What to do if you get bitten by a snake

Sri Lanka has a lot of snakes, many species of which, like cobras, are venomous. There is also a lot of folklore surrounding them and many of them likely originated as tales made up to scare the daylights out of children, like ghost stories. I vividly recall one story that was told about the Russel’s viper. The story was that if anyone in your household encountered a viper and killed it (and killing a poisonous snake was often the chosen method of getting rid of them), then seven other vipers would come to your home and they would hang like a chain from the rafters of the roof if your house did not have a ceiling or from a fixture, each one clasping the tail of the other, until they lowest one reached you where you were sleeping and bit you. Needless to say, that story was enough to give small children sleepless nights.

As children, we did not question the validity of this preposterous theory and the fact that it seemed like it required a lot of coordination and hard work by the vipers just to get at you when they could instead easily have have waited for you by hiding in the grass or under some furniture until you passed by before striking, even allowing for the improbability that there existed some kind of viper committee that organized these revenge attacks and recruited members to carry them out, like some kind of commando snake strike force. There was something so frightening about the idea of snakes slowly lowering themselves down from the roof at night while you slept that it banished any critical inquiry.
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Republicans choose abortion as the hill to die on

It has long been clear that Republicans were using the abortion issue as a vote getting strategy. That seemed to have worked for a while to rally especially the religious zealots to their cause. But what has happened, as often occurs when a party panders to a fanatical base, is that the zealots get out of hand and push the issue much further than the party leaders would have liked. We see that with gun control measures. People in general approve of common sense gun control measures but Republicans are in the grip of the extremists so that now they cannot do anything at all, however reasonable, that might anger the extremists even if they say they want the right to openly carry bazookas and hand grenades in the streets.

What the Republican establishment seemed to have wanted is to place restrictions on abortion to make it very difficult to get while not blocking it entirely, because that policy of making it access harder seemed to have some appeal. They attacked the Roe v. Wade ruling by portraying it as allowing ‘abortion on demand’ (though it did not) and called for its overthrow. They got that result by packing the US Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices who hid their beliefs during their conformation proceedings, and exulted over victory of their stealth strategy.

But the zealots essentially want to outlaw any and all abortions at any time and without any exceptions, even for rape and the health of the mother. These moves to so severely restrict abortion access are not popular as can be seen in how it galvanized voters to largely reject Republican candidates in the 2022 mid-term elections.
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Adam ruins AI

Adam Conover was the host of the excellent show Adam Ruins Everything that ran from 2016 to 2019 where in each episode he took apart a popular belief, tackling a wide variety of subjects, using research and experts and humor. A lot of humor. It was similar in spirit to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight except that Conover has a goofier sense of humor and did not sit behind a desk and had a lot of actors and high production values to help make his points
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He now has a podcast on YouTube where he does similar debunking and it is also worth checking out. In the episode below, he does a brutal takedown of all the recent hype surrounding AI, with the hype about self-driving cars part of the collateral damage.

The size and quality of one’s social groupings

Maria Konnikova looked at the research done by anthropologists on the sizes of social groupings. The research initially studied why non-human primates spent so much time on grooming one another but then got extended to humans.

[I]n the nineteen-eighties, the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis (now known as the Social Brain Hypothesis) had just been introduced into anthropological and primatology discourse. It held that primates have large brains because they live in socially complex societies: the larger the group, the larger the brain. Thus, from the size of an animal’s neocortex, the frontal lobe in particular, you could theoretically predict the group size for that animal.

Looking at his grooming data, [anthropologist and psychologist Robin] Dunbar made the mental leap to humans. “We also had humans in our data set so it occurred to me to look to see what size group that relationship might predict for humans,” he told me recently. Dunbar did the math, using a ratio of neocortical volume to total brain volume and mean group size, and came up with a number. Judging from the size of an average human brain, the number of people the average person could have in her social group was a hundred and fifty. Anything beyond that would be too complicated to handle at optimal processing levels.

