Today is independence day in the US. John Oliver takes a moment to remind Americans what they gave up when they broke their bonds with England. I can do without almost everything he lists but the one thing that I regret not being able to find in the US are the savory pastries. In the US, pastries tend to be very sticky and sweet, like doughnuts and Danishes.
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Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party and a leading advocate of withdrawal from the EU, has suddenly resigned his party leadership, adding to the large list of people who have decided to take a lower profile following the Brexit vite.
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Readers may remember the scare over the hole in the ozone layer that appeared over Antarctica and had been growing at an alarming rate. That layer protected the Earth from dangerous levels of ultraviolet radiation and the danger posed by the hole resulted in concerted action to try and combat it. The 1987 Montreal Protocol targeted the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)that were believed to be the main cause of the rupture and the good news is that those efforts seem to be bearing fruit.
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While the fatal crash involving a Tesla car on autopilot mode attention has naturally focused attention on whether self-driving cars can be trusted, we should not lose sight of the dangerous levels of outright stupidity that human drivers are capable of. I was reminded of this when a few days ago I was stopped at a red light and looked in my rear view mirror. In the car behind me the driver had his cat perched on top of the dashboard exactly between him and the windshield.
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In a turn of events that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, two transgender women have won primary races and are now the Democratic candidates for Congress, one for the US Senate in Utah and the other for the US House of Representatives in Colorado. By a coincidence, both of them have the same first name of Misty.
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We know that mirrors can mislead by seeming to switch left-right symmetry but we do not expect it to change the shapes of things. But Mark Frauenfelder brings to my attention this fine illusion by Kokichi Sugihara that makes what looks like circles get reflected as squares and vice versa.
Can you figure out how this illusion works? The solution is given below the fold.
Rachel Vorona Cote provides a roundup of the way that anti-abortion laws are being targeted following the recent ruling by the US Supreme Court in Whole Women’s Health v. Hallerstadt that struck down laws that are labeled TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) that seek to impose on conditions on clinics that provides abortions that are not required for other procedures that might carry similar or even greater risks.
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Athletes playing for teams are expected to wear uniforms and those playing in individual sports have some restrictions too. But what is astonishing in this day and age is when those requirements are aimed at exploiting women’s sexuality. The most notorious were the rules for beach volleyball that at one time required women to wear skimpy bikinis.
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As self-driving cars become more a reality with multiple companies developing them, the issue of who would be responsible for accidents has become an issue. Sadly, that debate has come to the fore because of the crash of a Tesla car that was in self-driving mode with a tractor-trailer in which the ‘driver’ of the Tesla car was killed. This seems to be the first fatality involving such cars.
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