Military looks askance at religious exemptions for vaccines

Some people who do not want to get the vaccine but are required to do so because of their work are claiming the right to a religious exemption. At least when it comes to the military, they are finding that a very tough sell.

More than 12,000 military service members refusing the COVID-19 vaccine are seeking religious exemptions, and so far they are having zero success.

That total lack of approvals is creating new tensions within the military, even as the vast majority of the armed forces have gotten vaccinated.

The services, urgently trying to keep the coronavirus pandemic in check by getting troops vaccinated, are now besieged with exemption requests they are unlikely to approve. Meanwhile, troops claiming religious reasons for avoiding the shots are perplexed because exemptions are theoretically available, yet seem impossible to obtain.
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Obtaining a religious exemption is rooted in a process that predates the pandemic and has been used for decisions such as whether troops on duty can wear head coverings or beards for religious reasons.

In addition to discussions with chaplains to determine whether they have a “sincerely held belief,” troops must meet with commanders and medical personnel. The final decision is made higher up the chain of command and is also based on whether the person’s vaccine exemption will pose a risk to mission accomplishment, unit cohesion, the health and safety of the force, and military readiness.

Even in the past, few troops have cleared those hurdles to get religious exemptions. And because the pandemic can directly affect the force’s health and readiness, the bar is even higher, so military leaders aren’t surprised by the lack of approved exemptions.

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Why catalytic converters are being increasingly stolen

It is increasingly common for the catalytic converters on cars to be stolen. This is because the precious metal that forms a key element of the converters has become more expensive. That element is a rare one called rhodium which is, by weight, reportedly the most expensive element on the planet, beating out gold and silver and other precious metals. It is one of the rarest, just one part in a billion, compared with 5% for iron.

The converter on regular fuel vehicles is simple: a stainless steel shell surrounds a ceramic honeycomb monolith— that monolith is coated with three important precious metals: platinum, palladium, and rhodium. 

As the car’s exhaust passes through this honeycomb the metals heat up and act as catalysts: turning carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide, unburned hydrocarbons to H20 and C02, and nitrous oxides into nitrogen and Carbon-dioxide.  

Because these metals, and especially rhodium are so stable and durable they can perform this function over an extremely long lifetime of the car part—suffering very little loss in performance.

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Radiation paradoxes 5: Mass

On the surface mass, like space, seems like a simple and straightforward concept but there are deep subtleties involved here too. In order to bring out the subtleties about mass, I had a practice of asking students in my introductory physics classes to explain what they understood when they spoke of the mass of some object. The would usually give some vague formulation along the lines ‘the amount of stuff’ it has. When I pressed them by asking how that differs from their concept of volume, they would sharpen their answer, usually saying that volume was a measure of the amount of space that was occupied by the object but mass was a measure of how heavy it was. There are teachers who insist that we must emphasize that mass and weight are different but I am not one of them. After all, we all know from experience that objects with greater mass are heavier to lift. The intuitive idea that mass has a relationship to weight is a good enough starting point for learning about the subtleties of mass.
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Straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel

Take a look at this graph that disaggregates the rates of covid-19 deaths according to vaccination status.

Note that if you are unvaccinated you have at least a five-fold greater risk of dying. This is a massive difference. And yet, many people choose to ignore information that is effectively smacking them upside the head and telling them to get vaccinated.

Compare this with how people are willing to adopt all manner of practices that promise even small benefits. People start taking things like turmeric, acai berries, pomegranate, and adopt all manner of diets, exercise routines, and things like detoxing even though the promised benefits may be just a few percent reduction in cancer or a slight increase in longevity, and the like. And even those benefits have been shown to not be that robust or are even spurious. This behavior reminds me of something that Jesus said in Matthew 23:24 about people straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.
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Radiation paradoxes 4: Stars, space, and rotating frames

How do you tell if you are in an inertial frame or not? According to Newton’s model of a fixed space, an inertial frame is one which is at rest or moving with constant velocity through that fixed space. We saw that determining this required us to observe the state of motion through that space of an object Q that was known to be not under the influence of any forces. If you observe Q to be at rest or moving with constant velocity, then you are in an inertial frame. If however, even in the absence of forces, the freely floating object Q appears to be accelerating in some direction with respect to you, you could conclude that this must be because you are in a frame that is an accelerating in a straight line in the opposite direction and hence you are not in an inertial frame.
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Radiation paradoxes 3: Identifying genuine inertial frames

As a computational matter, when we are in a rotating frame such as the Earth, we have a choice. We could work with inertial frames where Newton’s laws and Maxwell’s equation are valid, use real forces only, and make sure to include all the accelerations introduced due to the rotational motions. Or we could use a frame that is embedded in the Earth and thus rotating but treat it as an inertial frame by including via the fictitious Coriolis and centrifugal forces the non-inertial effects caused by its rotation. The two methods are mathematically equivalent but conceptually different. It is sometimes easier to treat the Earth as an inertial frame that is not spinning and incorporate fictitious forces and that is often done in the field of meteorology.

It is the search for genuine inertial frames that is of interest in this series of posts because it is important in the resolution of the radiation paradoxes.
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Cuba’s vaccination production effort pays off

One of the appalling things about the current pandemic is the great inequality in vaccine availability around the globe, highlighting once more how the wealthy nations are able to corner the market on valuable resources. In this case, since many of the companies that are the biggest producers of vaccines are private ones and they seek to make as much money as they can, they have entered into contracts to mostly supply wealthy nations like the US that are able to pay more, while the WHO consortium that sought to provide vaccines to poorer countries through its COVAX program has found it hard to get adequate supplies.
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Radiation paradoxes 2: Space and inertial frames

In trying to understand and resolve the paradox I wrote about in the first post in this series, I will be taking a somewhat circuitous route in order to lay some important groundwork before we can directly confront the paradox.

We can start the journey by looking at one of the most fundamental concepts in physics, that of the nature of space. On the surface, space seems like a very straightforward concept. It is seen as a kind of container in which everything in the universe exists. But difficulties arise when one asks questions such as whether space can be viewed as something positive, a tangible entity that has its own properties that can be detected, or whether it is viewed as something negative, that signifies the absence of matter in a region. Another way of posing the distinction is asking whether, if one can conceive of removing all the matter and energy in the universe, what would we be left with? Just ’empty space’? In the absence of matter, would such a thing have any meaning at all?
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Wellness and woo

The concept of ‘wellness’ has been gaining ground in the US. It is a vague term and, as I understand it, it means taking proactive steps to maintain one’s health, such as eating healthily, getting exercise, avoiding harmful practices like smoking, getting enough rest, and so forth. The idea is that by doing so, one can stave off some of the ailments and illnesses that can affect one’s wellbeing.

An additional layer is laid on in the name of holistic’ approaches to health, with the idea that the mind and body are connected and that one should also try and maintain a healthy mindset. These could include practices like yoga, meditation, relaxation techniques, and other activities that seek to reduce stress, blood pressure, and the like.

All that is perfectly reasonable.
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