I am back from my travels and was greeted with the news that Donald Trump seems to have backed off his earlier support for the anti-vaccination movement. At various points, he had expressed support for widely debunked claims that vaccines could cause autism and had even proposed setting up a commission to ‘study’ the issue, which many people feared would provide a highly visible platform for the skeptics to spread their ideas.
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There was a story that appeared in the news some time ago about a mysterious sound that was supposedly affecting US embassy personnel in Havana and creating such debilitating effects that it resulted in some of them deciding to come back to the US. There were allegations that Cuba was waging some kind of high-tech warfare against the US but the case for that was pretty thin, even allowing for the fact that there would be no motive for them to do so, since they are interested in improving ties with the US.
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The last meeting of Science Café Cleveland had as its presenter Wyatt Newman, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, who gave a fascinating presentation on the state of Deep Learning, the term given by the Artificial Intelligence community to the next stage of AI development, where machines learn to identify things and make decisions for novel situations that they have not been previously programed to deal with. It is this feature, for example, that enables self-driving vehicles to identify the various things it encounters on roads and take appropriate actions.
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I do not drink alcohol, except for the occasional champagne or wine at weddings and other social events when such beverages are used to toast people. But I grew up in a family where most of the men drank a lot and Sri Lanka has a lot of heavy drinkers so I am familiar with the problems that alcohol can cause. Given that environment, why I did not start drinking myself I do not know. Perhaps seeing the adverse ways it caused people to behave was one factor. Another may be that my group of friends in college, the age when most people pick up the habit, were not drinkers either and so it was not part of our group activities and there was no peer pressure. Alcohol was not cheap and we preferred to spend our money on films and food. It was only much later that I learned of the genetic element that predisposes some people to become alcoholics and so it is perhaps a good thing that I did not start, just in case I had the gene and it may have been triggered.
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This seems like an easy question. It is at the top of Mount Everest, of course. But is it that simple? It depends on how you define highest. If you mean the height above sea level, then yes, that is the correct answer. But the Earth is not a perfect sphere. It bulges at the equator, making it what we call an oblate spheroid. So if we define tallest by the distance from the center of the Earth, then we have to also take into account the fact that sea level near the equator is ‘higher’ than at points away from the equator.
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That evolution shapes the nature of organisms depending on their environment is well known. But we may think that we have explored pretty much all the Earth and thus encountered all the variety that exists. So it is interesting when previously unknown regions of the Earth that have vastly different environments from those we are familiar with reveal new kinds of organisms.
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Some of you may remember the animated TV show The Jetsons about a family that lived in the future that had all manner of anticipated technological advances. One of them was the flying personal car and that particular item has become a punch line whenever people want to express disappointment that we do not have many of the amazing things that we thought had been promised to us in the dreams of science fiction writers.
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The works by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn have had a profound effect on my understanding of the nature of science. I can strongly recommend his books The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962 and revised in 1970) and The Copernican Revolution (1957).
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Now that self-driving vehicles (SDVs) are becoming a reality, people are paying close attention to accident reports involving them. In almost all the cases, it appears that it was an error by the human in the other car that caused the accident. Here is a compilation of dash-cam videos taken from SDVs as they avoid accidents, some of which required quick reactions.