It’s been awhile since I looked at the goings on in the UK as it staggers towards yet another Brexit deadline on October 31. The latest wrinkle is that the Labour Party managed to squeak through to a narrow victory in a by-election in Peterborough, just edging out the candidate for the newly-formed Brexit party led by Nigel Farage by a margin of 10,484 to.9,801 votes. The Conservative party trailed in third place with 7,243.
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An injured hiker in Arizona had to be airlifted out using a helicopter but got a lot more than they bargained for.
Not surprisingly, the hiker had to be first treated for dizziness and nausea.
When it comes to health care in the US much of the attention has rightly focused on the plight of those who lack any insurance at all. But this gives the impression that those who have employer-based insurance have few problems and would even suffer with the increasingly popular Medicare For All proposal that has now been embraced by pretty much every Democratic presidential candidate and would replace the current system. But that impression is erroneous. This is because in order to lower insurance premiums, employers are pressuring employees to move to high-deductible plans. But a new study finds that a quarter of people with employer-based health insurance in the US cannot longer afford to pay those deductibles
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Wealthy people like to buy expensive seats so that they can sit courtside at professional basketball games. And when I say ‘courtside’, I am not kidding. They are right on the side of the playing area right near the coaches and substitute players. Why they would want to do this is not clear to me since you can probably see better from a few rows back in the raised seats. You also run the real risk of a 250 lb player barreling right into you as they chase a ball that goes out of bounds and causing you serious injury. Apparently the tickets warn you of that possibility but perhaps the desire to be seen on TV is enough for people to take that risk.
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Currently many world leaders are in Europe commemorating the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. This remarkable scene from the anti-war satire The Americanization of Emily (1964), set during World War II, just prior to the D-Day invasion, has James Garner warning of the dangers of glorifying war to the mother of Julie Andrews, who has lost her husband, father, and brother to the war.
That speech was written by screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. I wonder if mainstream film companies would allow such a scene these days.
The West Indies came close to causing an upset by beating Australia today. Australia batted first and West Indies had them on the ropes before allowing them to recover. Set a target of 289 to win, West Indies fell just short, disappointing many in the cricket world who tend to cheer against Australia partly for being part of the cartel with India and England and partly because Australia practices a vicious form of gamesmanship that extends to even cheating, taking the view that it’s ok as long as you are not caught.
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I have watched all three seasons of this British police procedural TV series. Each season has a self-contained story and consists of six episodes spread over 4.5 hours and is one of the best of such shows that I have seen. I fancy myself as a connoisseur of such detective shows and like most connoisseurs have strong likes and dislikes. I heartily dislike violence and gore and find action sequences such as chases and fights to be boring. They seem to me to be a cheap way of generating interest to compensate for weak plots and poor writing, acting, and directing. I like shows where the focus is on the process of detection and this show definitely fits the bill.
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On a recent flight, I had an interesting discussion with the man next to me. It turns out his job is to work with airports and airlines to streamline the process of baggage handling to reduce delays and misplaced bags and he told me how the system works. Apparently, there are miles of conveyor belts behind the scenes at airports that begin at the check-in counter and they have multiple sensors all along the way that use lasers to periodically check the barcode on the baggage tags to make sure that the bag gets transferred to the correct belt for the final destination. The sensors also check the times at each checkpoint and predict when it should reach the next checkpoint so that if a bag does not reach it at the expected time, an alert goes off and someone physically goes to see if the bag has mistakenly switched to the wrong belt, fallen off the belt, or has got jammed somewhere. He said that the goal is to have bags spend no more than 20 minutes in transit from one plane to another though they can often do it in 10 minutes.
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One of the features of science is that there is always a tension going on. We have standard paradigms that most scientists work within but on occasion a new result will turn up that seems to be violate the boundaries of that paradigm. What does one do then? Reject the paradigm and its associated underlying theory? Seasoned scientists know not to do that because throwing out a paradigm is not something to be undertaken lightly since good theories are hard to come by. What they do is treat the discrepant event as an anomaly meriting further study.
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