What Britons think of US health care system

Boosters of the US health care system often claim that the British system, in which the government’s National Health System actually employs doctors and owns and runs an extensive system of hospitals that provide most of the care though there is a private system overlaid on top of it, is inferior to what we have here. They are aided in the claim by the fact that successive Conservative governments in the UK are underfunding the system causing some problems.
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On holding everyone responsible for the actions of a few

The odious Rupert Murdoch has weighed in with a series of tweets that all Muslims are essentially responsible for the Charlie Hebdo killers, and author J. K. Rowling and others have responded ridiculing him. Jon Stewart and a panel of The Daily Show correspondents used the Murdoch episode as a springboard to discuss the double standard of those like Murdoch who demand that all Muslims denounce all acts of violence by any Muslim anywhere.
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How many days are there in a week?

Believe it or not, the answer to this question became the subject of a very heated exchange on a site devoted to fans of bodybuilding. Like all great philosophical debates it all stemmed from asking, as Socrates so often did to provoke deep thought among his pupils, a simple question that you might have felt had a straightforward answer. In this case, the question was: If you exercise every other day, how many days a week are you doing it?

The argument raged on and on and is quite hilarious.

The brutality of boxing and football

I have been writing about the dangers playing American football due to the increasing number of reported cases of brain injury due to the repeated concussions that American football players experience, and argued that there are strong grounds for schools and colleges not fielding teams since educational institutions should not be encouraging young people to run the risks of permanent damage by seeming to endorse a dangerous activity. If as adults they want to play, there is little we can do except not support them.
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Averages can be tricky

When I started out as a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant in a lab. Invariably in physics labs students are expected to measure some quantity multiple times and then take the average so as to minimize the effect of random uncertainties that are intrinsic to any measurement. I recall some students showing me a set of about six numbers and the average that they had calculated from it. They were amazed when I told them after a quick glance that the average was wrong.
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Follow Peanuts from the beginning

The Peanuts comic strip started on October 12, 1950. It was considered groundbreaking because for the first time it had little children who were not lovable scamps but, as we see from the very first cartoon below, also expressed emotions like meanness and anger and even hate that people were used to seeing expressed mostly by adults. That this caused some controversy seems surprising these days when we live in an era of South Park.
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The ethics of being sponsored by a sex offender

The saga of Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy money manager whose penchant for sex with young girls resulted in him being investigated for having sex with minors, has involved some big-name people such as prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz. But it turns out that Epstein also fancied himself as some kind of Renaissance man and funded individual scientists, many of them very well-known, such as Nobel prize winning physicist Murray Gellman and skeptic and physicist Lawrence Krauss. In fact, physicists seem to be particularly favored by Epstein.
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Film review: The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)

This is the story of two restaurants directly across the street from each other in a small French town. One is run by a Frenchwoman (played by Helen Mirren), a long time resident of the town who is proud that her restaurant is a well-known and classy place that has earned a much-coveted place in the Michelin guidebook of fine restaurants. But it has just a one star rating and she lusts after being promoted to two stars. The other is a new restaurant run by an Indian family that decided to start a new life there after their van broke down. Mirren resents the presence of such a déclassé establishment next to hers and tries to ensure that they fail and leave.
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