The pandemic may be the death of the coal industry

While the economy struggles to recover from the pandemic, an unexpected casualty that may not survive is the coal industry.

The global coal industry will “never recover” from the Covid-19 pandemic, industry observers predict, because the crisis has proved renewable energy is cheaper for consumers and a safer bet for investors.

A long-term shift away from dirty fossil fuels has accelerated during the lockdown, bringing forward power plant closures in several countries and providing new evidence that humanity’s coal use may finally have peaked after more than 200 years.
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The pandemic has not been the CDC’s finest hour

One of the things that this pandemic has revealed is how diminished the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) has become. This organization was once highly respected around the world and should have been front and center during the crisis because it has the expertise and resources to marshal all the information and provide guidance to the public. The experts from the CDC should have been the people holding daily press conferences, calling upon other experts in the field of infectious disease like Anthony Fauci who heads the Infectious Diseases division of the National Institutes of Health.
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The mystery surrounding the world’s longest-lived person

A few years ago, I attended a seminar by a researcher on aging. He explained what goes on when a person ages and also what kinds of behaviors can shorten or prolong life. Towards the end of the talk he showed a slide of a smiling older woman whom he identified as a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 at the age of 122 and held the record for being the world’s oldest person ever. Calment would tell people that her ‘secret’ was that she drank and smoked, thus defying the best medical advice. The researcher used that amusing anecdote to illustrate that one can always find outliers for any statistical result.
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A fun party exercise illustrates a mathematics theorem

I know, I know, that parties seem to have become extinct but let us assume that at some point we will again begin to have gatherings of more than just the people in our own households. When that happens, here is a fun exercise you can do. Define as mutual acquaintances as any two people who have met at least once before this occasion, and mutual strangers as any two people who have just met for the first time. It actually does not have to be done at parties but with any group of six or more people.
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Building slack into systems

What the covid-19 pandemic has revealed, at least as far as the US is concerned, is how delicately balanced the supply and distribution systems are. As long as things are normal, everything appears to run smoothly. But given a large enough disruption, the system can not only not cope, it cannot reconfigure itself quickly enough to meet the challenge. In this case, we have discovered that the supply of goods and services is highly dependent on a just-in-time supply chains for each item that are finely tuned for maximum efficiency and eliminate the need for costly stockpiling of supplies. But the sudden change in the way people live and work has resulted in shortages in some areas along with gluts in others, with no means for quickly redistributing the resources to reach a new equilibrium.
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Everything is now part of the culture wars

Trump’s policies on dealing with the pandemic have been disastrous from the start. After not recognizing the need to take action for about a month early on, a delay that is estimated to have resulted in about 36,000 additional deaths. He has also not provided funding for widespread testing, apparently fearing that would increase the numbers and make him look bad, touted bizarre and even dangerous treatments for covid-19, promised unrealistically quick discoveries of a vaccine, and urged the reopening the country earlier than health experts recommend.
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Solitude and loneliness

Former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has written a book that argues that loneliness is a serious problem in the US and its negative effects are taking a physical toll on people as well, not just an emotional one. Although he wrote his book before the pandemic broke, the topic has considerable resonance now.

Murthy begins his story by detailing his travels across the U.S., where as surgeon general he encountered a disturbing theme: “There was something about our disconnection from one another that was making people’s lives worse than they had to be.” The stories weren’t always easy to unearth; many people were embarrassed by how they felt. “This shame,” he writes, “was particularly acute in professional cultures, like law and medicine, that promote independent strength as a virtue.”

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