Subdued New Year’s Eve celebrations

My idea of a great New Year’s eve is to spend it at home and go to bed at the usual time. On a few occasions I have been invited to a friend’s house for a party and everyone was given a pointy hat and noisemaker and all watched the TV and waited for the clock to run down and the ball to drop before letting out a cheer and then going around wishing everyone. I took part in these because the people are nice and I did not want to be a grouch but it all seemed so strained and artificial.

This year it looks like much of the world will be cutting back on such celebrations. France has banned gatherings and has assigned 100,000 police to break up parties and enforce a curfew. New York City has announced that Times Square, where revelers usually gather, has been closed and the traditional ball drop has been canceled.
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My talk on the myths surrounding Copernicus

There are a lot of false beliefs surrounding the response to Copernicus’s ideas about the universe being heliocentric rather than geocentric, one of the most prominent being that his ideas were strongly opposed because they demoted the Earth and human beings from the privileged position of being at the center of the universe.

I have written on this topic before, including in my book The Great Paradox of Science, and will be giving a short talk on this from 3:45pm-4:15pm (Pacific Time in the US) on Saturday, January 2, 2021.

The talk is part of the annual one-day Skepticamp conference held in Monterey, though this year it will be virtual on Zoom and free and open to anyone. To see the full program and the link to join, go here.

The dark side of randomized double-blind studies

While randomized double-blind tests have become the gold standard for testing of various hypotheses, they also raise some ethical questions for which there are no easy answers. In the case of the covid-19 vaccine trials, there were discussions as to when the study should be unblinded so that those in the placebo group could also be vaccinated. Commenter Bethany said that a co-worker was in the Pfizer study and told her that it has been unblinded.
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The greatest scientist ever?

The world has marveled at the speed with which the vaccines for covid-19 were developed. The time of less than one year is the quickest on record. What was the previous record holder? It was the vaccine for mumps, which took four years. But that vaccine was developed in 1967 by a scientist named Maurice Hilleman working with just two assistants, without all the technology that is now available to quickly sequence the virus genome and the problem attacked by large international teams with huge amounts of funding.
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Ignorance of statistics can kill you

An evangelical pastor in Fort Worth, Texas mocked and dismissed the covid-19 safety guidelines and said that he was going to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family with no restrictions.

Pastor Todd Dunn had been urging “Faith over fear!” since the COVID-19 pandemic started in March. Just before Thanksgiving, he posted a message on Facebook dismissing precautionary measures advised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to keep wearing masks and avoid gatherings with family members who don’t live in the same house.

“I’m not wearing a mask when around my family like the CDC requests and we are traveling so we’ll take our chances,” Dunn’s Facebook post read. “And to top it off we are huggers so there you go! There will be no social distancing CDC. Faith over fear!!”

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Driverless delivery service

I have been following the developments in driverless vehicles with interest. It is not just out of curiosity about the science and technology behind it, though those things do have considerable interest. It is also out of potential personal benefit. As I get older, I am aware that at some point it may not be safe for me to operate a vehicle. That would definitely restrict my movements though the ride share services have solved part of the problem.
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Ocean foam invades some Australian beaches

Australia is famously home to forms of nature not found in other parts of the world. And now, sea foam has been appearing on the beaches of parts of Australia, bringing with it all manner of things, including snakes.

People are being warned to stay out of sea foam that has appeared on the beaches of northern New South Wales and Queensland in the wake of severe storms this week, with sea snakes and hazardous material hidden in it.

Storms have lashed the two states, bringing heavy rain, flooding and coastal erosion. The foam is formed by the churning of seawater with algae, salts, fats and other pollutants.
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Nathan Fife, Gold Coast Lifesaving services supervisor at Surf Lifesaving Australia, told Guardian Australia the foam was not good for people’s health.

“Health-wise it’s probably not great to let your kids play in it,” he said. “Also the marine creatures that might get in it, like sea snakes.”

According to the Marine Education Society of Australasia, there are 32 species of sea snakes found around Australia. While they are venomous, the risk of death is low.

The sale of the foam is pretty impressive.

Is this ocean foam phenomenon peculiar to Australia? If so, why?

So why is this a bad thing, exactly?

In a speech, Mike Pence said that “”[Democrats] want to make rich people poorer, and poor people more comfortable.” As if that’s a bad thing. The idea that poor people should get a break even once in a while strikes terror in the hearts of these sociopaths.

It’s official: We are a nation of idiots

A group of massless people invaded a Target store and marched through it shouting “Freedom!” and “This is America!” and also, inexplicably,”Library Card!” (At least, that is what that last one sounded like.)

I can understand a person feeling, however wrongly, that wearing a mask is an infringement of their rights. But to care so much about it that they go out and recruit other people to engage in such an absurd stunt is to display idiocy of a high order

Can we all agree that the very lowest priority for getting the vaccines should be people like those in the Target store who are deliberately flouting the guidelines and needlessly putting other people at risk just to make a silly political point?

Seth Meyers makes the case for others who should be on the bottom of the list.