Exodus of ob-gyns from Texas

The state of Texas has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, resulting in the needless deaths of women whom doctors were fearful of treating for pregnancy-related problems because the state could prosecute them under the law. ProPublica has been exposing these cases and reports on yet another one.

Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.

Over the course of six hours on June 11, 2023, Porsha Ngumezi had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land that she’d needed two transfusions. She was anxious to get home to her young sons, but, according to a nurse’s notes, she was still “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”
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Randomizing a deck of cards

I like the card game bridge and play in local duplicate club tournaments about twice a week. Depending on the game or the preference of the director, the hands that are played are either shuffled and dealt by the players at the beginning of the session or are hands that have been previously generated by a computer and arranged by a dedicated card sorter.

In bridge, each of the four players starts with 13 cards and if the deck of cards has been completely randomized before being dealt, the distribution of the four suits (in any order) can vary from somewhat even distributions such as 4-4-3-2 (21.6% probability) to the next most likely 5-3-3-2 (15.5%), 5-4-3-1- (12.9%). 5-4-2-2- (10.6%), 4-3-3-3 (10.5%) and then starts dropping sharply until it gets to 9-3-1-0 (0.01%). More skewed distributions are even rarer. (The Official Encyclopaedia of Bridge (1984))

A common refrain that I hear from players at the table is that they feel that the hands that are generated by the computer tend to have more skewed distributions than the ones shuffled and dealt at the table. They think that whoever is in charge of the computer that generates the hands tend to program it that way in order to provide greater challenge. I heard this so often that I became curious if this was the case and looked it up to see if there was anything to this bit of bridge folklore.
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Can a passenger stop a self-driving car?

The above question was prompted by a strange dream I had last night. I was in the front passenger seat of a car that supposedly had self-driving capabilities. The owner of the car was in the driver’s seat and at one point got out to do something or other. The car started off without him and proceeded to go somewhere unknown to me. In the dream, I was wondering how to bring the car to a halt but had no idea what to do. In my dream, I looked for the steering wheel and brake pedal and other standard control features of ordinary cars but since I have never been in a self-driving vehicle, my dream did not have that specific information.
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Idaho region is precursor to RFK Jr.

The health department in a region of the state of Idaho has been ordered to stop providing covid-19 vaccines to the public.

A regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID-19 vaccines to residents in six counties after a narrow decision by its board.

Southwest District Health appears to be the first in the nation to be restricted from giving COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccinations are an essential function of a public health department.

While policymakers in Texas banned health departments from promoting COVID vaccines and Florida’s surgeon general bucked medical consensus to recommend against the vaccine, governmental bodies across the country haven’t blocked the vaccines outright.

This is just one region in one state. But creepy Donald Trump seems to have promised nutcase RFK Jr. a free hand in deciding policies over all food and health-related issues and that would be a disaster.
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Why are baby seals white?

I was reading something about jigsaw puzzles that reminded me of a very difficult puzzle I did a long time ago that consisted of a white baby seal on an ice floe. Almost the entire puzzle was shades of white with just the seal’s eyes and nose being black. The image below is not from the puzzle but you can see why such a puzzle would be difficult.

While thinking about it, I was reminded of the cruel practice of killing baby seals, usually by beating their heads in with clubs, because their white fur is valuable.
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Standing desks are now bad for you?


I have written before about how people seeking healthy lifestyle choices can be whipsawed by advice that can veer wildly, with things that are supposed to be good for you one day becoming demonized the next. This happens with diets as well as physical activity.

The latest reversal deals with ‘standing desks’, desks at which you must stand in order to work. These were meant to combat the supposed ill-effects of being seated all day at our desks, something that office workers are prone to do. I know several people who have them in their offices and even in their homes.

Now new research suggest that standing all day may also be bad for you.
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The danger of storm complacency

Hurricanes are extremely volatile events, highly sensitive to local conditions. They form quickly, their strengths can rise and fall rapidly, and their paths are can veer abruptly. Given all that, it is quite remarkable how weather scientists are able to predict things about them as much as they can. But because of their volatility, these predictions necessarily lack absolute certainty and contain margins of error. Unfortunately, many people do not appreciate this fact and when events turn out differently from what was announced, they tend to feel that either the forecasters were incompetent or that they were deliberately misled. (In my book The Great Paradox of Science, I spend considerable time making the case that teaching students and adults about the uncertainty inherent in almost all scientific measurements is an important element in understanding the nature of science. But unfortunately, very little time is spent on it.)
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MAGAwoman explains how and why the weather is being manipulated

Jason Selvig who, along with Davram Stiefler, makes up the comedy duo The Good Liars talks to a woman attending a creepy Trump event and she explains how and why the government is intensifying the strength of hurricanes.

Will this be the next right wing freakout?

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has signed into law a ban on all plastic bags given out by grocery stores.

“Paper or plastic” will no longer be a choice at grocery store checkout lines in California under a new law signed on Sunday by the governor, Gavin Newsom, that bans all plastic shopping bags.

California had already banned thin plastic shopping bags at supermarkets and other stores, but shoppers could purchase bags made with a thicker plastic that purportedly made them reusable and recyclable.

The new measure, approved by state legislators last month, bans all plastic shopping bags starting in 2026. Consumers who don’t bring their own bags will now simply be asked if they want a paper bag.

State senator Catherine Blakespear, one of the bill’s supporters, said people were not reusing or recycling any plastic bags. She pointed to a state study that found that the amount of plastic shopping bags trashed a person grew from 8lb (3.6kg) a year in 2004 to 11lb a year in 2021.

Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, said the previous bag ban passed a decade ago didn’t reduce the overall use of plastic.

“We are literally choking our planet with plastic waste,” she said in February.

The environmental non-profit Oceana applauded Newsom for signing the bill and “safeguarding California’s coastline, marine life, and communities from single-use plastic grocery bags”.

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Chatting with Jehovah’s Witnesses

On Saturday morning there was a knock on my door. This is unusual since the condominium complex that I live in is not on a through street and hence the only people who knock on doors tend to be delivery people and I rarely order anything. When I opened the door, there were two women aged 65 or thereabouts standing there and I immediately guessed that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

After saying hello, one woman (let’s call her A) asked me whether I read the Bible and I said that I used to but no longer. She asked me why and I said that it no longer made any sense to me. The other woman (let’s call her B) then asked me whether I stopped reading because of the way that the world was these days and I said no, that was not it, but that I could not reconcile the idea of a god with what the laws of science said about how the world works. B was curious and asked me what scientific field I was referring to and I said physics.
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