This year’s Spelling Bee cancelled

I have argued in multiple posts that I think that the Spelling Bee contest is not a good use of young people’s intellect. The skills it teaches are not commensurable with the time, energy, and resources that the children’s families put into it. The format of the contest is not designed to even produce the best spellers, because luck plays a significant role in determining the final outcome. The contest is designed to produce TV drama (and ratings) by putting these young children under enormous pressure.

So I can’t say that I was sorry to hear that this year’s contest, like so many other events, has been cancelled. I do feel sorry for all those young people who had been devoting so much time to preparing for it because those who think that they can be winners pretty much give up everything else for years on end in pursuit of that goal. Perhaps being released from the pressure to memorize the spelling of obscure words will allow them to explore other areas of creativity and discover new pleasures in life. I hope so.

Will the Spelling Bee recover after social distancing ends and make a come back? Sadly, it seems likely because there is money in it.

The strange world of futures contracts

There was this news report in the last few days about the price of oil going negative to -$40 per barrel, giving the impression that oil producers were now paying people to take their oil. Of course, that could not be strictly true. It is not as if your local gas station was paying customers to fill their tanks. In actuality, gas prices were trading normally, though the prices have been dropping due to the lowered economic activity because of the pandemic leading to an oil surplus.
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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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