Ransomware attacks

John Oliver devoted a segment of Last Week Tonight to the problem of ransomware, where hackers break into a computer system, lock up all the data, and then demand payment, usually in cryptocurrencies, in order to provide the key to unlock it. Barely a day goes by without some report about a new ransomware attack. The news stories focus on the havoc caused by attacks on big entities like hospitals, local governments, and businesses. But Oliver points out that with more and more people having their home devices hooked up to the internet, those become vulnerable as well.
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Sackler exploitation of bankruptcy laws

In an earlier post, I linked to an episode of Last Week Tonight where John Oliver explained how the odious Sackler family are trying to use the bankruptcy laws so that, while they claim that they will be paying $4.5 billion, they will end up with total immunity frrom future lawsuits, will not have to admit guilt, and likely end up even more wealthy than they are now. This article explains why this is such a bad deal for the public and how it lets the Sacklers off the hook.
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When even fear of death is not enough

This video from Vice News shows how deeply some people have become buried in the anti-vaccine propaganda that even almost dying from covid-19 does not persuade them to get the vaccine. Instead they babble about how they have heard about vaccines changing their DNA and that they are not sure whom to believe. It is a frightening display of ignorance masquerading as knowledge.


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Why do it?

I was intrigued by the news report that researchers had calculated the value of pi to 68.2 trillion figures. Pi (defined as the number obtained when the circumference of a circle is divided by the diameter) is a massively important quantity that occurs all over the place but it is hard to imagine what value is gained by achieving such a high level of precision. So my first reaction was, of course, “Why bother?”

This article looks at how much precision is neccssary for any practical application.
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Masks are coming back

I just returned from a trip to the supermarket and noticed that pretty much everyone, except for four people of whom three were young, is wearing masks again. While I always wore masks there and at any indoor venue where I was not sure that everyone was vaccinated, I had noticed last month that mask usage had dropped considerably. I wondered whether people would be more resistant to the advice to mask up again and was glad to see that, at least in this area, people seem to have adopted them again. The county has as yet not mandated that everyone mask up indoors, though with the rising number of infected people due to the Delta variant, I expect to see such a mandate soon.
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Establishing non-existence in science

The so-far unsuccessful search to find direct evidence for the existence of dark matter is raising an issue in science that is often misunderstood and rarely gets the attention it deserves. And that issue is how we know in science that something does not exist. I discuss that in some detail in my book The Great Paradox of Science (yes, yet another plug for those who have not read it to buy it!) because it is hard to understand the logic of scientific progress without it. The history of science is replete with things that were once thought to exist but are no longer so. The aether and phlogiston are two famous example and another is N-rays. Trying to understand why we think those entities no longer exist will enable us to better understand when it might happen that dark matter is also thought to not exist.
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Will the new climate change report change minds?

The new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays out the basis for “the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.”

The warnings are getting more and more dire, though the situation is not yet hopeless.

Earth is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.”

“It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

But scientists also eased back a bit on the likelihood of the absolute worst climate catastrophes.

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and “unequivocal” and “an established fact,” makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013.
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The 3,000-plus-page report from 234 scientists said warming is already accelerating sea level rise and worsening extremes such as heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger and wetter, while Arctic sea ice is dwindling in the summer and permafrost is thawing. All of these trends will get worse, the report said.

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Biggest life expectancy drop since WWII

In a reasonably healthy society one would expect life expectancy to rise or at least approach a plateau as the limits to which we can extend life (assuming that there is a limit) get reached. Dropping life expectancy should be a source of serious concern since it implies that something is seriously out of whack. So the recent dramatic drop in life expectancy in the US has to be a cause for alarm.

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