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The wonderful world of caterpillars

Environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert had an interesting article in the New Yorker about the little-known world of caterpillars and other insects. I have to admit, caterpillars had not figured much in my consciousness but was impressed to learn that they undergo a dizzying array of transformations in their very short lives.

From a caterpillar’s perspective, humans are boring. The young they squeeze out of their bodies are just miniature versions of themselves, with all the limbs and appendages they’ll ever have. As they mature, babies get bigger and stronger and hairier, but that’s about it.

Caterpillars, for their part, are continually reinventing themselves. They emerge from tiny, jewel-like eggs and for their first meal often eat their own egg cases. Once they reach a certain size, they sprout a second head, just behind the first. They then wriggle free of their old skin, the way a diver might wriggle out of a wetsuit. (In the process, the old head drops off.) In the course of their development, they will complete this exercise three, four, in some species sixteen times, often trying out a new look along the way. The spicebush swallowtail, for example, which is found throughout the eastern U.S., emerges from its egg mottled in black and white. This color scheme allows it to pass itself off as a bird dropping. After its third molt, as a so-called fourth instar, it turns green (or brown), with two yellow-and-black spots on its head. The spots, which look uncannily like a pair of eyes, enable the swallowtail to pretend it’s a snake.
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The New War Between Science and Religion

As part of my process of posting my published articles here on my blog for easier access, here is one that was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education Review on May 9, 2010. Note that this was back in 2010 so the word ‘new’ may no longer be applicable. The editors of the magazine said that this article received one of the highest readerships that they had seen.

The New War Between Science and Religion

Communicating with the dead

I was talking with someone recently and during the conversation, she started telling me about the psychic she visits who had been very helpful in enabling her to communicate with her dead husband who had given her various kinds of advice. She said that the psychic has also told her many things that were accurate. She also said that on one occasion, she had seen her dead husband in the corner of the room and had made eye contact with him. She said that another person who was with her had also seen her husband.

I got to know this person just within the last couple of years, and while we are not close friends, she is very nice and I like her. While she was telling me this, I simply kept silent, even though I am dyed-in-the-wool materialist who does not believe in the existence of the afterlife and the spirit world. I am also aware that psychics and mediums use cold reading and other methods to give the impression of channeling the voices of dead people. And yet, my friend was so obviously happy with her experience that I did not have the heart to try and disabuse her of her belief.
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Galileo knew the answer to this question

It is not a silly question.

The reason is that when we are on a moving vehicle, we have the same velocity as the vehicle and when we jump up, the velocity in that direction does not change and we keep moving in the same direction, with only air resistance to slow us down.

Some time ago, an elementary school teacher in Cleveland asked me a variant of this question. She asked, since the Earth rotates on its axis, instead of flying to California which takes about five hours, we could not just go up in a balloon and wait for three hours so that the Earth’s rotation would bring California to us, saving us time and all that fuel.

Is there any limit to the silliness that the MAGA world will accept?

The ridiculous efforts to gin up right-wing outrage continues apace. The latest are the proposed regulations to make washing machines more energy and water efficient. Naturally, this has been seized on by right-wing media to suggest that our clothes will come out dirtier. This follows the general manufactured anger over similar developments like low-flush toilets. These are being used as examples of the ‘wokeness’ that is destroying the American way of life. They are even blaming the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on the management being more focused on being woke than financial matters. Yes, really.
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Death of an ivermectin influencer

Thanks to the internet and the rise of social media, we now live in a world where there are vast numbers of so-called ‘influencers’, people who try to tell others what to do in pretty much every area of their lives, even if they have no expertise or credentials in that field. What is surprising (to me at least) is that there are so many people willing to follow their advice.

Daniel Lemoi was one such influencer and he died on March 3, 2023 at the age of 50. He used his channel on the social media app Telegram to advocate for the use of the drug ivermectin, the deworming medicine that gained popularity as a prophylactic and treatment for Covid. While there is a version of ivermectin that has been developed to treat humans for certain specific ailments, he chose instead to use the version used by vets for large.animals like horses and cows, something that has been strongly discouraged by medical professionals. But its use took off after some people promoted it as an alternative to Covid vaccines and treatments.
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