I had been curious about the legal consequences of issuing and using fake covid-19 vaccination cards. I had assumed that it would be at most a violation of state laws and would depend upon what the individual states had decided. But it turns out that it is a federal violation and can thus be prosecuted anywhere in the country. This is because the Centers for Disease Control is a federal agency and the CDC logo is on the cards.
[Read more…]
The FDA has granted full approved the use of the Pfizer vaccine for preventing covid-19. Up until now, it had only been granted emergency use authorization and some vaccine-hesitant people had said that they did not want to take an ‘experimental’ treatment that had not received full FDA approval. Let’s hope that they will now take the vaccine because the number of preventable cases and deaths is staggering and heartbreaking.
But I suspect that even this approval will not win over the hard-core skeptics. Take this report that some people are using drugs used to deworm livestock to prevent covid-19 instead of taking the vaccines. The FDA has put out a surprisingly sarcastic statement.
You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4
— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021
John Oliver devoted a segment of Last Week Tonight to the problem of ransomware, where hackers break into a computer system, lock up all the data, and then demand payment, usually in cryptocurrencies, in order to provide the key to unlock it. Barely a day goes by without some report about a new ransomware attack. The news stories focus on the havoc caused by attacks on big entities like hospitals, local governments, and businesses. But Oliver points out that with more and more people having their home devices hooked up to the internet, those become vulnerable as well.
[Read more…]
In an earlier post, I linked to an episode of Last Week Tonight where John Oliver explained how the odious Sackler family are trying to use the bankruptcy laws so that, while they claim that they will be paying $4.5 billion, they will end up with total immunity frrom future lawsuits, will not have to admit guilt, and likely end up even more wealthy than they are now. This article explains why this is such a bad deal for the public and how it lets the Sacklers off the hook.
[Read more…]
This video from Vice News shows how deeply some people have become buried in the anti-vaccine propaganda that even almost dying from covid-19 does not persuade them to get the vaccine. Instead they babble about how they have heard about vaccines changing their DNA and that they are not sure whom to believe. It is a frightening display of ignorance masquerading as knowledge.
I was intrigued by the news report that researchers had calculated the value of pi to 68.2 trillion figures. Pi (defined as the number obtained when the circumference of a circle is divided by the diameter) is a massively important quantity that occurs all over the place but it is hard to imagine what value is gained by achieving such a high level of precision. So my first reaction was, of course, “Why bother?”
This article looks at how much precision is neccssary for any practical application.
[Read more…]
I just returned from a trip to the supermarket and noticed that pretty much everyone, except for four people of whom three were young, is wearing masks again. While I always wore masks there and at any indoor venue where I was not sure that everyone was vaccinated, I had noticed last month that mask usage had dropped considerably. I wondered whether people would be more resistant to the advice to mask up again and was glad to see that, at least in this area, people seem to have adopted them again. The county has as yet not mandated that everyone mask up indoors, though with the rising number of infected people due to the Delta variant, I expect to see such a mandate soon.
[Read more…]
The so-far unsuccessful search to find direct evidence for the existence of dark matter is raising an issue in science that is often misunderstood and rarely gets the attention it deserves. And that issue is how we know in science that something does not exist. I discuss that in some detail in my book The Great Paradox of Science (yes, yet another plug for those who have not read it to buy it!) because it is hard to understand the logic of scientific progress without it. The history of science is replete with things that were once thought to exist but are no longer so. The aether and phlogiston are two famous example and another is N-rays. Trying to understand why we think those entities no longer exist will enable us to better understand when it might happen that dark matter is also thought to not exist.
[Read more…]
Especially the part about action films.
