In my post on the short BBC true-false quiz on popular misconceptions about evolution, I mentioned that I had got just the last question wrong and knew I would get it marked wrong as I answered it. Reader deepak shetty asked me to explain why I had answered the way I did and here is a belated response.
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It has become an article of faith among many conservatives in the US that fears of global warming are a hoax perpetrated on the world by a cabal of scientists who are using fake climate models and manufactured data in order to spread alarm and thus get money for grants or some such reason. The Trump administration seems to be fully invested in this belief. But then there was this curious news item about an environmental impact statement issued by the government that predicts that global warming will be even worse than some of the scenarios.
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To lift your spirits from the dreary news on the national and international scene, here is a bit of good news from my neck of the woods. Ohio is a pretty conservative, even reactionary state but I am lucky that the county I live in (Cuyahoga) has fairly progressive politics. An example of this is recent legislation passed by the County Council that provides protections against discrimination for the LGBT community, joining 20 Ohio municipalities that have passed similar legislation in Ohio, six of which are within Cuyahoga County already.
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Via Seamus Bellamy here is a baby rhino skipping along like his lamb buddy.
Amazon is a retail behemoth has been reviled for overworking and underpaying its workers, forcing them to depend on the government social services to supplement their income, as well as using its power in the retailing world to drive many small local firms out of business. Recently it got some good publicity by saying that it would pay all its workers at least the minimum living wage of $15/hour. But it turns out that there is a catch, that what Amazon gave with one hand, it partially took away with the other.
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I just watched this absolutely riveting documentary. Ostensibly it is about how West Indian cricket became a dominant force in the years from 1980 until 1995 but it is about a lot more than that, weaving in the politics of race and colonialism. Even if you do not know anything about cricket, the politics of the film is utterly absorbing, a story of a victimized people fighting back at their former oppressors, with cricket serving as the vehicle for exacting that revenge.
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The appeal of golf eludes me, though it attracts fanatically faithful players and followers. Its appeal as a spectator sport is particularly baffling since it has all the speed of a chess game. And I say that as a fan of cricket, considered by many to be one of the slowest games on the planet. At least on TV, you get to see various players on different holes. If you are actually on the course, you get to see just a tiny portion of the game. And yet tournaments attract a huge number of spectators to the courses.
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Domesticated dogs tend to be widely loved as companions and I am no exception to this feeling. Hence I was startled to learn that feral and free-roaming dogs may be responsible for the extinction of a large number of animal species.
There are now an estimated 1 billion domestic dogs across their near-global distribution.
Domestic dogs include feral and free-ranging animals (such as village and camp dogs), as well as those that are owned by and completely dependent on humans (pet dogs).
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In a BBC interview that was brought to my attention by Matt, this year’s co-winner of the Nobel prize in physics Donna Strickland was asked why she was still an associate professor and had not been promoted to full professor, something that I had noted in my earlier post, and she replied that she had never applied for promotion to full professor. Matt asked me to explain the weird academic rank system, so here it is.
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