And then there were two was one (climate accord holdouts)

[UPDATE: On November 7, 2017, Syria said it would also sign the Paris accord leaving the US as the only holdout.]

Nicaragua has agreed to sign on to the Paris accord on climate change, leaving the US and Syria as the only two nations on the planet who are not signatories. Nicaragua held out for so long for reasons opposite to that of the US, in that it felt that the accord did not go far enough in protecting the environment. The reasons for Syria’s abstention have not been made clear.
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Some pharmaceutical companies are just “drug dealers in lab coats”

Like with many other public health crises, the opioid epidemic is frequently thought of as having just somehow happened, the result of a confluence of unintended consequences for which no single individual or corporation is really at fault but that must now be dealt with collectively. But journalist Christopher Glazek in a long article in Esquire magazine, traces how the secretive Sackler family, through their private company called Purdue Pharma in the US and Napp Pharmaceuticals in the UK that invented OxyContin, downplayed the risks of addiction and exploited doctors’ confusion over the drug’s strength and, helped create the opioid crisis. What they did was take the drug and market it as the salve for a wide array of problems, the same strategy they had used earlier to make Valium a huge marketing success.
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Book review: In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist

In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist (1996) is a memoir by Susan Blackmore. Blackmore became convinced even before she went to college that the paranormal existed and decided to study it as a career. In her first year of college she also had a vivid out-of-body experience (OBE) that made a huge impression on her and she also found that she was an accomplished Tarot card reader, with her clients extremely impressed with the accuracy and quality of the things she told about them, persuading her that she too had psychic abilities.
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The sociology of science

In my post on the Planck units yesterday, I referenced the work of C. Alden Mead who, as far as I am aware, was the first to take the idea of the Planck units as having a real physical significance out of the realm of folklore. Interestingly, Mead had considerable trouble getting his paper accepted for publication. When I read his paper, I noticed that it was first submitted in June 1959 and must have had multiple exchanges with referees because a revised version was finally received four years later in August 1963 and then it took another year to appear in print in August 1964. The publication of scientific papers can be slow and take about a year or so if accepted but five years means that he had a lot of trouble with referees and had to fight to get it published.
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The Planck units and their meaning

(Note: I am using some Greek letters and math symbols in this post and HTML can be dicey in how they appear. They look ok to me using the Safari browser on my Mac but if it looks weird to you, let me know in the comments and I will try and tweak the HTML to make it look better.)

In our lives we need to have some system of units for quantities like mass (M), length (L), and time (T). The most common system, used almost everywhere in the world with the US being a notable exception, is the metric system where length is in meters, time is in seconds, and mass is in kilograms. But any such system of units is purely conventional and if we were to make contact with any extra-terrestrials, it is almost certain that they would have a different set of units. But could there be units that are universal?
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Nobel prize in physics given for gravity wave detection

To no one’s surprise, this year’s Nobel prize in physics has been awarded for the detection of gravity waves in September 2015. This was a huge project involving large numbers of experimentalists and theorists because the waves have such a weak signal. It is not unlike the earlier discovery of the Higgs boson in that the final detection was received with relief rather than surprise because both were firmly believed to exist. In the case of the Higgs, the prediction had been made fifty years earlier and with the gravitational waves, it had been made 100 years earlier, as a consequence of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The challenge in both cases was to overcome the immense technical hurdles involved in detecting them.
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Exploiting the credibility of science

As a result of science’s great achievements in giving us reliable and accurate knowledge, it has tremendous credibility. Unfortunately, that increase in credibility has not been matched by a corresponding increase in the public’s awareness of how science acquires that knowledge and the limitations on it. This makes it possible to dazzle people with ‘science’.
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The costs and benefits of prolonging life

I pretty much sit all day, mostly working on the computer or reading. I have done this all my life. I am told that I should exercise more but have not done so, due to a combination of laziness and other factors. I now see a report that says that my daily routine of largely sitting is going to kill me and that occasional walking would not have helped anyway.
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