Unwarranted anxiety over memory lapses

I am at the age when people begin to worry about the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. It does not help that this topic keeps surfacing in conversations among age-peers in one’s family and friends and acquaintances, thus keeping it at the forefront of one’s mind. But it is easy for people who are not clinicians trained in the symptoms of these diseases to become unduly alarmed over things that are merely the effects of normal aging and not signs of serious cognitive decline. Misplacing items, being unable to recall the name of an object or an actor in a TV show or film, forgetting why one went into a room, are among the things that cause unwarranted uneasiness.

This article tries to dispel some of those concerns, by distinguishing between normal aging-associated memory loss and mild cognitive impairment. Every year about 10-15% of people with mild cognitive impairment will develop dementia.
[Read more…]

Self checkouts are to be avoided

My local grocery store has self-checkout lines. These were introduced about three decades ago but I almost never use them. This is partly because I do not like to feel that I may be contributing to the elimination of jobs for cashiers and partly because while it is fine for reading bar codes for items, it is a nuisance when I buy unpackaged fresh produce that requires me to weigh the item and then press the correct code identifying the item. The cashiers do this much more efficiently. In addition, over time you get to know the cashiers and can engage in pleasantries with them. But I sometimes wonder whether I am some kind of closet technophobe and should use them more.

But this article says that self-checkouts are not good for the workers nor the stores nor customers.

In 2018, just 18% of all grocery store transactions went through a self-checkout, rising to 30% last year. Walmart, Kroger, Dollar General, and Albertson’s are now among retail chains testing out full self-checkout stores.

That’s not something we should get excited about, says Christopher Andrews, a sociologist who examined the kiosks in his 2018 book, The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. Despite what grocery stores and kiosk manufacturers claim, research shows self-checkouts aren’t actually any faster than a regular checkout line, Andrews says. “It only feels like it because your time is occupied doing tasks, rather than paying attention to each second ticking away.”
[Read more…]

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad”

The sentiment “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” has ancient roots but was perhaps most famously found in the poem The Masque of Pandora written in 1875 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who put these words into the mouth of Prometheus. How I interpret it is that if you make people mad, they will destroy themselves, saving you the bother of doing so.

I was thinking about these words while pondering the actions of three people: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Donald Trump since all three seem to be on the path of self-destruction. I am not implying that they are mad but they do seem, on the basis of past success, to suffer from an irrational overweening confidence in their own powers, and this has led to rash decisions that threaten to bring them down.
[Read more…]

The January 6th committee hearings end with criminal referrals for Trump and others

The hearings have just wound up with a unanimous vote to make criminal referrals to the department of justice on four counts:

I. Obstruction of an Official Proceeding (18 U.S.C. § 1512(c))
II. Conspiracy to Defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371
III. Conspiracy to Make a False Statement (18 U.S.C. §§ 371, 1001)
IV. “Incite,” “Assist” or “Aid and Comfort” an Insurrection (18 U.S.C. § 2383)

While the department of justice is not obligated to prosecute based on these referrals, they will add to the pressure to do so. These charges all carry length prison sentences if found guilty and Trump in particular would be disqualified from any future federal or state office if found guilty of the insurrection charge.
[Read more…]

The invention of the table knife

One tends to think of everyday objects that are not technologically advanced as if they had somehow more or less accidentally come into being, not that they were designed by someone. Take for example the common table/dinner/butter knife. It appears that it was invented by Cardinal Richelieu in 1637.

Perhaps weary of watching dinner guests picking their teeth with the points of their daggers, Cardinal Richelieu orders the blades of his dinnerware to be ground down and rounded off. Et voilà, the modern dinner knife is born.

Prior to Richelieu’s flash of inspiration (or simple revulsion at bad manners), diners typically used hunting daggers to spear their morsels, which were then conveyed to the mouth by hand or with the help of a spoon. The fork, the implement that really revolutionized chowing down, had existed since biblical times. Despite its utility, however, the fork remained a relative rarity in the West until the 17th century, even among the French royals whom Richelieu served with unswerving devotion.

Richelieu’s knives became the rage among the court, and soon everyone who was anyone in France had a set. The dinner knife became commonplace throughout France after Louis XIV — who, like most kings, had his own reasons for not wanting sharp blades and pointed tips around — decreed its universality. Soon afterward, the dinner knife found its way throughout continental Europe to England and, eventually, the American colonies.

