Matt Damon’s obliviousness

The actor has a persona of an enlightened person so it was surprising to read an interview in which he claimed that he had just recently stopped using a slur term for gays after his daughter had upbraided him about it. His defense for using it was that the term “was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application”.

He said his daughter had taken him to task after he used the word in a joke at a dinner party. “She went to her room and wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood,” he said in the interview.

Damon, who in 2017 apologized for saying sexual assault was “a spectrum of behavior” after a similar outcry, immediately came under fire from LGBTQ+ activists.

The admission is quite astonishing. If he was expecting praise for his newfound understanding, he was mistaken. The general reaction has been “What took you so long?”

Damon was born in 1970, one year after the Stonewall riots which brought to the public’s attention the way that the LGBT community was harassed by the police and the public and acted as a catalyst for the advancing of gay rights around the world. By the time he was a ‘kid’ of (say) ten years of age, the movement for LGBT rights was well underway. But even if he missed it and his family and peers did not correct him as a child, surely by the time he reached adulthood and entered the workplace he had to personally know gay people and be aware that such slurs are hurtful and not acceptable? We are long past the stage when people can use their childhood as an excuse for obliviousness about things like this.

The person who comes out well is his daughter for rebuking him. The only positive thing that emerges about Damon from this episode is that he raised a child who is willing and able to challenge parental authority when they say do something wrong. Most of the time children are more enlightened about changing social mores than their parents and we would do well to listen to them.

Long haired sprinters

I usually only watch the track events at the Olympics and that too only after it is over. I was watching the finals of the women’s 100m and noticed that the top three medal winners (all from Jamaica) all had long ponytails, with the silver medalist’s hair an eye-catching yellow and red.

I wondered whether having long hair might slow them down just a fraction due to increased wind resistance. It is true that resistance is not as significant as in swimming where everyone wears caps. But in an event where one-hundredth of a second can make all the difference, wouldn’t sprinters want to minimize drag as much as possible?

Since almost all the eight finalists had long or longish hair, I have to assume that they have concluded that it does not matter and that does seem to be the case.

Flowing locks increase air resistance insofar as they boost a runner’s surface area. More hair creates more opportunities for friction between the runner and the air, so a full-headed athlete would have to work harder to maintain the same speed as a bald one. And since Olympic sprinters are already close to maxing out in terms of effort, any situation that requires them to do more work has the potential to extend their times.

But hair is pretty light, so athletes know it’s the styling, not the quantity, of their tresses that could dash their hopes. Hairdos like ponytails, braids, and or buns, which comb the mane behind the neck, have little effect on overall surface area, while hair that sticks out from the sides of the head increase it (and might also whip into the runner’s eyes).

All the sprinters had their hair in ponytails that stayed behind their backs and did not swish back and forth.

Film review: Athlete A (2020) and gymnast abuse

I had not been aware of this documentary that dealt with the massive abuse of women gymnasts in the US until three days ago when I was reading about all the turmoil in gymnastics. I watched it yesterday on Netflix and was just horrified that what it revealed was far worse than I had imagined. I do not follow gymnastics but was aware that Dr. Larry Nassar had been convicted and sentenced to essentially life in prison for the sexual abuse of girls under the guise of treating them for injuries incurred during their routines. What I had not been aware of was the vast scale of the abuse that goes on all over the country, with over 50 coaches having had allegations made against them about their predatory behavior but with the governing body USA Gymnastics doing little or nothing about it and even allowing them to move around. It reminded me of nothing so much as the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts. It seems like just as those two organizations provided an environment congenial to predators of boys, gymnastics did the same with girls.
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Why English spelling is so weird

The origins of languages are buried deep in time and teasing out why they have the features they do is not easy and hence often speculative. For those of us whose language is English, one mystery is the way things are spelled, which is a source of humor for comedians like Eddie Izzard.

Arika Okrent says that English is unusual in the level of weirdness of its spelling
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The bipartisan war on whistleblowers

When it comes to covering up the abuses by the government’s military and security services, all political partisan divisions disappear and the two parties become as one in prosecuting those people who have the temerity to leak information. This has happened repeatedly with whistleblowers and the government’s weapon of choice is the Espionage Act, something that strips defendants of most of the legal protections they are normally have access to and makes getting convictions easier and punishments harsher.
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How to raise children not to be jerks

I have described before that I think a good philosophy to live by is “Try not to be a jerk”. While it is more limited in scope and not as elegant or high-minded as some of the more well known ones like treating others as you would like them to treat you, it has the advantage that jerk behavior is easily recognizable in pretty much every situation and thus can be more easily avoidable if one wants to.

So naturally my attention was caught by this article that had the title How to Raise Kids Who Don’t Grow Up to Be Jerks (or Worse). It consists of an interview with Melinda Wenner Moyer, the author of a book that discusses how to raise children to not be jerks. (The book’s title is actually How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes which is pretty much the same thing.)

Moyer says that the key is helping children develop a theory of mind.
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The horrific abuse of female gymnasts

I hadn’t heard the terms ‘yips’ and ‘twisties’ until reading some of the many articles following Simone Biles’s withdrawal from her events at the Olympics. This article explains what the terms mean.

People who watch the types of sports that are broadcast on a regular basis are more familiar with the yips than the twisties because generally, we only gather to watch champion gymnasts compete every few years. However, people mainly associate the yips with uncharacteristically poor performance on fields or courts leading to errors and low scoring.

However the twisties, which involves a sudden loss of spatial awareness mid-air, can result in serious injury, possibly even death. Most of us heard about it for the first time after other athletes came forward to defend Biles from attacks accusing her of a weak mental fortitude, citing feats from past Olympic medalists as evidence that pushing through physical pain is what makes a champion a champion.

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The link between climate change and extreme weather becomes hard to ignore

We know that the relationship between climate change and weather is a statistical one, in that rising global temperatures will cause more extreme weather patterns to occur more frequently. But that causal arrow goes just one way, in that we cannot take any particular weather event, however extreme, and unequivocally blame it on climate change. This puts the scientifically minded at a disadvantage when arguing with climate change skeptics who have no compunction about taking isolated anomalous events (such as the recent cold snap in Texas) and using it to proclaim that global warming is not occurring or is a hoax. Most of us refrain from fighting anecdotes with anecdotes.
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Reversals of scientific conclusions are not unusual

I have started wearing a mask again when I go to the bridge center even though everyone has to prove that they are vaccinated before they are allowed to enter. The reason is the revised CDC guidelines that once again recommend indoor masking, especially in areas of high covid-19 incidence, because of the surge in cases due to the Delta variant.

There have been some criticisms of the CDC reversing its policy on masks. While I think that it can be faulted for less than clear messaging, I think the more fundamental problem is one over which they have no control and that is that people have a poor idea of how the scientific process works. People tend to think that scientific conclusions are fixed once and for all once they are arrived at and get unsettled when ‘science’ says one thing at one time and another thing later. But as I argue in my book The Great Paradox of Science, reversals of scientific consensus judgments happen all the time. It is just that it usually happens without the full glare of the media spotlight them so people are not aware of how common they are. In the case of covid-19, we are all getting to witness in real time that scientific conclusions are always provisional and that the scientific community can change its view when the situation changes and new evidence emerges. That is how it should be.
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