The wall with Mexico has already caused problems

I wrote a short while ago about how the proposed border wall with Mexico could face problems when it came to the Rio Grande river that forms about 1000 miles of the border that separates Texas and Mexico. Putting the wall on the US side, which is the only realistic option, means ceding the river to Mexico. This is not a purely hypothetical exercise. Back in 2006 when there was an earlier spurt of wall building, it resulted in many Americans, farmers and householders, finding themselves on the Mexican side of the fence, effectively shut out of their own country, and also had land taken from them under the doctrine of eminent domain.
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Manipulating yellow traffic light times for profit

I have been a supporter of cameras at traffic lights to catch people who run red lights. It seemed like an impartial way to catch offenders who indulged in this dangerous practice because the camera did not care about your gender, age, ethnicity, class, type of car, or other factors that might cause a traffic police officer to decide whether to issue a ticket or not. Furthermore, it seems like a waste of time to have police hanging around at intersections doing something that a machine could do better when they could be doing more important things like preventing crime or catching criminals.
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The need to remember when it is not about us

I recently attended an excellent talk organized by the Center of Inquiry of Northeast Ohio. It was by Mandisa Thomas, the founder of Black Nonbelievers, and she provided a concise history of the troubled relationship between the black community and Christianity. After being forced to adopt Christianity while they were enslaved, the church then became a focal point of black life after Emancipation and Reconstruction, providing leadership and refuge during the era of Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle.
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Cycling around the world in 80 days

Ever since the Jules Verne classic novel Around the World in 80 Days and subsequent film celebrated the achievement of circling the globe, the idea has appealed to people trying to recreate a similar challenge in different forms. Mark Beaumont is planning to cycle around the globe in 80 days, which would be 43 days less than the current record. This requires him to cycle 240 miles a day, which he plans to do in four four-hour shifts per day.
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The convoluted tale of Russian hacking

I have been sort-of following the story about possible Russian interference in the US election. I say ‘sort-of’ because it seems to me that the ratio of actual facts to elaborate hypothesizing is tiny. Each day seems to bring with it some new allegation based on anonymous sources that gets people worked up into a frenzy. As I see it, many possible scenarios are being merged into one big mess. Here are the various possibilities as I see them, going from the most serious to the least:
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Another day, another hypocrisy

Egypt’s president, the brutal general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is currently in the US and receiving a warm welcome from Donald Trump. This is not surprising but that Trump is a ghastly president should not result in us viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. But some media are doing just that, suggesting that this visit shows how different he is from his predecessor. But the main distinction between Trump and Obama is that the latter, like many Democrats, maintained a façade of keeping a distance while actually supporting el-Sisi away from the cameras.
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Fact and folklore about the deflection of light by the Sun

Most people are familiar with the dramatic story of how Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity made a surprising prediction that was spectacularly confirmed and thus enabled his counter-intuitive idea to become the accepted view. The story goes that he predicted that the path of light would be bent by the presence of a strong gravitational field. Arthur Eddington then measured that bending during a solar eclipse and got a result that agreed with Einstein’s prediction, thus providing strong support for the revolutionary idea that space was curved by matter and that light followed that curved path. Part of the dramatic appeal of this story, as recounted in the folklore, is that Einstein’s prediction that light would be bent by the Sun seemed to be utterly novel and thus its confirmation carried much greater impact than it would have otherwise.
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Atheists and the very religious fear death the least

I was interested in this article about the fear of death.

A team of researchers analyzed 100 relevant articles published between 1961 and 2014, containing information about 26,000 people worldwide and their feelings about death. They found that higher levels of religious belief were only weakly linked with lower death anxiety. The paper, which was published in the journal Religion, Brain and Behavior, also showed that strong religious believers and non-believers appeared to fear death less than those in between.
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