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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But really, who’s on first?

Fox News personality Laura Ingraham is an awful person similar to Tucker Carlson, using her show to promote the most hateful views. To appreciate this clip, all you have to know is that there is apparently a show on Netflix called You that she has clearly never heard of. (I had never heard of it either but I am notoriously clueless when it comes to popular culture.)

The difficulty of gauging Trump’s strength

I predicted that once Donald Trump was out of office, his ability to draw large crowds to his rallies would diminish as people wearied of hearing the same stuff over and over again. It looks like I was wrong. He has been holding allies like the one in Iowa that drew a large audience. Since this is the first state to vote in presidential primaries, his visit was seen as an indicator that he plans to run again. He spoke for almost two hours, devoting much of it to the well-debunked claims that he only lost the election due to fraud. The fact that so many people would devote such a large amount of time to attend an event and listen to him saying what he has said many times before shows that his hold on the Republican party remains strong.
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Well, that was embarrassing …

Ohio and North Carolina compete to claim the honor of inventing the airplane. While the Wright brothers Orville and Wilbur were from Ohio, their first flight took place in North Carolina in 1903. In support of their state’s claim, the state of Ohio issued a license plate showing their plane carrying a banner that said “Ohio Birthplace of Aviation”.

Unfortunately for them, their image had the plane backwards so that it seemed to be actually pushing the banner. That really would be a first.
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Atheists, agnostics, and Catholics are the most supportive of vaccines

Although the anti-vaccine and anti-mask protestors get a lot of media coverage, a new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that a majority of the American public (by a margin of 62% to 37%) see the health benefits if the Covid-19 restrictions as worth the costs, even though the restrictions have “hurt businesses and economic activity and keep people from living their lives the way they want”. But many also fear that the worst is yet to come.

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Overreacting to publicity hounds

The media tends to focus on controversies, which is fair enough. After all, ‘news’ is what is out of the ordinary. What is annoying is when they lazily treat some idiotic statements by a few people as representing sentiments more widespread than they actually are. This is even more irritating when the people making the statements are known publicity hounds who clearly make absurd statements hoping that they will garner some headlines.

Take this recent headline from an Associated Press story titled Big Bird backlash: Vax lands even Muppet in political flap about the beloved Sesame Street character saying that he got the vaccine that is now given to children.

The word ‘backlash’ suggests widespread reaction. What is the evidence of it? Just senator Ted Cruz along with an obscure Fox News contributor describing it as ‘government propaganda’ and ‘brainwashing’ and ‘twisted’.

There are some politicians who simply crave to be in the headlines: Cruz, Marjorie-Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert to name just a few. They will respond with something that is inflammatory to anything has the slightest chance of igniting passion among the loonies of the right. If it does, they pat themselves on the back for succeeding. If it doesn’t, there is always something new that will come along the next day.

The publicity hound monster is insatiable and one has to stop feeding it. But the 24/7 news cycle is like these publicity hounds in that it also craves attention and needs content that will provide it. So we have a symbiotic relationship between attention-seekers on both sides.

This xkcd strip needs an extra panel

Via PZ’s blog Pharyngula I saw this xkcd strip.

I am a physicist and a physics teacher and so of course am well aware of this popular lecture demonstration where a bowling ball or some other heavy object is hung from the ceiling of a lecture hall. A person then stands some distance away from the lowest point at which the ball is resting and brings the ball up to their nose with the rope kept taut. The ball is then released and it swings away from the person and returns, just like a pendulum. The point is whether the person will flinch when they see the ball come back towards their face. The law of conservation of energy predicts the ball will not rise higher than the initial release point and so will never hit the face, and the panel looks at how different scientists might respond to being in that situation.
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