How FOMO was used to swindle people

In the US where we are inundated with stories of the lifestyles of the rich, it should not be surprising that some people dream of joining that group. But most people are not born into wealth and need to find some way of getting there. Some have an entrepreneurial bent and try to market an idea. The tech world is appealing and the person who is held up as a model is the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. If you do not have an idea for a product or the stomach to do all the work of developing one, the next best thing is to identify someone who has and become an early investor so that one can reap the benefits if and when the product becomes wildly successful.

But identifying good ideas in the early stages is a gamble, especially if one is unfamiliar with the world in which it operates. What may seem like a terrific idea can turn out to be a smoke-and-mirrors exercise in which someone with very persuasive skills manages to convince rich people who lack the technical knowledge to cough up lots of money by promising a product that will revolutionize the field. The FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) phenomenon can be a useful lever of persuasion, where people fear that by not investing, they may be missing out on the equivalent of the next Apple.
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Black holes as dark matter candidates

As the search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) continues to be fruitless, advocates for alternatives to dark matter (such as Modified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND theories) to explain cosmic puzzles have been encouraged. But if the history of science is any guide, we should not expect the larger community of scientists to quickly embrace these alternative theories. This is because once a paradigm becomes dominant, as dark matter has, then it will not be dislodged until most of the variations within that framework have been explored and rejected. In the case of dark matter, a fresh search for WIMPs has been launched using extremely sensitive detectors that, if they still fail to detect them, will likely result in WIMPs being ruled out.
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Is your phone spying on you?

I am getting weary about hearing of all the ways that our devices are spying on us. The main ways in which we give away information are the sites that we visit and the searches we make. But we know about those and have grudgingly come to accept them as facts of life and the price we pay for the conveniences they provide. But there are other, more disturbing aspects, like that the cameras and the microphones on our devices may be surreptitiously recording us.

If you think your smartphone is spying on you, you’re probably right.

Apps are designed to track your moves, and your phone’s microphone can be picking up your conversations.

So if you’re suddenly bombarded with ads on your social media for things you’ve never searched for but have spoken about, it’s no coincidence.
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Well, that was embarrassing …

Ohio and North Carolina compete to claim the honor of inventing the airplane. While the Wright brothers Orville and Wilbur were from Ohio, their first flight took place in North Carolina in 1903. In support of their state’s claim, the state of Ohio issued a license plate showing their plane carrying a banner that said “Ohio Birthplace of Aviation”.

Unfortunately for them, their image had the plane backwards so that it seemed to be actually pushing the banner. That really would be a first.
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Atheists, agnostics, and Catholics are the most supportive of vaccines

Although the anti-vaccine and anti-mask protestors get a lot of media coverage, a new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that a majority of the American public (by a margin of 62% to 37%) see the health benefits if the Covid-19 restrictions as worth the costs, even though the restrictions have “hurt businesses and economic activity and keep people from living their lives the way they want”. But many also fear that the worst is yet to come.

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This xkcd strip needs an extra panel

Via PZ’s blog Pharyngula I saw this xkcd strip.

I am a physicist and a physics teacher and so of course am well aware of this popular lecture demonstration where a bowling ball or some other heavy object is hung from the ceiling of a lecture hall. A person then stands some distance away from the lowest point at which the ball is resting and brings the ball up to their nose with the rope kept taut. The ball is then released and it swings away from the person and returns, just like a pendulum. The point is whether the person will flinch when they see the ball come back towards their face. The law of conservation of energy predicts the ball will not rise higher than the initial release point and so will never hit the face, and the panel looks at how different scientists might respond to being in that situation.
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Psychopaths and sociopaths

Although I had not really looked into the formal definitions of the words, I used to distinguish between sociopaths and psychopaths by thinking of the former as people lacking in conscience and in empathy, who pursue their own interests without thinking of the needs or feelings of other people. One can think of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos but pretty much any oligarch would seem to fit into this category. I saw psychopaths as going even beyond that and being willing to even physically harm people who stood in their way. Serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer would be psychopaths.

But somewhere along the way, I read that there really was no difference between the two terms and started using them interchangeably. Now comes along an article in Discover magazine by Benjamin Plackett that says that using the two terms interchangeably is not correct and that a useful distinction can be made using brain science between the two terms.
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Average body temperature is dropping

A few days ago, I started feeling a little lousy, ‘under the weather’ as they say in the UK, and decided to take my temperature and sure enough I had a low fever of about 100.6F. In these pandemic days, even though I am vaccinated and take precautions, wear masks in public places and as much as possible only associate with vaccinated people, there is always the chance of breakthrough infections so even though I had none of the other symptoms of covid such as loss of taste and smell, I decided to take a home test to see if I had contracted covid. The test came beck negative, which was a relief, but these rapid tests are not that reliable so one can never be sure, so I decided to self-isolate until my fever went back to normal.
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Galilean relativity rules! (At speeds much less than the speed of light)

The Mythbusters team looked at what happens when you fire a soccer ball at 50 mph backwards out of the back of a truck that is moving forward at 50 mph. The result would have come as no surprise to Galileo.

But if instead of a soccer ball, you fired a beam of light out of the back, it would still travel at the speed of light, however fast the truck was moving. (The truck can never travel at the speed of light, of course.) You would have to use the Lorentz transformations, not the Galilean ones, when you have objects traveling at close to or at the speed of light. You could use the Lorentz transformations for the soccer ball case also (since the GT are an approximation to the LT).

The ultimate gated community – in space

Now that we have people going to space just for the hell of it and if they can afford it, there are some plans to open a space hotel in the year 2027 in the form of a rotating wheel (a la 2001) to simulate gravity to about one-sixth of the Earth’s.

As the first of its kind, Voyager Station is slated to be a luxury resort designed to accommodate 280 guests and 112 crew members, complete with a restaurant, a bar, a concert hall, a gym and even a cinema.
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After blasting off from Earth, guests will arrive at a central, zero-gravity docking hub. From there, elevator shafts will carry them outward to a chain of “habitation modules” arranged around the circumference of the circular station. It’s only there, at the edge of the wheel, that the centrifugal force will be strong enough to keep guests and their surroundings firmly grounded.
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Wandering the 24 modules, which come in at 125,000 square feet total, they’ll find all the aforementioned amenities of this resort in the sky.
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On its website, the company urges potential clients to get in on the action: “Be one of the first humans to vacation on a luxury space station. Make history as one of the first humans in history to own real estate in orbit.” As if it were promoting any old property in Aspen or Palm Beach, the site advertises short- and long-term leases for “luxury villas, commercial, retail and industrial space” — pun perhaps intended. They’re already in negotiations with booking agents, Alatorre says.

Yes, finally the very wealthy will be really, really free of the presence of the hoi polloi, their ultimate dream.

If you want more information, you can check out the website.

While I can see this maybe becoming reality at some point, 2027 seems highly unlikely.