The abundant availability of health data

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am locked into the Apple ecosystem. The latest addition was the Apple Watch. I had not considered buying one since I had an excellent analog wristwatch that kept perfect time and was powered by light and thus did not require any batteries. As long as you did not keep it in darkness such as put away in a drawer, it kept perfect time. I had had it for over a decade with no problems, so never felt the need to get another watch.

But since I live mostly alone, my daughters were concerned about me falling and not being able to call for help so they bought an Apple Watch for me because it has the feature that if you do have a hard fall, it detects it and will alert you. If you do not cancel the alert and are immobile for a minute, it will call 911 emergency services and your emergency contacts and send your GPS location to them. It will also send any medical information, such as the medications you are on, allergies, and any other health information you wish to share.
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The corrosive spread of tech company mentality

One of the aphorisms guiding tech companies is to ‘move fast and break things’. Rewards accrue to those companies that are first out of the gate with something new and so products are rushed out without being fully tested, the assumption being that any faults can be corrected based on feedback from consumers. In other words, the people who buy the early versions of the product serve as so-called beta testers, whether they want to be or not.

These situations rarely have life-or-death consequences. With most things such as devices and apps, usually the worst that can happen is that the users are annoyed or frustrated with the glitches but are willing to tolerate them as long as they get upgrades that purportedly take care of the problems.

But there is now an increasing area where tech-based products are being marketed as solutions for things where that tech culture attitude is not suitable, with sometimes dangerous consequences. I wrote recently about AI systems being used to try and treat the problem of loneliness by acting essentially as therapists, sometimes giving dangerous advice out of misguided attempts at being supportive. This can have tragic real-world consequence such as one case where a ChatGPT chatbot urged a teen to kill himself. The family is now suing Open AI, creator of ChatGPT.
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The horrifying revelations in The Tesla Files

The Tesla company is very secretive about the cars it produces. In particular, it is very reluctant to release information about their safety records. While the company blocks attempts to release records on its crash records, a whistleblower has released what is being called The Tesla files based on internal records. The Guardian has released an edited extract from The Tesla Files by Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden that was published on 24 July that reveals horrifying details about the kinds of crashes that Teslas have been involved in and how that information is suppressed. The article says that what the files reveal is that it is perfectly reasonable to be mortally afraid of these cars.

The most disturbing thing that I read was that Tesla collects vats amount of real-time data from its cars all over the world but the existence of this data was being kept secret from regulators. When any of the cars crash, this data would be invaluable to investigators looking for the cause but many do not ask for it, presumably because they are unaware that the data exist and even when they ask, the company stonewalls, leaving the victims of the crashes and their families frustrated.
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The desire of the wealthy to live forever

The August 11, 2025 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article by Tad Friend titled How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It on the huge amounts of money swirling around the efforts by some to lengthen their lives and even to reverse the aging process. This is a small community of billionaires who are willing to invest huge amounts of money on research into the aging process so that they might become immortal or at least increase their lifespans considerably. Naturally, this has spawned an industry of researchers who cater to this need because of the money available.

And these rich people, labeled biohackers, are willing to go to great lengths to increase their own lives. The article profiles one Peter Diamandis who can be considered an evangelist for this cause. His shtick is to get rich people to give huge amounts of money to create competitions that offer massive prizes under the umbrella category of XPRIZE for breakthroughs in longevity research and methods.

His promise is essentially a world in which you can blithely marry someone forty years younger than you, continue to have children even as your grandchildren are having children of their own, and keep your gaze trained on the farthest horizons—in which you can stick around to witness, and even determine, where humanity goes next.
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Is there a middle ground between atheism and theism?

To me the answer is ‘no’ but the title of this post was suggested by this essay by Philip Goff, a professor of philosophy, who clearly wants to find one. The subheading says, “Neither atheism nor theism adequately explains reality. That is why we must consider the middle ground between the two.”

Goff says that he was brought up as a Catholic but started identifying himself as an atheist at the age of 14 and was comfortable with it for about two decades. Then about five years ago, he had to teach a course on the philosophy of religion that required him to present the arguments for and against God. In doing so he says that he found the arguments for God “incredibly compelling too! In particular, the argument from the fine-tuning of physics for life couldn’t be responded to as easily as I had previously thought.”

