On his show Last Week Tonight focused his attention on the dubious business of debt collection in which people’s debts to some institution are sold cheaply by that institution to agencies that then try and strong-arm people into paying them back, even if the debts have expired. Oliver shows how easy it is to set up a company that can purchase the debts of people.
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The belief that “if you built it they will come” has not worked for the modern Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport (HRI) airport that was built by the Sri Lankan government in the southern part of the island at a cost of over $200 million that has just one daily flight and one weekly one. This article explains what happened.
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(As I mentioned some time ago, I am working on my next book that is tentatively titled The Paradox of Science. From time to time, I will try out ideas from it on the blog, suitably modified to make the blog posts self contained. Readers get the benefit of a sneak preview and I hope to get feedback from readers as to clarity, correctness, style, etc. Note that the book is aimed at the interested layperson and not the many experts who read this blog so put yourself in their shoes when reading. This post is the first of such offerings. Enjoy!)
The website Fivethirtyeight has a weekly feature called The Riddler where puzzles of a mathematical sort are presented and the solution given the following week. Here is one such problem stated in its entirety:
Complete this series:
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 23, 30, 33, …
I want to use this simple purely mathematical puzzle to illustrate an important insight about science. I will give the solution below the jump and then discuss the relation to science.
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Muhammad Ali died yesterday and the tributes are pouring in. His greatest accomplishment may have been that he persuaded so many people (including me) to become fans of a brutal activity (I cannot call it sport) that should be despised out of existence. But even more than his boxing skills, what electrified people like me around the world who detested what the US was doing to Vietnam was what he said when he refused to be drafted to fight in that horrible war.
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I expressed concern yesterday over the violence between political partisans that seem to be becoming a routine feature of this election. This is not a healthy sign. It is interesting how politics in US are a delayed mirroring of what I was used to in Sri Lanka. There too violence at political rallies was not uncommon. Another ugly feature there were the attempts by politicians to impugn the integrity of judges and even retaliate against them or threaten them and thus undermine their credibility or intimidate them whenever they ruled against the government in power.
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Cory Doctorow says that in China there is a group called the Chengguan that is an urban management police squad that is “charged with enforcing petty regulations and notorious for their violent tactics, which include beating a watermelon seller to death with his own weights.”
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This description of what happened at a Donald Trump rally in San Jose yesterday that was attacked by protestors is really disturbing.
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The US has a pretty strong regimen for getting drugs approved, a system that has great credibility after it kept out the nausea and morning sickness combatting drug thalidomide that in the 1950s wreaked havoc on babies in other countries. The gold standard for new drugs to be allowed to be prescribed is, as I understand it, that they have to show that they do not pose significant risks and also undergo double-blind clinical trials on humans that demonstrate that they work better than a placebo. The process is long and expensive.
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As Donald Trump tries to get the Republican party to unify around him, there has been some shifting around among the members of the various sectors within the right-wing party, such as the elected officials, the media, and the influence shapers. One is seeing the first two sectors falling into line behind Trump as they see it in their best interests to not defy the party nominee.
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As we all know, young people are leaving religious institutions in ever-increasing numbers. This is naturally causing concern in religious quarters and some wealthy people think that the problem is that the young are not being equipped to ‘properly’ answer the kinds of deep questions that occur to almost everyone as they are growing up and becoming independent. By properly, these people mean consistent with what the Bible says.
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