The celebrity memorabilia craze

People seem to love what are known as collectibles, items that have no functional use but they want to own either because they see it as an investment that they think will grow in value over time and/or because they attach some significance to it. In the case of the former category, one has thing like works of art and jewelry and people have been collecting them for a long time. Aesthetics play an important role in this market.

But more recently there has been a surge in people seeking out items whose only value is that they were once owned by a celebrity. In the March 25, 2024 issue of The New Yorker, Rachel Monroe takes a deep dive into this world.
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Nitrogen gas manufacturers try to block use for executions

Many states in the US that still have the death penalty are finding it hard to find ways to execute people. Apart from the recorded cases of being unable to find veins into which the lethal drugs are delivered, the manufacturers of those drugs, not wishing to be associated with this death industry, are refusing to supply the drugs. But those states that are determined to retain the death penalty are now seeking other ways, even suggesting that we bring back hanging or the electric chair or the firing squad.

One method that is gaining vogue is to use nitrogen gas to essentially asphyxiate people. Given that nitrogen is so plentiful and makes up about 80% of the air around us, it would seem that getting access to it would be easy. But apparently it has to be bought from medical suppliers and three top suppliers that provide medical nitrogen are balking at having their product be used by the death industry.
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Trump gets good and bad legal news

The good news for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is that a panel of New York state appeals court judges has agreed to a reduction in the bond that he has to pay in his appeal of the civil fraud judgment obtained by state attorney general Letitia James to $175 million, and given him ten days to come up with the money. The original amount of $454 million plus interest was due today and SSAT’s lawyers had said that he could not pay it. This allows the appeal to go ahead once he pays this reduced amount but he will still have to pay the full amount if his appeal fails. The appeals process could take several months.

The bad news for him is that the judge overseeing the criminal case involving his hush money payments to Stormy Daniels has rejected his appeal for further delays and has scheduled the trial to begin on April 15th with jury selection. The original trial date was set to begin earlier this month and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had already agreed to a one month delay due to new documents surfacing.
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Rooting out scientific fraud with cash rewards

The reward structure in American universities, especially in the sciences, puts a great deal of pressure on scientists. In order to get research grants, which are an important measure used in promotions and getting tenure, scientists need to publish a lot of papers and show that they are major findings. This has resulted in some of them rushing to print without performing due diligence to make sure that their results are robust and repeatable. In some cases, this is just sloppiness or allowing their prejudices to unduly guide the interpretation of results, though that is still dishonorable. In the more serious cases, fraud is involved, either by deliberately massaging data to get the required result or by actually manufacturing the data.

Science has long been based on trust because it takes a lot of effort to reproduce the works of others and the custom has been to build on the work of others, not check them. It is only when some anomaly turns up that people comb through the work to see what might have gone wrong. Because of the prevalence of recent scandals, there are now efforts underway to put in place mechanisms to root out problems, and one of them involves giving cash rewards to those who investigate and reveal such cases.
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The UFO cult

I do not believe that we have been visited by extra-terrestrials. However, I do think it is quite possible, even likely, that intelligent life has emerged in many places in the universe. The universe is an immensely large place with an estimated 1022 stars within the visible part and since we know that the probability of intelligent life, let alone any kind of life, emerging is not zero (since it has happened here), it is not hard to imagine that it also emerged elsewhere.

What I do not believe is that they visited here, simply because of the vast distances that they would have had to travel, even if they originated on a planet of the nearest star to the Sun. To be able to traverse such distances would require some spectacularly new science and technology that is unlike anything that we know, that is also able to circumvent the limits of the speed of light and the lifetimes of organisms that seem to be so firmly based.

Furthermore, the idea that they have arrived and are playing coy by giving us just hints of their visits, and that the government is covering up those visits, adds another layer of implausibility. Why go to all the trouble of interstellar travel just to take a peek and go away? To arrive here would require incredibly sophisticated technology. To think that they were able to do that only to have their craft crash in the desert in the US, not just once but several times, just compounds the unbelievability.
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The student loan problem

John Oliver explains why so many students in the US acquire such large college debts and have a hard time paying off their loans. It is a familiar story. A government program meant to serve a good end is handed over to the supposedly efficient private sector to manage, which then turns out to be both inefficient and corrupt and results is people making loan payments for decades while making hardly a dent in the principal.

Oliver says that Joe Biden, over the objections of Republicans and obstacles placed by the US Supreme Court, has actually managed to eliminate or reduce student debt for a considerable number of people.

The Havana syndrome is still a mystery

The strange symptoms reported by US diplomatic personnel at various locations around the globe got the name ‘Havana Syndrome’ because it first surfaced in Havana in 2016. They complained of headaches, dizziness, nausea, hearing sounds, and difficulties with thinking and sleep;.

But repeated efforts to try and identify any kind of systematic pattern that might lead to a diagnosis of the cause have come up short, with various alternative theories being postulated ranging from the benign (that the sounds were caused by crickets) to sinister (that the diplomats were being targeted as part of some kind of technological warfare). But none of the theories covered all the cases.
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17 unanswered scientific questions

This article lists what it calls 17 ‘outstanding’ scientific mysteries that have currently eluded researchers’ ability to solve. Any such list is always subject to criticism about its choices and one could quibble with what is included and what has been left out. But it is useful as a discussion starter. I question the use of the word ‘mysteries’ for most of them because that implies questions that we have little or no idea how to address. These questions are what I would call ‘puzzles’, in that we do know how to tackle them even if we have not achieved success as yet.
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But the questions are undoubtedly interesting and of those, two in particular caught my attention because I wrote about them in my book The Great Paradox of Science. They are: What is the universe made of? Was there an advanced civilization on Earth before humans?

What is the universe made out of?

This one is about how the search for dark matter is proving to be so elusive. In chapter 17 of my book I suggested that we may be in the midst of a crisis that precedes a paradigm shift (using the model proposed by Thomas Kuhn), similar to what happened with the ether back at the dawn of the twentieth century. At that time, the existence of the ether was strongly believed even though it had not been directly detected. Various explanations were given to explain away the negative results but they became increasingly strained and it would be fair to call the situation a crisis. The time was ripe for a change and when Einstein proposes his special theory of relativity, although it did not disprove the existence of ether (something I argue cannot be done), it did make it redundant. Since it was no longer needed as an explanatory concept, and special relativity proved to be a fruitful source of new research it was possible to deem the ether to be non-existent and embrace relativity, which is what happened.

Something similar is happening with dark matter. In my book, I wrote:
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