See Yale and die?

Colleges and Universities are beginning their new academic year. When I was still teaching, I used to enjoy the week before classes began when you saw new students excitedly arriving on campus with their families to move into the dorms. It was a feeling of new beginnings and possibilities. My university had a whole slew of programs during orientation week for new students that were a mixture of information providing and socializing. At the end of it just before classes began, we had a big culminating event for all the new students in the huge Severance Hall, home of the famed Cleveland Orchestra. I would be one of the speakers at this event and each year, I would try to get students excited about what I felt was the chief attraction of being at a university.
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Trump attacks New Zealand

You can tell that the charges that Trump has been utterly incompetent in the way that he has handled the pandemic leading to far more people dying than necessary, is getting under his skin by the way that he gloated yesterday when New Zealand reported a cluster of new cases. That country and its leader Jacinda Ardern had been widely praised for their vigorous and decisive science-based response that resulted in a period of over 100 days with no new cases. To be compared unfavorably to the leader of another country, and a woman at that, must have really stung.
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Review of my book

Chris, a long time reader of this blog, took up my request to readers to write a review of my book after reading it and because he captured so well some of the things that I was trying to say, I am reproducing it here.

I enjoyed this book. It provided a useful framework for thinking about and discussing science as it affects our daily lives. The later chapters added a philosophical perspective I had not anticipated.

I liked the Tree of Science metaphor and selected quotes from the Bible scattered throughout the book. At one time religion had a more active interest in the answers to scientific questions. When along the Tree of Science would you propose that the Last Common Universal Ancestor of science and religion existed?

The case study on the age of the earth was very interesting, and perhaps my favorite part of the book. I had no idea that the accepted value varied so widely over time and that the eventual convergence at 4.54 billion years was the result of a multidisciplinary approach that gradually filled in a complete picture from seemingly disparate data points. This networked approach made me think of a spider web where each link is interconnected and dependent on the links around it. At the same time, weak portions of the web can be rebuilt in situ without the entire web collapsing.

It also was interesting to read about the life cycles of various theories and in particular how they can still be useful even when superseded by something better, as in the case of Newton’s laws of motion.

The parts of the book that dealt with science deniers and misinformation seem acutely relevant during the pandemic crisis. I noticed many of the types of bad-faith arguments used to try to discredit science that were discussed are being brandished about in the media almost constantly. I am hopeful that now I will be in a better position to argue that the conclusions of experts can be trusted because they are the result of a robust system that is constantly revising itself from within.

I hope other blog readers will buy the book and then write their own reviews and post them here and on the many websites that allow for readers to post reviews.

Thanks, Chris!

The scientific history of the North American continent

The PBS science program Nova has an excellent three-part series that was first broadcast in 2015 on the history of the continent. They use nice special effects to bring vividly to life the very slow processes of geology and biology. Each episode lasts about 50 minutes.

The first one deals with the geologic history.

The second deals with the evolution of life.

The third deals with humans. I had thought that there were just two theories for how humans arrived on this continent. Either they came from the east and crossed the Bering Strait land bridge that was exposed during the last Ice Age when ocean levels receded. Or they came from the west by ships that hugged the North Atlantic coastlines. [Correction: I had misremembered. I recalled something about people coming to the Americas earlier from the west but that ‘earlier’ only meant before Columbus and not that they were the first inhabitants.] But this program says that the earliest human remains have been found on islands in the Pacific just off the west coast of the continent, indicating that they must have come from the east by boats. This was new to me and I need to look into it.

Whenever I see these programs, I am always impressed by the grandeur of the story being told and the dogged work of so many scientists who have been able to piece together the narrative of things that occurred long before there were any humans to observe them.

And that feeling is always followed by a sense of sadness that those who believe in a 6,000 year old Earth are missing out on that sense of wonder. Oh sure, maybe the belief that “God made everything” fills them with a different sense of wonder but that seems so shallow to me.

College football season likely to be canceled

Today comes welcome news that the Big Ten conference made up of 14 of the biggest powerhouses in college football (it started out with just 10 but retained the name after expanding its roster) has canceled the upcoming fall season due to the pandemic. Another smaller conference had announced its cancellation a couple of days ago.

