. (All boldfacing is mine.)
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Covid-19 fatigue

I am one of the fortunate ones in that I was able to get vaccinated and boosted and since I am retired, during the worst of the pandemic I could spend most of my time at home and thus could easily practice social distancing. I also wore masks whenever I was in any indoor facility with other people. But while it was not onerous, I too have started to feel weary of taking these precautions and was hopeful that the rapid decline in cases in the recent past signaled the transition from a pandemic phase to an endemic phase that would enable us to let down our guard and just take the kinds of precautions we are used to with other familiar airborne contagions like the flu and cold, where we stay at home when we have symptoms and avoid contact with people who are exhibiting symptoms.

But now we hear reports of a delta-omicron hybrid and a BA.2 version of the omicron variant causing a slight uptick in cases in Europe and the UK, which in the past have been leading indicators of what would happen in the US after about two or three weeks. 45% of the US population has been infected with omicron and thus have some immunity to that BA.2 version of it but that still leaves a large number at risk.
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A set of podcasts worth browsing

A friend alerted me to the existence of this series of fascinating BBC podcasts called In Our Time. Each 40-50 minute episode consists of the host Melvin Bragg exploring one topic in depth with three academics from various British universities and research institutions. Originating in 1998, it produces a new episode each week and by now its archives have close to 1,000 podcasts. Each episode also has a comprehensive reading list for those who want to know more. The topics range all over the place, covering science, history, literature, art, religion, and so on so that anyone will find something that appeals to them or are curious about. Since the panelists are experts in the area being discussed, one gets reliable information based on in-depth research. The program is ideal for a generalist like me.
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