Perceptions of time

I have long been interested in how we perceive time. There are many markers of time’s passage, daily and seasonal changes and biological changes being just some of them. Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of time by saying that physical time of an event is what is given by clocks placed at the location of the event, and then showed that the interval in clock readings between any two events depended on the state of motion of the clocks.

But there is also the psychological perception of time, the sense of how much time has elapsed when one has no external means such as a clock or diurnal rhythms to keep track of it. In an experiment, 15 volunteers were kept in a deep cave for 40 days without any means of knowing the passage of time other than their sense of it.
[Read more…]

Keeping track of right wing extremist groups

It can be difficult to keep track of the various extremist groups on the right since even though they share certain broad goals, they each have their own agendas and membership. In an article After The Storm in the April/May 2021 issue of The Progressive magazine, Matthew N. Lyons provides a handy list to enable us to keep track of whoo’s who and doing what.

Boogaloo bois: Started around 2018, this loose collection of people advocate overthrowing the state and view law enforcement as the enemy. While largely made up of white nationalists, they claim to have factions that support Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ movements. They often wear Hawaiian shirts as identifiers.
[Read more…]

Film review: I Care A Lot (2021) and guardianship abuse

There are many elderly people in the US who live alone but are not poor. This Netflix film is a dark comedy of the way that some people abuse the guardianship laws in the US to exploit such elderly people out of their life savings. The way it works is that if a doctor certifies that someone is incapable of looking after themselves, a court can declare them to be ‘wards of the court’ and appoint a guardian to look after them and the guardian immediately gains total power over that person’s life, including their finances. The judge gets to decide whether you need a guardian and who gets to be your guardian and everything hinges on that decision. Usually it is a member of the family who petitions the court but it is not necessary and it is not always the case that they are acting in the best interests of the person. Unscrupulous guardians can sell off the ward’s assets to pay for their care and pay themselves a hefty fee and there is little that can be done about it once the process is set in motion.
[Read more…]

White Lives Matter rallies flop bigly

Rallies organized in many parts of the country for Sunday, April 11 by right wing groups around the theme of ‘White Lives Matter’ turned out to be flops.

In semi-private, encrypted chats, neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists planned rallies in dozens of cities Sunday to promote their racist movements and spread their ideologies to larger audiences. 

Hyped by organizers as events that would make “the whole world tremble,” the rallies ran into a major problem: Hardly anyone showed up. 

The “White Lives Matter” rallies, the first major real-world organizing efforts by white supremacists since 2018, were planned on the encrypted app Telegram after many aligned groups were alleged to have taken part in the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S Capitol.
[Read more…]

The problem with cryptocurrencies

I know almost nothing about cryptocurrencies or the blockchain technology that undergirds it. I was aware that all transactions by currency holders are recorded on a distributed public ledger, which apparently is what is meant by a ‘blockchain’. I had been aware that these currencies, of which there are many in addition to the best known one of bitcoin, are not backed by any government like ‘real’ currencies are. Their value is maintained by having their production limited by having it ‘mined’, which is a metaphor for actions that are done by computers.

Elizabeth Kolbert writes about how this ‘mining’ works.
[Read more…]

Give that dog a medal! Or at least a biscuit!

During a high school 4×200 m relay race, a dog who had been among the spectators joined in and ran a superb anchor leg.

A pet dog escaped its owners to join the home stretch of a 4×200 metre relay race at a high school athletics meet in Utah. The dog, Holly, can been seen running on to the track to chase Logan high school’s Gracie Laney down the home straight. 

Holly clocked the final 100m in about 10.5 seconds, which is 1 second behind Usain Bolt’s world record, track and field website MileSplit reported. 

The crowd roared as the dog overtook Laney just before the finishing line, almost tripping her over. However, race officials did not award the victory to Holly the dog – the heat win went to Laney with a time of 1 minute 59.27 seconds. 

Holly was guilty of illegal lane changes and a bit of Usain Bolt-level showboating at the end when she eased up her pace alongside Laney before speeding up to pip her at the post. But it was still an impressive performance.

Ugly metaphors and sayings

In writing a recent post, I typed in the phrase ‘beat a dead horse’ that had come to my mind. Then I stopped short and asked myself why I was writing that. While it captured the futility of repeatedly doing something that will produce no result, it is a really ugly metaphor. What I mean by the word ‘ugly’ is not that the metaphor is inconsistent or mixed but that the image it brings up is unpleasant or cruel. The image of a horse that is dead being flayed by someone is abhorrent. So I replaced it with ‘belabor the point’.
[Read more…]

The pandemic and hygiene habits

I have been seeing a lot of stories such as this one about how staying at home and social isolation has resulted in some people changing their personal hygiene habits, sometimes entirely jettisoning some of them.

Working from home, shielding, not socialising or just losing the will to blow-dry appear to have had many of us questioning whether our pre-pandemic personal hygiene and grooming habits were really necessary. And, with routines disrupted, it is perfectly possible to get to the end of the day before wondering if you have brushed your teeth. Or putting off your morning shower until you have done some lunchtime exercise, and then not bothering to do that either.

[Read more…]