Wasting food

I hate to see food wasted. I really, really hate it. I will try and eat everything in the fridge, even if I don’t like it, if the alternative is throwing it away. I will cut out the bits of food that are spoiled and eat the rest. It is not that I am cheap. It is just that I think that throwing food away should be the absolute last resort. It really bothers me that so much food is wasted in the US. Part of it is due to the sheer size and complexity of the food distribution system in which the producer and consumer are separated by such vast distances that some wastage is inevitable in storage and transportation. This is perhaps understandable as an unavoidable consequence of creating complex societies.
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A case study of dogged perseverance in mathematics

It is widely held that mathematics at the highest levels is a young person’s game and that once one hits the age of forty, one has pretty much exhausted one’s potential for any creative contribution to the field. The famous mathematician G. H. Hardy said, “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game… I do not know of an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty.”

This was partly why it was such a shock when in 2015 a paper appeared in the prestigious journal Annals of Mathematics claiming to have solved a major unsolved problem and that the author was the nearly 60-year old Yitang Zhang, an untenured part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who had published only one paper in the past in 2001.
 
So what did Zhang do? He proved a long-standing conjecture in number theory involving prime numbers that dates back to the nineteenth century. Alec Wilkinson wrote a long article in the New Yorker about Zhang, the theorem he proved, and how it came about.
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Why did T. Rex have such small arms?

While the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus Rex is huge, its arms are surprisingly small and this has been a puzzle for scientists. This article describes the search for an explanation ever since the discovery of fossil remains of the dinosaur in 1902 by a team of paleontologists led by Barnum Brown from the American Museum of Natural History, an institution that was headed by Henry Fairfield Osborn.


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Covid finally catches me

Last Tuesday night (ie., a week ago), I started a cough and felt that I had a fever so I took a test on Wednesday morning that confirmed that I had Covid. I am pretty sure that I know how I got it. I have been very conscientious about wearing my N95 mask in all indoor public settings but on New Year’s Eve I attended a party. While I wore my mask almost all the time, I removed it to eat and I expect that that was when the virus snuck in. My symptoms started three days after that event. I have been isolating myself since then.

My symptoms were mild. In addition to the slight cough, I had a fever of about 101F. Three days after my test, by Friday, my fever had gone and I felt back to normal but I will continue to isolate for another week just to make sure that I am not contagious. Friends and neighbors who became aware that I have Covid have been very generous with offers of food and to run errands.

I am now part of the nearly 700 million people globally who have had the virus. I wrote earlier about the kinds of personal risk-benefit calculations one makes. I had on a few occasions removed my mask in indoor public spaces in order to eat and had not caught Covid. But it is always a gamble. You can reduce the risk by taking precautions but can never make it zero.

The link between machismo and climate change denial

Not being well versed in popular culture, I had never actually heard of Andrew Tate before his Twitter exchange with Greta Thunberg made news headlines last week. I was in a discussion group where the topic of the tweets came up and one of the participants enlightened me on who he was and the odious views he espoused, adding that he has become ‘the Jordan Peterson for the incels’.

Rebecca Solnit goes beneath the surface of the Twitter exchange.

There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.

“Men resist green behavior as unmanly” is the headline for a 2017 story on the phenomenon. Machismo and climate denial, as well as alliance with the fossil fuel industry, is a package deal for the right, from the “rolling coal” trucks whose plumes of dark smoke are meant as a sneer at climate causes to Republicans in the US who have long opposed nearly all climate action (and are major recipients of oil money).
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The myth of the rich genius

I have written many times before about the strange tendency of people to ascribe qualities of cleverness and depth, even genius, to very wealthy people. This makes the media pay undue attention to the utterances of such people, even on topics that they know nothing about. The examples are too numerous to list. The deference given to them. by the media and the constant presence of acolytes who feed their egos in this way, seem to result in them actually buying into the myth themselves.

Calder McHugh writes about this tendency but be warned that his essay contains spoilers for Glass Onion. The following passage is free from them.

In reality, rich people are no smarter than everyone else; their plans and even downfalls are simple. Peter Thiel is funding artists in New York City and politicians in Arizona because he thinks they’ll influence culture and politics toward his vision of a new right. Neither is going well for him. FTX founder and large political donor Sam Bankman-Fried at some point bought the boy-genius myth that he was selling to everyone else, lost a lot of money and landed himself in court. Musk made an offer for Twitter because he was addicted to the platform and thought it would be good to have an even bigger megaphone and now, his companies and his own brand seem to be in freefall. Donald Trump ran for president so that he could watch himself on cable television more, stumbled backwards into the job, tweeted through it and is now hawking NFTs while he tries to dodge prosecutions. Ye, better known as Kanye West, embraced shocking behavior until it lost him lucrative business deals and, reportedly, billionaire status.

At some point, all of these men accrued enough capital that they found themselves surrounded by people who fanned their egos in the hopes of a kickback. But as they settled into these carefully constructed worlds that were built to reinforce their supposed genius, any creative spark or understanding of business or American culture that helped them in their journey to the top is bound to dim.

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US life expectancy drops again

For the second straight year, US life expectancy dropped, according to the CDC. It is now the lowest it has been in 25 years.

As per the 2021 data, Americans are expected to live 76.4 years, down from a peak of 78.8 years in 2019.
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The finalised numbers confirm preliminary ones released by the CDC in August, in which the health agency predicted the worst two-year decline of life expectancy on record in the US since 1923.
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Life expectancy in the US remains lower than the UK, where the average is 80.8 years. It is also lower than neighbouring Canada, where life expectancy as of 2020 is 81.75 years.

Of both countries, the US spends the highest amount of money on healthcare. Per capita, the US pays $12,318 (£10,217), while the UK spends $5,387. Canada’s healthcare spending, in comparison, sits at $5,511 per capita.

Covid-19 and drug overdoses are being blamed from the drop.

“COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths, or 74%, of the decline from 2019 to 2020, and 50% of the decline from 2020 to 2021.”

Drug overdose deaths are also a factor. They now account for more than a third of all accidental deaths in the US, the data shows. Overall, overdose deaths have risen by 16% from 2020.

This includes deaths involving fentanyl, which increased by 22% in 2021.

While the pandemic effect should slowly decrease, there’s no sign that the drug issue will follow.

Unwarranted anxiety over memory lapses

I am at the age when people begin to worry about the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. It does not help that this topic keeps surfacing in conversations among age-peers in one’s family and friends and acquaintances, thus keeping it at the forefront of one’s mind. But it is easy for people who are not clinicians trained in the symptoms of these diseases to become unduly alarmed over things that are merely the effects of normal aging and not signs of serious cognitive decline. Misplacing items, being unable to recall the name of an object or an actor in a TV show or film, forgetting why one went into a room, are among the things that cause unwarranted uneasiness.

This article tries to dispel some of those concerns, by distinguishing between normal aging-associated memory loss and mild cognitive impairment. Every year about 10-15% of people with mild cognitive impairment will develop dementia.
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Masking is being advised again

Last week, for the first time since the pandemic started, I went into a public place without wearing a mask. It was the occasion of some friends of mine visiting from out of town and the five of us went to a restaurant. It felt a little strange at first to be without a mask but the restaurant was only about half full and there were no people at the adjacent tables.

I am one of the few holdouts who are still wearing masks. But health experts are warning that we seem to be heading for some months where cases will rise for three kinds of viral infections (Covid-19, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), and flu) and are recommending that people wear masks again in certain situations. This is going to be a hard sell since most people around the country (and apparently the world) have given up on them and live as if infectious diseases are things of the past.

But others share my concern.
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