Update on the Nova Scotia massacre

The horrific massacre by a lone gunman in Nova Scotia is even worse than originally reported. It now appears that he killed 22 people during his 12-hour rampage dressed as a police officer and driving a replica of a police vehicle. The increase in numbers is because authorities have found bodies in buildings that he set on fire.

It appears that he had targeted his first victims who were known to him and then went on a killing spree on anyone who had the misfortune to cross his path as he drove around.
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Clue to matter domination in universe may lie in CP violation detected in neutrinos

A recent news report suggests that time–reversal violation may have been observed in neutrino reactions. (You can read the paper on which the report is based here.) Why is this important? Because it may shed light on a long-standing puzzle and that is why it is that in the universe we inhabit, matter is vastly more abundant than anti-matter.

Why is this a puzzle? Because when matter is created out of pure energy, it seems to be always the case that the amount of matter and anti-matter are identical. So in the Big Bang when energy was transformed into all the matter and anti-matter now in the universe, there should have been equal numbers of both. But since we now see so little anti-matter, it has been argued that this is because of the violation of what is known as ‘time-reversal symmetry’, that causes anti-matter to decay at a different (and faster) rate than matter, leading to its current depleted quantities. [UPDATE: See a correction to this in the comments.]
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Why not ask his why his god did not save them?

[Sorry for the glitch! I have corrected it. -MS]

We have heard about some church preachers demanding that their churches be allowed to have in-person services and violate the social distancing guidelines. Some may be doing it because of their belief that the god demands the actual physical presence of people close together while others may be doing it for ideological reasons such as that no government can tell them when and where they should go. They use the spurious argument that their god will protect the truly faithful.
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Natural coronavirus experiments in Trump country

I wrote before about how the coronavirus pandemic is creating the conditions for many natural experiments to be conducted. One is the question of how effective the various countermeasures being taken are. We have seen that in Trumpland, those parts of the country where his followers are dominant, the social distancing guidelines are being ignored or relaxed early, despite warnings by public health experts that this could lead to a resurgence in the number of infected cases. These people, especially in rural areas, seem to think that they are relatively immune from the pandemic because the absolute numbers in their areas so far have been relatively few, though on a per capita basis that may not be the case.
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Politely ending a conversation

I tend to be somewhat business-like in my conversations with people other than close friends and thus I often find myself in conversations with people, either face-to-face in the good old days or nowadays via phone or video or audio chats, in which the time has come when I want to end the conversation but find it awkward to do so without implying that I am tired of the other person’s company. Since we are now confined to home, the old standby of saying one has another engagement to get to is no longer credible.

Rat has decoded a common technique used to end calls.

(Pearls Before Swine)

In Kentucky, umbrellas are considered more dangerous than guns

In the state of Kentucky, heavily armed and masked protestors of the pandemic containment measures entered the state capitol building waving their weapons without any hindrance from the security personnel. What is strange is that umbrellas and stick are prohibited. Even one of the gun-toting people was surprised that they were allowed in so easily.
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How racism in the US became institutionalized after slavery ended

Although I was generally aware of the terrible history of racism against blacks in the US, I have to admit that I was horrified at the degree to which they were systematically institutionalized after slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment passed in 1865 in the wake of the Civil War. The states in the South quickly set about putting into law many of the awful conditions that slaves had suffered under and had looked forward to being released from. In his book Reconstruction; America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988, 2014), historian Eric Foner describes what happened.
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Coronavirus news has swamped even mass shootings

It is a measure of how much the news media in the US has been dominated by the pandemic that a horrific shooting during a 12-hour rampage in Nova Scotia, Canada yesterday that resulted in 18 deaths including the gunman, was relegated to the kind of coverage given to minor stories.

The initial details of this story are a little puzzling. The 52-year old gunman’s profession was described as a ‘denturist’, someone who makes and installs dentures and other oral devices.

Wortman, who is believed to have known several of the victims, appears to have acted in alone, said police. Authorities have not yet determined a motivation for the attacks, but the fact that Wortman had created a replica RCMP vehicle and police uniform suggested his early actions were deliberate.

“The fact that this individual had a uniform and a police car at his disposal certainly speaks to it not being a random act,” said Chris Leather, RCMP chief superintendent.

The fact that he prepared quite extensively for the shooting, equipping himself with a replica of a police car and obtaining a police uniform, would suggest someone who picked his targets randomly for who knows what reason. But the news report suggests that he knew at least some of the victims. Why go to all that trouble if you wanted to kill specific people who would have recognized you anyway and would know that you were not a police officer?