A long overdue event

Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed by the US senate on a 53-47 vote to fill the vacancy on the US Supreme Court that will be created when retiring justice Stephen Breyer steps down in July. It is quite incredible that it has taken so long to have a woman of color on the bench. I have not blogged about it because it was almost certain that she would be confirmed and there was nothing about her nomination that was controversial, as she was very much in the legal mainstream and had no skeletons in her closet.

But the Republican party of Trump decided to make up outlandish stuff about her . Why? Because that is what they do. And their task of persuading their rabid base that Jackson was unqualified and even evil was made easier by the fact she was a woman and a person of color because we know that white men have the best legal minds and that everyone else must be an imposter, right?
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Amazon takes a leaf from George Orwell’s 1984

In his book 1984, George Orwell imagines a dystopian society where the rulers control people by restricting their language. It appears that Amazon has decided that that policy need not just be used by governments but can also be used by big companies.

AMAZON WILL BLOCK and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining to labor unions, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Intercept. An automatic word monitor would also block a variety of terms that could represent potential critiques of Amazon’s working conditions, like “slave labor,” “prison,” and “plantation,” as well as “restrooms” — presumably related to reports of Amazon employees relieving themselves in bottles to meet punishing quotas.
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Philosophy Is Essential to the Intelligent Design Debate by Mano Singham

Continuing my policy of putting my published non-technical articles on this site, this article titled Philosophy Is Essential to the Intelligent Design Debate was published by Physics Today in June 2002 (p. 48-51).

The background to this article is that back in 2002, the advocates of Intelligent Design creationism seemed to be everywhere, seeking to have their ideas included in K-12 school science curricula at least as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. These battles were fought at the state and local levels and involved state and local school boards. Ohio and Kansas were particular hot spots because they were revising their respective science standards and ID advocates saw an opportunity to influence the new standards, especially since school boards consist of elected people who may not have deep understandings of science and could be swayed by dubious arguments about what science was.
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Sri Lanka in deep crisis

Overshadowed by other world news such as the war in Ukraine, Sri Lanka has been in a state of deep crisis. The proximate cause is the depletion of foreign currency reserves to below $1 billion which has resulted in the country being unable to pay for the imports of some of the most basic commodities like fuel for both vehicles and cooking, fertilizer, and essential foodstuffs such as milk and sugar. Surgeries have been suspended due to a shortage of medical supplies. As a result of the shortage of fuel, there have been daily power blackouts lasting up to 13 hours (except in the capital city Colombo because of course the wealthy who live in those areas must never be inconvenienced) and long lines of people waiting for hours and sometimes even overnight trying to purchase fuel and food and even then coming up empty.
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The daring young man on a flying lawn chair

What happens when you have a crazy ambition – and achieve it?

Anyone in the US above a certain age will remember the strange story of a man who in 1982 attached 42 helium-filled balloons to a chaise lawn chair so that he could float up into the sky and drift slowly over the countryside. It was an insane idea but he actually carried it out. But he rose much higher than he anticipated, to over 16,000 feet, so that he was in the flight path of commercial jets whose pilots radioed back to airport control about seeing a man in a lawn chair.

Back in 1998, George Plimpton wrote about Larry Walters’ flight. It is not that Walters did not take precautions. He included a parachute plus “a two-way radio; an altimeter; a hand compass; a flashlight; extra batteries; a medical kit; a pocketknife; eight plastic bottles of water to be placed on the sides of the chair, for ballast; a package of beef jerky; a road map of California; a camera; two litres of Coca-Cola; and a B.B. gun, for popping the balloons.”
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Amazon workers succeed in union effort

I was surprised and pleased that yesterday a majority of the 8,000 employees at one of the four Staten Island, NY Amazon warehouses voted in favor of forming a union by a margin of 2,654 to 2,131. A similar vote at a Bessemer, AL warehouse is too close to call at the moment. Even the latter stand-off is encouraging since Alabama is not a union-friendly region, unlike Staten Island.

Progressives hailed Friday’s unionization vote by employees at an Amazon warehouse in New York City as a historic victory for workers across the United States and an inspiring call to action for others seeking to organize.

“This is the catalyst for the revolution.”

In what’s being described as a “tremendous upset” of “David versus Goliath” proportions, employees at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island—led by fired worker Chris Smalls—defeated a multimillion-dollar union-busting effort by one of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations and voted to form the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).

“It’s official,” ALU tweeted after the vote. “Amazon Labor Union is the first Amazon union in U.S. history. Power to the people!”

“This is the catalyst for the revolution,” Smalls, the ALU organizer and president, said while celebrating the vote.

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Dangerous food trends

It is quite astonishing to me how much attention some people pay to their diets, even if they have no medical condition that requires them to be careful about what they eat or drink. This feeling that certain diets can be the pathway to good health and longevity has been exploited by some to promote various fads that can, in fact, be dangerous. This article describes some popular fads that one should be very wary of.

This article warns that excessive fears about food, that come under the heading of ‘clean eating’, can lead to obsessive behavior and all manner of problems.
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TV Review: The Plot to Overturn the Election

The so-called ‘Big Lie’, the idea that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election and that there was a major conspiracy to steal the election and give it to Joe Biden, is so preposterous that one has to be delusional to give it any credence. And yet, it seems like many Republicans have bought into it.

The excellent investigative journalism outfit ProPublica has combined with the PBS program Frontline to produce an absorbing 53-minute documentary in which correspondent A. C. Thompson (who has previously investigated hate groups) tracks down the origins of the Big Lie, the people behind it, and their goal of trying to rig future elections to get the results they want. Although I have been following this story closely, I learned a lot of new things about it.

The varied responses to the monk problem reveals important insights

I was a little surprised at the length of the comment thread in the post about the logic puzzle involving the monk Gaito going up and down a hill. On the one hand, I thought that there were some excellent explanations of why there had to be at least one instant where the monk was at the same location at the same time. These involved visualizing the situation in slightly different ways, such as instead of having one monk go up and down on two different days, having two monks going up and down on the same day or using graphs or films and so on.

But clearly these arguments were not persuasive enough for some and I have been trying to think why this might be so. In my teaching experience, it is often the case that what seems obvious to you as a teacher is by no means so to the student. It is no use repeating the same explanation more slowly or (worse) more loudly or (much worse) exasperatedly. There is clearly some opposing argument that the student finds persuasive that makes them reject your argument and yet they may not be able to identify and articulate what it is. Instead they feel that there must be some flaw in your reasoning that they cannot put their finger on. It is more fruitful as a teacher to try and figure out what their argument might be, rather than reiterating your own.
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