A community in American Samoa leapfrogs into solar energy

I have been reading several books on anthropology recently and decided to revisit a classic, the 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead. This was Mead’s first book, published in 1928 when she was just 27 and was based on nine months field work in 1924 on the island of Tu’a in American Samoa and it made her famous. She was investigating whether the conflicts that seemed to arise in the US between adolescent girls and their parents after they reached puberty was biologically based or was because of the cultural context in which they grew up.

Mead was part of the anthropology program at Columbia University and Barnard College directed by Franz Boas that claimed that evidence showed that race, sexuality, and gender were not fixed, biologically determined categories but were fluid and a product of culture. Boaz expanded on these themes when he wrote in the Foreword to Mead’s book, “Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.”
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The Copernican Myths by Mano Singham

Given the discussions generated by yesterday’s post about how the location of heaven changed with advances in science, I decided that an article that I published back in 2007 in Physics Today on December 2007, p. 48-52 might be relevant because it discusses why it was that the idea of a heliocentric universe led to the inference that the universe might be infinite and thus left no room for a heaven. (Doing so continues my program of putting on this blog my published articles for easier access.)

The Copernican Myths.

How did heaven first end up in the sky and then nowhere?

One of the things that made me into a disbeliever in the existence of gods (and anything supernatural) was the fact that science seemed to have ruled out any location where such things might exist. The answer usually given that ‘God is everywhere’ but could not be detected seemed like a cop out. And the idea of dead people’s souls wandering around that could observe you but you could not contact (except through people with special powers) also seemed weird.

But during the time that I was a believer, I did struggle with the question of where a god and heaven could possibly be. In this article, Stephen Case explores how ideas about heaven have changed over the last two millennia.
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Changing times

Today at 2:00 am is when the US changed from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time which required shifting clocks back by one hour. It is also the cue for many (including me) to grumble once again about this clock adjusting process that takes place twice a year. I went around changing all eight clocks last evening and then a few minutes later, there was a brief power cut, which meant that I had to again set the time on four clocks that are plugged in.

Not every part of the US changes times like this, with some staying on Standard Time all year round.

Exceptions include Arizona (except for the Navajo, who do observe daylight saving time in Navajo Nation), Hawaii, and the overseas territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands.

I grew up near the equator where the amount of daylight stays pretty much the same throughout the year. and thus does not require fiddling around with clocks twice a year. But irritation with the practice is growing in the US and arguments for keeping one time throughout the year seem to becoming more frequent.
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The counter-intuitive appeal of the lottery

Every day I read reports of how the jackpot for the Powerball lottery, one of the many lotteries run by states in the US, keeps increasing in size. Under the system, if a drawing does not produce a winner, the jackpot rolls over with the value of the new bets added to the old. Currently the prize is about 1.2 billion dollars.

In an interesting article, Kathryn Schulz discusses the history of how the lottery became a ubiquitous presence in American life.

How this came to be is the subject of an excellent new book, “For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America,” by the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s book is a peculiar contradiction: on the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents make it out to be, a deception that has come at the expense of public coffers and public services. On the other hand, it is so popular that it is both extremely lucrative for the private companies that make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most dedicated players.

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The danger of ‘long covid’

The WHO is warning that what is known as ‘long covid’, one feature of which is debilitating fatigue, is a serious issue that countries should start paying more attention to.

Long Covid is “devastating” the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of people, and wreaking havoc on health systems and economies, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned as he urged countries to launch “immediate” and “sustained” efforts to tackle the “very serious” crisis.
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Covid has killed almost 6.5 million people and infected more than 600 million. The WHO estimates that 10% to 20% of survivors have been left with mid- and long-term symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness and cognitive dysfunction. Women are more likely to suffer from the condition.
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Why we can say that some things do not exist

In two recent posts I discussed the question posed as to why there is something other than nothing and whether the question was even meaningful. The difficulty of showing that something does not exist is not confined to questions about the universe as a whole, it even applies to individual entities where you think it might be easier.

I got a text from a person I know and attached to it was a video of what looked like an organism consisting of the head and tail of a fish and, in between, the torso of a human being with arms behind its back and three pairs of breasts. This looked like it had been forwarded multiple times on social media and this person asked me if I thought it was real. I replied that it is safe to assume that anything seemingly bizarre that floats around the internet, and is not cited to a reputable news source along with supporting evidence, is a hoax. I did not tell him it was impossible that it was real because such a level of certainty implies omniscient knowledge on my part. But it is possible to be effectively certain that some things do not exist if one follows the logic of science.
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More about ‘nothing’

In response to the comments about my post about whether the question of why there is something other than nothing was meaningful, I thought I would link to an old post of mine titled Much ado about ‘nothing’ (I was quite pleased with myself for coming up with the title) that discussed the flak that erupted following the publication of the book by Lawrence Krauss that purported to explain why there is something rather than nothing. Krauss and Neil de Grasse Tyson do not come out well in that episode.

Since my post was from 2013, it is likely that many readers have not seen it before.