Hawks and hummingbirds

When seated at my desk, I have a nice view of the hills that surround Monterey. I often see hawks and hummingbirds and I marvel at how evolution has created two such different birds, and I do not mean just in terms of their size. It turns out that the fact that they both are seen in the same vicinity near my home is not an accident. What researchers have found is that hummingbirds nest under hawks because that protects them from their main predator, the Mexican Jays.
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Election transition fears

As the election draws ever nearer, Seth Meyers takes a closer look at the question of whether there will be a peaceful transition of power.

Although Trump keeps stoking fears that he may not agree with the election results if they show him losing, and this has caused great alarm, I am not so worried. What he would be advocating is a coup and that requires the support of the military. I simply do not think that the US military is going to go along with his attempt to overturn the result of the election even in the unlikely event that his supporters take to the streets en masse to demand that he be allowed to remain in power.

Examples of how anti-science forces use falsifiability

In my recent article in Scientific American, I wrote about one issue that I deal with more extensively in my book The Great Paradox of Science and that is that we should get rid of the idea of falsifiability being both a defining element of what makes a theory scientific as well as it being the driver of scientific evolution. I said that my argument that falsifiability is a myth that does not describe how science operates is borne out by a close examination of actual scientific history.
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A nice survey of research into the origin of life

The theory of natural selection provides a way of understanding how life, starting from one or a few microorganisms, has evolved over time to give us the immense variety and complexity we see all around us now. But it does not, at least directly, tell us how the very first thing that we can call a living organism came about. Natalie Elliot provides a nice survey into what current research says about the origin of life and she says that this research has also resulted in significant changes in what we mean by ‘life’.
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Hilarious episode of This American Life

I have written many times before about my admiration for the way that this radio program tells stories, whether they are dealing with serious political issues or whimsical ones. This show really must be listened to to get the full effect, because these people are terrific storytellers, expertly blending in pauses, inflections, and music to great effect that gets lost with just the written word. Reading the transcript is nowhere near as good. Last week they had a particularly good episode that at times had me laughing out loud. It mostly dealt with watching films and TV.
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Book Review: The Unnecessary Science by Gunther Laird

Some readers may recall that a couple of years ago, I made fun of a press release issued by the publishers of a book by Edward Feser that had the title Five Proofs of the Existence of God and claimed that “the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments” (my italics). The point of my brief post was that life was too short to read yet another book claiming to prove the existence of any god since there have been so many failed past attempts. I said that if someone had actually come up with an irrefutable proof, that would be be earth-shattering news and reported all over the media and so I would wait and see if that a happened before wading through yet another theological treatise.
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How much physical distancing is safe?

As the pandemic drags on and countries try to grapple with how to achieve some semblance of normalcy in the fact of restrictions, they seem to have arrived at three general recommendations to help slow the spread of the virus. Wash hands with soap and water or use sanitizers, wear masks, and keep one’s distance from other people. While those seem straightforward enough, there are a lot of uncertainties within them. For example, when it comes to masks, while there has emerged a broad scientific consensus that wearing them is a good thing, what types of masks are better and are they meant to prevent the wearer from spreading infections to others or from getting infected by others or both?
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Radiolab on jury nullification

I have written many times about jury nullification, the little known right of juries to acquit defendants even if the defendant has clearly violated the law, if the jury feels that the law used to convict them is unjust.

We are all familiar with the process by which laws are created. We, the citizens, vote legislators into office. These legislators propose and debate bills. Once passed by the legislature and signed by the elected executive, these bills become laws and that, we think, is the end of the story unless courts rule the law to be unconstitutional. We are now obliged to follow the laws. If we do not like a law, the only option is to get the legislature to change it.
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Has the pandemic second wave begun?

As the death toll goes past 200,000, health experts have been warning that we should brace ourselves for a surge in new coronavirus cases in the fall, especially if people start to let down their guard and not follow safety precautions, either because they got tired of being restricted or they felt that the crisis had passed. Recall that with the 1918 pandemic, it too started in the early part of that year, subsided in the middle, and then roared back towards the end of the year and most of the deaths occurred in that second phase.

This graphic from the New York Times suggests that there has been a recent surge in new cases, which is worrying.