The Big Ten has voted to cancel the 2020 college football season in a historic move that stems from concerns related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, multiple people with knowledge of the decision confirmed to the Free Press.

The sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the decision. A formal announcement is expected to Tuesday, the sources said.

The presidents voted, 12-2, Sunday to end the fall sports in the conference. Michigan and Michigan State — which both has physicians as presidents — voted to end the season, sources said. Only Nebraska and Iowa voted to play, Dan Patrick said on his radio show Monday.

The move comes two days after the Mid-American Conference became the first in the FBS to cancel ts season, and sources told the Free Press the Big Ten is trying to coordinate its announcement with other Power Five conferences.

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How to avoid being seen with Trump

As Trump’s unpopularity increases, elected Republican officials are trying to edge away from him. This was hard to do during the primary races where the Trump fanatics have the most clout but once they got their party’s nomination they are trying to broaden their appeal. Apparently the party’s congressional leaders, including senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, worried about suffering major losses in November, have quietly told candidates that they can distance themselves from Trump if they feel the need.
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Pot, meet kettle

It is pretty much indisputable that New Zealand has done much, much better at containing the coronavirus than the US. The leadership shown by the NZ government stands in stark contrast to the utter shambles that we have seen in the US. That country has had just 1,569 cases and 22 deaths so far, compared to over five million cases and 163,000 deaths in the US. Life in that country seems to have pretty much gone back to normal, though the government stands ready to take quick action if there is any sign of the virus coming back.
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The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and its aftermath

The current pandemic has rekindled a lot of interest in the 1918 pandemic where the misleadingly labeled Spanish flu killed anywhere between 50 and 100 million people.

As the pandemic reached epic proportions in the fall of 1918, it became commonly known as the “Spanish Flu” or the “Spanish Lady” in the United States and Europe. Many assumed this was because the sickness had originated on the Iberian Peninsula, but the nickname was actually the result of a widespread misunderstanding.

Spain was one of only a few major European countries to remain neutral during World War I. Unlike in the Allied and Central Powers nations, where wartime censors suppressed news of the flu to avoid affecting morale, the Spanish media was free to report on it in gory detail. News of the sickness first made headlines in Madrid in late-May 1918, and coverage only increased after the Spanish King Alfonso XIII came down with a nasty case a week later. Since nations undergoing a media blackout could only read in depth accounts from Spanish news sources, they naturally assumed that the country was the pandemic’s ground zero. The Spanish, meanwhile, believed the virus had spread to them from France, so they took to calling it the “French Flu.”

While it’s unlikely that the “Spanish Flu” originated in Spain, scientists are still unsure of its source. France, China and Britain have all been suggested as the potential birthplace of the virus, as has the United States, where the first known case was reported at a military base in Kansas on March 11, 1918. Researchers have also conducted extensive studies on the remains of victims of the pandemic, but they have yet to discover why the strain that ravaged the world in 1918 was so lethal.

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Lasers and eye damage

The US attorney general Bill Barr has defended the massive and violent federal response to the demonstration in Portland by arguing that the protestors were the ones who were being violent and that the security forces were just defending themselves and government property.

Barr said federal authorities had a duty to defend against violent attacks and rioters, and said protesters have attempted to burn down the building, shot commercial fireworks, and used pellet guns and slingshots to shoot projectiles that have injured federal officers “to the bone” as well as lasers that have damaged officers’ eyesight.

Are these claims true? Barr is a loyal follower of Donald Trump and hence one must assume that, like Trump, he is lying unless he can prove otherwise. I have not seen a detailed fact-check of those claims of injuries, such as medical reports or independent third party observations.
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The US should follow New Zealand’s lead for dealing with the pandemic

Yesterday brought some encouraging news of a survey that shows that most Americans do not believe Trump’s assertions that the US is doing a better job of dealing with the pandemic than other countries, and they are looking for the government to issue aggressive national plan to fight the epidemic and are willing to wear masks and accept other restrictions.
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