So there you are. An answer to a question that you may have never thought to ask.

Get rid of penalty shoot outs in soccer

Argentina beat France in the World Cup final earlier today. The game was decided by a penalty shoot out after the score was tied at 3-3 after extra time. Five of the 15 games in the knockout round were decided by this method: Croatia v. Japan and Morocco v. Spain in the round of 16; Croatia v. Brazil and Argentina v. Netherlands in the quarter-finals, and the final. This was the most number of shoot outs in the knock out rounds in World Cup history.

I think the penalty shoot out is an unsatisfactory way of deciding games. I think this system does not adequately reflect the merits of the competing teams. Each of the five losing teams (Japan, Spain, Brazil, Netherlands, and France) may feel that they should not have lost. I wrote about this back in 2021 (revised slightly here) after Italy beat England on penalties in the European Cup, describing what I think might be a better system.
[Read more…]

How to deal with the holiday season if you are an introvert

We are in the holiday season when parties seem to be obligatory. Getting together with family and friends can be enjoyable but for introverts like me, too many functions with too many people that last too long can be tiresome. It is not the case, as is commonly assumed, that introverts do not like the company of others. They do and they often have many friends. It is that introverts feel drained by the company of others and need solitude to recharge, while extroverts get energized by the presence of others and get drained when they are alone. So the problem for introverts is that parties can come thick and fast in the holiday season and they have too few times when they can be alone.
[Read more…]

Politics, race, and class in West Indies cricket

The game of cricket was invented in England and exported by them to their colonies so that expatriates could continue to play it. But the game fascinated the locals who took to it with such enthusiasm that many of those countries now routinely field stronger teams than England. One of the first colonies where people of color became serious challengers was the West Indies, which is not a single country but a collection of many independent island nations in the Caribbean that banded together to field a single team. For a long time, the administration of the game was in the hands of English expatriates who retained control and appointed the captain of the team and made the selections, even as the dominant players were people of the islands.
[Read more…]

Is 2024 going to be a rerun of 2016?

In the US, there is no such thing as an election season. General elections nominally occur every even year but that is only mostly true for races for national office. State and local elections often occur in odd years as well. Campaigning for the next election begins immediately after one election has ended but that is only open campaigning. Preparations for the subsequent election are usually being laid before any election ends.

So it is unsurprising that there are already many discussions about the 2024 presidential election, even though the predictions that are made just after a mid-term election are usually completely off the mark as to who will actually make it to the finish line two years later. But that does not stop the punditocracy from engaging in endless speculations. This time though, there is actually something concrete to talk about because Donald Trump has already announced that he will run and that has to be taken seriously because he did win in 2016.
[Read more…]

Strikes in the UK

The UK is about to experience a wave of strikes, starting with the nurses unions.

Tens of thousands of nurses across the United Kingdom are set to walk off the job Thursday in what’s been described as the largest-ever strike by National Health Service workers, who said they were forced to act after the government refused to negotiate over pay amid painfully high inflation.

The walkout represents NHS nurses’ first national strike, and it comes as U.K. rail and postal workers are also taking major labor actions in response to falling real pay, meager benefits, and worsening conditions.
…

The RCN [Royal College of Nursing] said a strike became inevitable after U.K. ministers declined every offer to start formal pay negotiations. Earlier this week, [Pat] Cullen [general secretary and chief executive of the RCN] met with Tory Health Secretary Steve Barclay in a last-ditch effort to discuss pay before launching the national strike, but he refused to budge.

“I asked several times to discuss pay and each time we returned to the same thing—that there was no extra money on the table, and that they would not be discussing pay with me,” Cullen said. “I needed to come out of this meeting with something serious to show nursing staff why they should not strike this week. Regrettably, they’re not getting an extra penny.”

Jonathan Pie says that all those striking deserve the increases in wages and benefits and job security they are asking for.

On a personal note, I have great fondness for the British nursing profession. I spent a lot of time as a child in UK hospitals and one of the main things that stands out for me in my memory are the nurses. They were briskly efficient but also kind and caring. I would give them anything they asked for.