We know that big companies collect vast amounts of data on us based on our online presence and know our likes and dislikes in the minutest detail. So it is not surprising when we get emails recommending products for us to buy. But I was struck by an email I got from Amazon recently that said “Hello, Mano Singham, We have found something you might like.”
And the recommendation was … my own book.
The pandemic has cut deeply into the airline business and they are seeking to lure people back. Surely one of the most bizarre attempts is offering people the opportunity to buy tickets to fly to nowhere, i.e. where the plane takes off, flies around for a few hours, and then returns to the airport.
Singapore Airlines (SIA) is looking to launch no-destination flights that will depart from and land in Changi Airport next month, in a bid to give its ailing business a lift.
Sources told The Straits Times that the national carrier is working towards launching this option for domestic passengers – dubbed “flights to nowhere” – by end-October.
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We all get pesky robocalls and each one presents a problem. If we do not recognize the number, should we answer? Ignore? Block the number?
Apparently, the answer is that none of these actions make much of a difference.
To better understand how these unwanted callers operate, we monitored every phone call received to over 66,000 phone lines in our telephone security lab, the Robocall Observatory at North Carolina State University. We received 1.48 million unsolicited phone calls over the course of the study. Some of these calls we answered, while others we let ring. Contrary to popular wisdom, we found that answering calls makes no difference in the number of robocalls received by a phone number. The weekly volume of robocalls remained constant throughout the study.
My current laptop is getting pretty old, close to eight years. That by itself does not bother me since I use it mainly for writing, email, and the internet and do not really need any of the fancy doodads that manufacturers keep adding on. But it has started to show disturbing signs of being about to kick the bucket, such as the screen suddenly going dark and then getting the ominous ‘black screen of death’ message in about eight different languages saying that some mysterious problem had occurred and that I needed to hit a key to reboot. While it has been rebooting, I have been told that this is a sign of an impending hard disk crash and that one of these days, it will never come back to life.
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As you may have noticed, the site was down for almost two days. This is a really shoestring operation and I am really impressed how smoothly it runs almost all the time, so I hope you will bear with us when this kind of thing happens occasionally.
This coming Sunday, August 23 at 8:00pm (US Eastern Time), I will be giving a talk on the topic of my latest book The Great Paradox of Science: Why Its Conclusions Can Be Relied Upon Even Though They Cannot Be Proven.
The talk is being sponsored by the Freethinkers group in Cleveland. It will be on Zoom and those readers of this blog who wish to join in can find the necessary information here.
Via Carla Sinclair:
A group of skydivers jump at the same time, when one is accidentally kicked in the head by his buddy. He goes unconscious, but is miraculously saved when one of his partners is able to catch him and activate his chute.
We tend to fall prey to what can be called ‘presentism’, to think that the way things are now are somehow ‘natural’ and the way things always were. But as Aven McMaster writes, when we examine ideas about sexuality in the times of ancient Rome using Julius Caesar as a case study, we find things were quite different.
Like many premodern societies, the Romans rarely if ever identified people by their sexuality, at least not in terms of what gender their sexual partners were. To be sure, they had categories for types of sexual activities, but not for the sexual identities we use today. The terms ‘homosexual’, ‘heterosexual’, ‘bisexual’ and so on are modern inventions. There is no evidence for the existence of the concepts themselves, and Romans didn’t define people by the gender of their sexual partners.
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Via fellow FtB blogger The Bolingbrook Babbler, I was sad to learn that Ed Brayton had died. I first got to know him when he reached out to me in 2012 to say that the FtB community wanted to invite me to join the group. At that time, I had been blogging since 2005 on the blogging platform set up by my university to encourage faculty, staff, and students to take up this practice.
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