Utterly revolting treatment of climate scientists by Trump administration

Will Happer has resigned as a member of the Trump administration’s National Security Council. Since Trump never got around to filling the position of Science Advisor to the president, Happer tried to play that role. Happer is one of those physicists who seems to think he is an expert on many things and even though he is not a climate scientist, he was a fierce climate change denialist and had a plan to thwart the scientific consensus on the causes and dangers of global warming by following the playbook that had been adopted by earlier generations of industry-funded skeptics on things like the dangers of smoking, and that was to sow doubt on the scientific consensus.
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How to con scientists and skeptics

When I was in graduate school, magician James Randi gave a performance for the university and then he gave another performance to just the physics department and I attended both. They were both fun to watch, especially the second since I was able to see him in action up close. At the end of his physics department show and after he had pulled off a lot of tricks to the amazement of the audience, he said that scientists were the easiest people to fool because they thought they were so smart that they easily fell prey to the most basic of misdirection techniques. There was some embarrassed laughter from the audience of physicists.
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Parents risking children’s lives

When I was a boy, a diagnosis of leukemia was pretty much a death sentence and in fact a school friend of mine died from the disease. Thanks to advances in modern medicine, nowadays many forms of childhood leukemia can be treated and cured. So it is unconscionable when parents decide that they want to treat their child with ‘alternative’ treatments that will likely result in death. One couple in Florida decided to skip the chemotherapy session for their four-year old child and fled the state with him.

Authorities caught up with them in Kentucky and took the child back to continue the treatment, and the child now lives with his grandmother.

After the boy, who the BBC is not naming, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in April his parents opted to treat him using cannabis, oxygen therapy, herbs and alkaline water.

Medical cannabis is legal in Florida.
…

Chemotherapy is often associated with debilitating side effects, but many types of modern chemotherapy cause only mild problems.

According to St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, about 98% of children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia go into remission within weeks of beginning treatment, and about 90% of child patients are eventually cured.

The report does not say if the parents are highly religious. The fact that they sought to treat the child with cannabis and other things and not prayer suggest they are not. Instead, they are probably those who, like the anti-vaxxers, think that they know better than what modern science and medicine says are the best treatments for disease.

The parents have lost custody of their son but are planning to file an appeal.

He’s not going to last long

[UPDATE: Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator of NOAA and himself a career meteorologist facing a potentially hostile audience of weather scientists at a meeting in Huntsville, Alabama who had threatened to walk out on his talk, tried to smooth over the conflict by tearfully thanking the Birmingham scientists in the audience for their work. The semi-apology seemed to have been accepted.]

There has been much publicity over the absurdity of Donald Trump claiming that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian when it was not. National Weather Service scientists in Birmingham immediately corrected it as they should, since warning residents that they are in the path of a major storm when they are not is a serious matter. Trump then doubled down on his claim by showing a doctored NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) weather map that showed Alabama in the projected path. But the most serious aspect of this was when an unsigned press release came from NOAA (the NWS is overseen by NOAA) saying that earlier forecasts did include Alabama, implicitly rebuking the NWS scientists.
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This is unnerving

I am someone who thinks that self-driving cars are the future and am not opposed to them. But I was not aware that they had already been allowed on public streets. This unnerving video shows a driver and passenger in a Tesla self-driving car fast asleep while speeding along the Massachusetts turnpike. Tesla says that drivers should be awake and have their hands on the wheel, ready to take control if necessary.

This driver has way more confidence in this new technology than I have. I would not have the nerve to fall asleep like that.

Elizabeth Warren shuts down fossil fuel industry talking points

During the climate change town hall, moderator Chris Cuomo of CNN raised the issue of whether fighting climate change would require forcing people to give up their straws etc. Warren quickly shut down that line of questioning, saying that the fossil fuel industry wants to put the onus of cleaning up the environment on us and for us to be always talking about such things as violating our personal freedoms, in order to distract from their major role in destroying the environment.

42 as the sum of three cubes

In March, I wrote about the successful effort, after 64 years of computational striving, of finding integer solutions to the problem x3+y3+z3=33. This equation, along with x3+y3+z3=42, were the only two equations for which neither a solution nor a proof that no solution exists had been found for the right hand side being below 100. Finding that solution meant that only the 42 problem remained unsolved.

Now 42 problem too has been solved and in a nod to Douglas Adams, Andrew Sutherland (MIT) and Andrew Booker (Bristol), the finders of the solution, announced it on webpages titled Life, the Universe and Everything.

Every cube of a whole number is within one of a multiple of nine, which means that a sum of three cubes must be within three of a multiple of nine. So numbers of the form 9𝑘+49k+4 or 9𝑘+59k+5 cannot be written as the sum of three cubes.

In 1992, Roger Heath-Brown conjectured that every other whole number can be written as the sum of three cubes, in infinitely many different ways. Mathematicians on the whole seem to have been convinced by Heath-Brown’s argument that this ought to be true – but actually finding ways to write any particular number as a sum of three cubes remains a difficult problem.

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Summary of the Democratic town hall on climate change

Yesterday, CNN hosted a seven-hour climate change marathon where 10 candidates in sequence faced about 40 minutes of questions from the moderators, scientists, and others about their climate change plans. Rolling Stone had a summary of the key points, saying that “We can’t pretend it was fun. But it was historic: This is almost certainly the longest stretch of programming a U.S. news network has ever dedicated to the topic of climate change. We watched all ten of the candidates make their case for their candidacies on the basis of their plans to keep the planet from overheating.”
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A major success against Ebola

Researchers have made astonishing progress in developing a drug that combats Ebola that has been seen as disease that carried an immediate death sentence. What is amazing is that the drug was put through clinical trials under extremely difficult circumstances because the disease causes widespread panic since it is so highly contagious and lethal.

Two Ebola drugs have proven so effective in a clinical trial that researchers will make the treatments available to anyone infected with the virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where Ebola has killed nearly 1,900 people over the past year.

The survival rate for people who received either drug shortly after infection, when levels of the virus in their blood were low, was 90%.

“It’s really good news,” says Sabue Mulangu, an infectious-disease researcher at the National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB) in Kinshasa in the DRC, and an investigator on the trial. “Now we will be able to stress to people that more than 90% of people survive if they come into the [Ebola treatment unit] early and get this treatment.”
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“I’m in awe about what seemed to be an impossible clinical trial to run,” says Sumathi Sivapalasingam, a senior director at Regeneron. “The team did this in such a complex emergency and still, the data quality is exceptional.”

The benefits of this drug are enormous, not least because it will also help to protect those health workers who run great risks in treating the infected.

Why people stick with the status quo and how to change their minds

In their book Merchants of Doubt that I reviewed very favorably here, authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway make the case that those people and business interests that oppose the scientific consensus that goes against their business and ideological interests (like the perils of smoking tobacco, second-hand smoke, acid-rain, the ozone hole, and climate change) base their opposition strategy on exploiting the way people make decisions.
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