Fascinating documentary on the north and south poles

In a break from the ‘all Bernie, all the time’ mode that this blog has been in recently, I want to alert readers to the PBS documentary series Nova that has produced a fascinating two-hour documentary titled Polar Extremes about how the polar regions have experienced dramatic shifts during the history of the Earth. There have been periods when the poles had warm climates and consisted of swamps and forests and at other times when the entire Earth was covered with a sheet of ice.
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Beware of Catalina

Some of you may have noticed that I did not post anything yesterday. That was because on Monday evening, I decided to upgrade the operating system of my MAC computer to the latest version called Catalina that was released in October 2019 and had got some pretty good reviews. Since the OS I had been using (El Capitan) was pretty old, I felt that I should upgrade since older software is more vulnerable to hacks.
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A strange and sad story

I am not sure what to make of this story about a doctor who took his own life possibly because of regrets that he had provided parents with fraudulent documents that their their children were vaccinated when they were not. These were parents who wanted their children to be vaccinated but he had decided in the last decade of his life that vaccinations were harmful and unilaterally pretended to vaccinate them.
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What it is like to experience an earthquake

I have been lucky to never experience a serious earthquake, the closest being slight tremors that I would likely not have even noticed if I had been outdoors or asleep. The video below was taken at an airport during the 2011 earthquake in Japan. It is quite terrifying. The tremors last for about two minutes.

What amazes me is that the person taking the video was so committed to doing so that they did not seek to run outside to avoid being injured if the balcony they were on collapsed, or to hide under something to prevent being hit by falling debris.

Speech pathologist argues that Donald Trump has aphasia

It is clear that when Donald Trump speaks extemporaneously, he goes off at weird tangents and finds it hard to sustain a coherent train of thought, meandering all over the place, laced with non-sequiturs. A retired speech pathologist says that when you analyze his speeches and compare them with the way he spoke long ago, that it is clear that he has a serious language disorder called aphasia.
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Science and the big questions

Chemist Peter Atkins writes that it is only science that can answer real big questions, as opposed to invented ones such as Why are we here? What are the attributes of the soul?.

They are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence. Thus, as there is no evidence for the Universe having a purpose, there is no point in trying to establish its purpose or to explore the consequences of that purported purpose. As there is no evidence for the existence of a soul (except in a metaphorical sense), there is no point in spending time wondering what the properties of that soul might be should the concept ever be substantiated. Most questions of this class are a waste of time; and because they are not open to rational discourse, at worst they are resolved only by resort to the sword, the bomb or the flame.

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