Great moments in nepotism

At one of the G20 meetings currently going on in Hamburg, Germany that dealt with the important question of how to improve the conditions in some African countries in order to stem the tide of refugees fleeing awful conditions, who do you think represented the US among the other 19 heads of state and sat between Germany’s president Angela Merkel and China’s president Xi Jinping? Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, or National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, all of whom are present as part of the US delegation?
[Read more…]

The ethics of laboratory grown meat

I was interested in this article and video clip of attempts to make meat in the laboratory. This technology has been talked about for some time and is advancing. They are already able to make chicken, beef, and pork. They do this by using stem cells to grow the protein in the labs. I have no idea how it compares with regular meat in terms of taste and texture. The video below explains the process by which it happens and the advantages.
[Read more…]

The doorway effect

We’ve all experienced what the cartoon character has just gone through. You decide to do something the next time you go into a room where that task has to be done and then as soon as you get there, you forget what it was that you wanted to do. Sometimes you know that you have forgotten something but can’t recall what it is, at other times you don’t even realize that you have forgotten until much later, when you are doing something else.
[Read more…]

Hobby Lobby and the stolen Iraq artifacts

The crafts company Hobby Lobby has been fined $3 million and asked to return over 5,000 stolen artifacts to Iraq. The name of the company may be familiar to some because they were behind a victorious lawsuit that went all the way to the US Supreme Court because they argued that the religious beliefs of the owners of the company should allow them to not provide contraceptive coverage in the employees’ health insurance policies. Yes, the family that owns the company consists of religious zealots.
[Read more…]

Background to the tensions over North Korea

Donald Trump seems intent on making childish belligerent noises over North Korea and this is concerning because bellicose rhetoric (such as considering doing some “very severe things”) has the effect of raising the stakes and expectations. This can create its own dynamic and lead to Trump doing something rash because to not take action after talking tough would make him (at least in his own eyes and those of his supporters) look weak, and for such weak-minded people that is something to be avoided at all costs.
[Read more…]

Great moments in adult jerk behavior

Jack Sock is a tennis player who was on the court for his first round Wimbledon match. When a young boy in the stands gestured for a souvenir, he threw him a towel. But an old man in front of the boy caught part of the towel and wrested it away from the boy. This was caught on camera and distributed on Twitter and has understandably caused widespread disgust because it was easily identified as a jerk move. Adults should really know better.
[Read more…]

On the pursuit of happiness

On this Independence Day holiday, I am repeating a post on what to me is one of the most intriguing phrases in the US Declaration of Independence. It is contained in the famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have always found the inclusion of “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right to be appealing. One does not expect to see such a quaint sentiment in a revolutionary political document, and its presence sheds an interesting and positive light on the minds and aspirations of the people who drafted it. [Read more…]

You too can climb Everest – from your living room

My post a couple of days ago about the first Sri Lankan to climb Everest sparked an interesting discussion about these climbs. Would you like to see what it is like to get to the top of Mount Everest but think it’s too damn dangerous? Well, you can follow the trek taken by most climbers to get to the summit and, once you get there, have a 3D view of the world below you.
[Read more…]