Lead is harmful in many ways, especially for children’s development, and has been linked to violent crime when lead-exposed children grow up. The terrible situation in Flint has brought the issue to the forefront.
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Those of us who love algebra (and even those who don’t) are familiar with problems that end up with the command to ‘solve for X’. But why, of all the letters in the alphabet, has X been chosen for this singular honor of representing the unknown, a practice that has extended well beyond algebra? To the extent that any of us thought of this at all, we may have put it down to sheer accident. Someone back in time picked that letter for who knows what reason and it stuck as others followed the practice.
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Yesterday’s interfaith panel held at my university was interesting. The Hindu was a no-show so the first part began with the other three panelists (the Protestant campus chaplain, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim imam, who was the same person from Thursday’s session) each giving 15 minutes presentations. The Protestant chaplain was a minister in the United Church of Christ. This is one of the most socially enlightened and progressive of Christian denominations.
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It is by now pretty much a given that the mania to cut taxes to enrich the wealthy has resulted in government being deprived of the necessary revenue to maintain its existing infrastructure and public spaces, let alone make any improvements to bring them into line with other developed nations. Anyone who has traveled to other developed and even many developing countries will immediately notice the difference in roads, airports, and other transportation systems and how the once-enviable public spaces of the US, such as its roads, parks, and libraries, are slowly decaying.
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The more I learn about bats, the more I am impressed at the abilities of these mammals. I had taken the phrase ‘blind as a bat’ literally and thought that bats depended entirely on echolocation to navigate. Christie Wilcox sets me straight and says that bats use both vision and echolocation to get around, using each for specific purposes.
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Mississippi is a poor state combined with a strong religious tradition and is usually at the bottom of the list when it comes to most measures of social well-being. But there is one area where it excels and that is in the vaccination rate where the rates are the highest in the nation. 99.7% of its kindergartners are fully vaccinated, compared with 94.5% nationwide. I discussed the reasons for this anomaly in a post last year. They achieved it by limiting exemptions from vaccination only under very strict conditions, unlike the much looser exemptions in other states.
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The field of psychology has been reeling because of problems with replicability, in that studies that claim to see certain effects have later had doubts cast upon them when efforts to replicate them failed to do so. Part of the problem is of course dealing with human subjects. But one of the theories that seemed to be pretty robust was based on a study by Roy Baumenister and Dianne Tice that suggested that people have a finite reservoir of will power and that when that is depleted by using it on some tasks, then we have reduced ability to overcome new challenges until that reservoir is replenished.
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In watching Michael Moore’s film Where to Invade Next that I reviewed here, I was struck by a segment that he had on the role of women in Iceland. In 1980, that became the first country to democratically elect a woman as president of a republic (though not the first country to elect a woman as an executive head of state which happened in Sri Lanka when it elected a female prime minister twenty years earlier) and she went on to serve four consecutive terms. Every major political party in Iceland now requires a minimum of 40% of women members.
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Last year I wrote about the mysterious attacks that had been made on the home of an 85-year old man who lived in Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland. Over a year or more, the man’s house had been pelted several times a week, and the police were baffled as to who was doing it and how and why.
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Last Sunday, people in the US moved their clocks one hour ahead as part of the biannual ritual associated with Daylight Savings Time. And each time we do this, people complain about the disruption it causes. To add to the confusion, some states such as Arizona and Hawaii do not make any change.
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