A few weeks into this existential morass I was peacefully watching some ducks quack in a nearby nature reserve, when I suddenly realised there was a startingly simple and obvious solution to my dilemma. The two arguments I was finding compelling – the fine-tuning argument for ‘God’, and the argument from evil and suffering against ‘God’ – were not actually opposed to each other. The argument from evil and suffering targets a very specific kind of God, namely the Omni-God: all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good creator of the universe. Meanwhile, the fine-tuning argument supports something much more generic, some kind of cosmic purpose or goal-directedness towards life that might not be attached to a supernatural designer. So if you go for cosmic purpose but not one rooted in the desires of an Omni-God, then you can have your cake and eat it by accepting both arguments.

And thus my worldview was radically changed.
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Confabulation, dementia, and Trump

Those of us in the reality-based world face a challenge in the current US political climate. Trump and his cult followers can say anything they like without feeling the need to provide a shred of evidence in support. On the other hand, we feel that we need to provide at least some evidence for any claim.

The most recent example of this is Trump’s claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has rigged the latest appalling jobs numbers report to make him and Republicans look bad. Not only that, he said that the head of the bureau had faked the numbers even last year to make the economy under Joe Biden look good.

Contrast this with the increasing suspicion that Trump is suffering from severe cognitive deterioration, that he might already be in the throes of dementia. Most people will hesitate to openly say this because dementia is a medical condition that needs to be diagnosed by a professional.

But a conservative Republican attorney by the name of Chris Truax says that the evidence of Trump’s dementia has become so obvious that pretty much anyone, and definitely those who have had loved ones suffer from it, should be able to recognize it easily, especially the confabulation. He says that the kind of confabulation that Trump is demonstrating goes well beyond the more common problems of misremembering past events or conflating distinct events into one.
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“Died peacefully surrounded by family”

I have read the above line many times in newspaper reports of the deaths of celebrities, most recently that of Ozzy Osbourne.

A statement from the Osbourne family reads: “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.” No cause of death was given, though Osbourne had experienced various forms of ill health in recent years.

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Can AI treat loneliness?

Although I mostly live alone, I fortunately do not suffer from feelings of loneliness. That might be because I am an introvert, comfortable with solitude and being in my own thoughts and engaging in fundamentally solitary pursuits like reading and writing. It takes very little interaction with other people to satisfy my need for human companionship. But for those who thrive when engaging with others, solitude can be a real problem, leading to feelings of loneliness. Loneliness can also strike people when they are in the presence of others if they do not feel a sense of connection with them.

There has been some attention paid recently to the question of loneliness, with suggestions that its adverse effects go beyond just mental health.

A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Estimates suggest roughly half the US population over sixty say they feel lonely. The causes of loneliness among older people are not surprising. Friends and family die, and as their physical capabilities decline, people go out less less, engage in fewer activities, such that their social circle starts shrinking and they find new friends harder to make.
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The revolutionary water clock

Creating accurate time pieces has been a long-standing goal. Some of the earliest devices, such as the sun dial, suffered from the fact that they depended on the presence of sunlight. Water clocks, that measured the level of water in a container as it flowed out through a hole at the bottom, solved that problem but suffered from others, such as that the rate of flow depended upon the height of water in the container and was thus irregular and that the water had to be manually replenished. Another thing that had to be taken into account was that in those days, an ‘hour’ was not a fixed time interval as it is now. Instead, an ‘hour’ was defined by dividing the total amount of daylight in a day by twelve, and thus the length of an ‘hour’ varied with the seasons and this was hard to take into account.

But way back in the in the 3rd century BCE, a Greek inventor in Alexandria named Ctesibius devised an ingenious water clock that solved all these problems and which remained the standard for about 1800 years until the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656.

This video explains how he did it.

Ultimate cause of Air India crash remains a mystery

Indian aviation authorities have released the preliminary report on the Air India flight 171 crash that occurred just minutes after take off from Ahmedabad airport , killing 241 of the 242 people on board. While it pinpoints the proximate cause of the Boeing crash, it leaves unresolved how that came about.

The proximate cause is that the engine fuel switch to both engines was switched to the ‘off’ position.

According to a preliminary report by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, moments after take-off both the switches in the cockpit that controlled fuel going to the engines had been moved to the “cut-off” position. Moving the fuel switches almost immediately cuts the engine.
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According to the report, the fuel switches were moved to cut-off “one after another”. Seconds later, the switches were moved back to turn the fuel back on and one of the plane’s engines was able to restart, but could not reverse the plane’s deceleration.

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