Dementia news not as grim

I am of the age group where we encounter the phenomenon of people having Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia on a fairly regular basis, either because our parents or the parents of friends or even in rare cases with people closer to our age group who succumb to early onset forms of the disease. As a result, the conversations often assume the inevitability of our own serious cognitive decline. The attitude is that it is a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’, and various strategies are bandied about as ways of delaying it.
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The drug problem is going to get worse before it gets even worse

You may have read of the drug bust that found enough fentanyl to kill 26 million people That is a massive number so I was shocked to lead that the total haul was just 118 pounds, which works out to about two milligrams per fatality. Mark Kleiman explains that fentanyl is one of the most potent drugs, which is why a tiny amount can be so dangerous. He says that fentanyl is just one of a class of synthetic opioids that are far more dangerous than prescription opioids and heroin and also much easier to produce since they do not require an agricultural crop as its starting point but can be made entirely in a lab.
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The major role that luck plays in success

I think anyone who is ‘successful’ in life (however one defines that word) and is at least mildly thoughtful will have an appreciation of the important role that luck played in them getting where they are. Show me a person who thinks that they achieved their success purely because of their own talent and abilities, and I will show you an arrogant jerk. Where you were born and the circumstances of the family you were born into are two major luck factors but as one grows up, there are so many others such as the friends you happen to make, the teachers you encountered, purely random encounters and events that impinge on your life, and so on. Without much effort I can write down a long list of lucky breaks in my life that have enabled me to be ‘successful’, not in terms of great wealth or fame, but just simply in avoiding disaster or great hardship.
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John Oliver on the addiction rehabilitation industry

Dealing with addiction to drugs and alcohol is extremely hard on the addicts and their loved ones who are willing to go to extreme lengths to try and wean them off it. In his latest close analysis, John Oliver says that there is no formal definition of what constitutes addiction rehabilitation, no standards for what constitutes proper treatment, and no proper measures of whether these organizations are succeeding. So it should not be surprising that a rehabilitation industry has sprung up that promises to cure addiction for a stiff fee with little or no evidence that what they do actually works.

Yanny or Laurel?

You may remember the big disagreement that emerged in 2015 over ‘the dress’, a photo of a dress that some people saw as blue and black and others saw as gold and white, and each side could not possibly conceive how anyone could see anything else. (I was in the blue-black camp) Now there is a sound equivalent, where people listening to a sound clip hear the word spoken as either ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’. Test yourself.
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The strange behavior of clocks

Last week I gave a talk to the Northeast Ohio chapter of the Center for Inquiry on the topic “The Strange Behavior of Rulers and Clocks” where I discussed some of the implications of Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity for our notions of distance and time. After the talk, one of the participants whom I know teaches science told me that he had been unaware of one aspect of my talk and I realized that this may be generally true and so here’s a post about it.
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A new way for whistleblowers to share secret information

Given the secretive and coercive nature of the national security state, we have come to depend upon whistleblowers to tell us of the abuses that are committed by governments. Governments in turn retaliate by threatening to hand out extremely harsh punishments to those caught divulging information they do not want revealed, though high government officials will freely leak secret information to reporters when it serves their interests and such people not only do not get punished, they are rewarded for such actions and even for their deceptions and lies.
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Fame at last! Ok, maybe not so much …

Reader Leo was kind enough to send me a link to a clip from an episode of the TV show Adam Ruins Everything, where host Adam Conover amusingly debunks commonly held beliefs, often using animations. In this clip, he looks at the relationship between Copernicus and the Catholic Church that is often portrayed as a hostile one and uses an article of mine that I published in the December 2007 issue of Physics Today to support his case.
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Framed for murder by your own DNA

DNA has become the gold standard for evidence in criminal cases. It has a high reputation for accurately identifying people who had some contact with the scene of a crime and results in many convictions since jurors give great weight to DNA evidence. According to Katie Worth, a “2008 series of studies by researchers at the University of Nevada, Yale and Claremont McKenna College found that jurors rated DNA evidence as 95 percent accurate and 94 percent persuasive of a suspect’s guilt.”
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