Another day, another hypocrisy

Egypt’s president, the brutal general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is currently in the US and receiving a warm welcome from Donald Trump. This is not surprising but that Trump is a ghastly president should not result in us viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. But some media are doing just that, suggesting that this visit shows how different he is from his predecessor. But the main distinction between Trump and Obama is that the latter, like many Democrats, maintained a façade of keeping a distance while actually supporting el-Sisi away from the cameras.
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Fact and folklore about the deflection of light by the Sun

Most people are familiar with the dramatic story of how Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity made a surprising prediction that was spectacularly confirmed and thus enabled his counter-intuitive idea to become the accepted view. The story goes that he predicted that the path of light would be bent by the presence of a strong gravitational field. Arthur Eddington then measured that bending during a solar eclipse and got a result that agreed with Einstein’s prediction, thus providing strong support for the revolutionary idea that space was curved by matter and that light followed that curved path. Part of the dramatic appeal of this story, as recounted in the folklore, is that Einstein’s prediction that light would be bent by the Sun seemed to be utterly novel and thus its confirmation carried much greater impact than it would have otherwise.
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Atheists and the very religious fear death the least

I was interested in this article about the fear of death.

A team of researchers analyzed 100 relevant articles published between 1961 and 2014, containing information about 26,000 people worldwide and their feelings about death. They found that higher levels of religious belief were only weakly linked with lower death anxiety. The paper, which was published in the journal Religion, Brain and Behavior, also showed that strong religious believers and non-believers appeared to fear death less than those in between.
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The ‘hot hand’ theory makes a comeback

There is a strong belief among athletes and sports fans that sometimes athletes enter ‘the zone’, or have a ‘hot streak’ where it seems they can do no wrong or at least perform much better than they usually do and thus have a much greater chance of success at hitting the ball or shooting a basket than at other times. There is a kind of plausibility story built around this idea. When you achieve success, it makes you feel good and confident and that sense of assurance may lead to a greater focus and thus better performance whereas failure may lead to greater nervousness and second-guessing of oneself that could prove harmful in fast-moving actions sports.
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My predictions about Obama

While searching for an old post, I came across two other old posts from back in January 2009 on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, where I predicted what we could expect from him during his term in office. I do not have the best record in making political predictions, to put it mildly, but in reading over them now, I seem to have been pretty accurate at least on the domestic front.
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A novel lawsuit involving climate change

The difficulty with the climate change problem is that it is a long-term one and thus policy makers, who tend to be older people, may not view it with the same sense of urgency since the most adverse consequences will occur after they are dead. It is young people who will pay the price for my generation’s inaction. Hence I was intrigued by this court ruling that I missed when it was handed down on November 10th of last year. It should have got much wider publicity than it did.
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