Xenophobia and the story of Kabuliwala

We live in an age where many people are fleeing their native lands and seeking refuge in other countries. The causes for the creation of so many refugees are many, the most common being wars, economic hardships caused by climate change, and fears of persecution either as individuals or as members of some minority community that is being targeted by the majority community with the government either not doing anything about it or even condoning the abuses.

While I am technically not a refugee, I left Sri Lanka with my family because I fell into the last category. As such, it gives me a small window into the refugee mindset and know that leaving one’s country and all that is familiar for another land where one has to start afresh, sometimes not even knowing the language, is a very difficult decision, not made lightly. Hence refugees should be treated with compassion. But sadly that is often not the case. It is easy to view refugees as somehow threatening and many politicians have used them as an easy target to inflame nativist tendencies in the population to create hostility to the refugees.
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Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving day in the US.

Americans seem to have a love-hate relationship with this holiday. In many families it seems to be anticipated with dread at the thought of a large number of family members who do not share the same views and often do not get along with each other being expected to share a very long afternoon and evening together that can end up with arguments. And yet to not turn up can also cause problems, so it is a lose-lose proposition.

This Saturday Night Live sketch uses the framing of a Target advertisement to make this point.


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What NFTs are and how they work

I have been casually following the story about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) but had little idea what they were other than that an NFT was some form of digital work that one could own. The radio program On the Media had an entire show where they talked about it and that rekindled my interest and gave me some idea about this new world of speculation.

Host Brooke Gladstone discussed NFTs with Anil Dash, one of the people who in 2014 developed the idea that led to NFTs. Dash says that he and an artist friend Kevin McCoy did this as a blockchain-backed means for artists to assert ownership over their digital work. Dash now says that that initial goal of creating ownership rights for artists seems to be in danger of falling by the wayside, to be replaced by the kinds of speculative behavior that we have seen before with bubbles.
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What I like in a detective story

I read and watch detective stories a lot. I think it is because they are essentially puzzles to be solved and I am a puzzle solver at heart. I enjoy all kinds of puzzles. A ‘puzzle’ for me is any problem for which I think there should be a solution that lies within my grasp and ability. This is also the likely reason I was drawn to science because much of that also involves puzzle solving. In my spare time I do cryptic crosswords and I also play the card game bridge where each hand is essentially a puzzle where a task is set and you have to figure out the best way to reach it.

Over time, I have found that I have clear preferences as to the kind of detective story. They should be lean and spare, where the focus is almost exclusively on how the solution to how the crime was committed is worked out. I prefer that any violence be avoided, or if there is any, for it to take place off-stage with as little graphic detail as necessary. There does does not even need to be a murder. In some Sherlock Holmes stories, not only is there no murder, there is not even a crime but just a mystery to be solved.
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Extra-terrestrials are English speakers

The 2016 film Arrival that I reviewed here involved the sudden arrival of a fleet of alien spaceships at many locations on the Earth and had as a central plot the efforts by a linguist to overcome the language barrier and learn how to communicate with them.

But if we examine a map of all the reported UFO sightings over time, we see that almost all of them are in the English-speaking world, primarily the US and UK. This clearly shows that aliens also worry about communicating with us and have chosen to visit just those regions where the natives speak a language they understand, and that is English.

(Doonesbury)

How FOMO was used to swindle people

In the US where we are inundated with stories of the lifestyles of the rich, it should not be surprising that some people dream of joining that group. But most people are not born into wealth and need to find some way of getting there. Some have an entrepreneurial bent and try to market an idea. The tech world is appealing and the person who is held up as a model is the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. If you do not have an idea for a product or the stomach to do all the work of developing one, the next best thing is to identify someone who has and become an early investor so that one can reap the benefits if and when the product becomes wildly successful.

But identifying good ideas in the early stages is a gamble, especially if one is unfamiliar with the world in which it operates. What may seem like a terrific idea can turn out to be a smoke-and-mirrors exercise in which someone with very persuasive skills manages to convince rich people who lack the technical knowledge to cough up lots of money by promising a product that will revolutionize the field. The FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) phenomenon can be a useful lever of persuasion, where people fear that by not investing, they may be missing out on the equivalent of the next Apple.
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Vicious union busting tactics

Big companies like Amazon, despite making huge profits for its owners and shareholders, fight tooth-and-nail to prevent their employees from forming unions that could help provide better pay and working conditions.

In another excellent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver describes the lengths the companies will go to fight unionization.

High profile prisoners highlight awful prison conditions in the US

Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the leader of the far right group known as the Proud Boys, is currently serving a five-month prison sentence but has asked a judge to release him early because of the terrible prison conditions.

Henry “Enrique” Tarrio is serving a five-month sentence for stealing and burning a Black Lives Matter banner from a historic Black church in the capital, after Donald Trump’s election defeat.

On Monday, Tarrio asked a judge to release him, arguing that he has been exposed to inhumane conditions.

Asking that his sentence be reduced or that he be allowed to complete it under house arrest, he claimed to have been harassed by correctional officers and said his cell regularly floods with dirty water from a toilet in a neighboring cell.
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Tarrio described abusive guards, smoke-filled hallways and medical neglect, saying he witnessed a prisoner have a seizure who lay for a half hour before help arrived.
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According to his attorney, Tarrio has endured “serious abuses of his rights on a daily basis”, including jail employees repeatedly ignoring his requests for medical treatment, throwing cold, often inedible meals into his cell and denying access to running water.

“Mr Tarrio has been intimidated and antagonized by correctional staff to dissuade him from making complaints about the horrendous conditions,” Tarrio’s attorney, Luca Dansie, wrote.

Tarrio is hardly a sympathetic figure except to those on the far-right but that does not mean that he deserves to be subjected to the terrible conditions that exist in many US prisons. Nobody does. The fact that he is a high profile figure with access to the media has the benefit of bringing these conditions into the public eye. Perhaps prison reform is one issue where both the left and the right can get together and actually achieve something worthwhile. It is long overdue.

Black holes as dark matter candidates

As the search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) continues to be fruitless, advocates for alternatives to dark matter (such as Modified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND theories) to explain cosmic puzzles have been encouraged. But if the history of science is any guide, we should not expect the larger community of scientists to quickly embrace these alternative theories. This is because once a paradigm becomes dominant, as dark matter has, then it will not be dislodged until most of the variations within that framework have been explored and rejected. In the case of dark matter, a fresh search for WIMPs has been launched using extremely sensitive detectors that, if they still fail to detect them, will likely result in WIMPs being ruled out.
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Is your phone spying on you?

I am getting weary about hearing of all the ways that our devices are spying on us. The main ways in which we give away information are the sites that we visit and the searches we make. But we know about those and have grudgingly come to accept them as facts of life and the price we pay for the conveniences they provide. But there are other, more disturbing aspects, like that the cameras and the microphones on our devices may be surreptitiously recording us.

If you think your smartphone is spying on you, you’re probably right.

Apps are designed to track your moves, and your phone’s microphone can be picking up your conversations.

So if you’re suddenly bombarded with ads on your social media for things you’ve never searched for but have spoken about, it’s no coincidence.
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