The above equation is famous and is indelibly associated with Albert Einstein. There has been renewed attention to this equation because a handwritten letter from Einstein containing this equation was sold last week at auction for $1.2 million. Authorities says that there are only three other such handwritten examples in existence. This letter was written in 1946.
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I long ago stopped watching TV news and talk shows, either on local stations or on the national networks. They never said anything that I did not hear about elsewhere and instead spent a lot of time on mindless blather that was truly irritating. And of course there were the numerous commercial breaks.
But sometimes you cannot avoid them, such as when the TV is on in a doctor’s waiting room or in the boarding areas for flights and then you would often see segments where the host would interview people who were talking about some new product that supposedly has beneficial effects on health.
On his show Last Week Tonight on Sunday, John Oliver dissected such segments, showing how often they were what are called ‘sponsored content’, i.e. essentially advertisements paid for by the manufacturer of the product that the ‘news’ shows presented without clearly disclosing this key fact.
Towards the end of the segment, Oliver’s team pulls off one of the pranks they are famous for and that is worth watching. They clearly plan these shows well in advance of airing.
Karim Bschir, a philosopher of science at the University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, has published a very detailed review of my book The Great Paradox of Science in the April 29, 2021 issue of the journal Metascience (This is a Springer journal and is thus behind a paywall. You can read it in full if you have the institutional access that universities often provide.) It is always gratifying for an author to have their book assigned to a reviewer who not only has a deep knowledge of the subject matter, but has clearly also read the text very carefully and summarized its content accurately and succinctly.
Since the review is behind a paywall, I will just provide the conclusions at the end where he looks at how I try to resolve the paradox that is central to the book, of why scientific theories work so well even though we have no reason to think that they represent the truth about the world or even that they are approaching the truth. (That is what the ‘anti-realist’ position referred to in the review means to philosophers of science. It does not mean that I live in some imaginary world!) Bschir’s summarizes my argument even better than I could and I hope it encourage readers of the review (and this blog!) to obtain and read my book.
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We are all familiar with the little test called a ‘captcha’ (an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) that we sometimes have to pass in order to access some website. You may have noticed that these tests are getting harder, in that we often fail once or twice before passing.
The video below explains why this is happening and it is not because we are becoming less human. It says that there is a race between these tests and computers, that as computers get better at doing them, the tests have to raise the level of difficulty. It also says that there is something else that is going on in the background, and that is that our responses are used to create databases that enable computers to become better at character and image recognition. For example, many of the captchas are to identify things that we see while driving, such traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, fire hydrants, and the like. The responses are used to program self-driving cars to better identify those things.
We may arrive at a point where this system runs out steam because we are not able to design simple tests that only humans can pass.
The New Yorker has a reputation for being a serious magazine. It is famed for its rigorous fact-checking of its pieces. So when I came across an article in the May 10, 2021 issue titled How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously, I took the article seriously. My attitude towards UFOs is, I suspect, similar to that of many, deep skepticism about the claims that extra-terrestrials have visited us but that the issue is not worth the effort to look into and debunk each and every claim closely.
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Some people (and I include myself) sometimes describe bad behavior as animal-like, even though many of us treat our pets as members of the family. Commenters are quick to point out that this comparison is often a slander on non-human animals because much of the depraved behavior that humans can indulge in are not found among them. So how did this tendency arise? David Egan writes that the way we use non-human animals as slurs in our language reveals quite a lot about us, and what it reveals is zoophobia, defined as fear or antipathy towards non-human animals.
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Sri Lanka, the country that I grew up in, is made up of about 90% of Buddhists and Hindus, religious traditions that have meditation as a part of their tradition and yet, growing up there, I did not know anyone who was a real devotee of the practice. I do recall dropping in with a friend out of curiosity to a place that was supposed to be a meditation center and listened to the leader of the program tell us of the need to ‘open our third eye’, which my friend and I found pretty funny, conjuring up as it did the sudden appearance of an eye in the middle of our foreheads like Cyclops, and tried to suppress our laughter. We never returned.
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Alex Gibney has a new documentary The Crime of the Century that looks at the opioid drug crisis and the shameless role played by the big pharmaceutical companies like Purdue and the Sackler family who profited greatly from the deaths of many people and the destruction of families and communities, topics that I have covered many times before. They were aided and abetted in their crimes by government officials and lawmakers who cut deals with the Sacklers and top Purdue executives to allow them to escape the consequences of their actions and retain their ill-gotten billions.
Here is a detailed review by Saloni Gajjar.
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As the cost of renewable energy keeps going down and the technology used to generate and store it improve, the fossil fuel industry, especially coal, is feeling the pinch as energy companies move away from using fossil fuels. Despite Trump’s electioneering promise to coal miners that he would revive the industry and bring back the mining jobs that were disappearing, he did not really do anything other than eliminate some clean air regulations.
The latest effort by Wyoming, one of the nation’s biggest coal mining states, is a measure of how desperate the situation is for the industry. It is telling other states, “Buy our coal or else!”
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I have discussed before the increased trend towards color-blind casting of films and TV shows, which I see more in British productions than in American ones, along with the related issue of cultural appropriation.
In general, I favor color-blind casting and have got used to it. To see people of color playing roles where they would not normally be seen in such positions, such as the aristocracy in costume dramas of a bygone period, seems increasingly unexceptional to me.
But I started to wonder if by having such portrayals, we might be inadvertently downplaying the racist repression that existed in those times. For example, in the TV series Bridgerton, people of color play lords and ladies in England a couple of centuries ago which is not even remotely close to reality. Would some viewers leave with the impression that this was the reality of those days?
It would seem that one would have to be massively ignorant of history to fall into such a way of thinking but given that there are reportedly people who think that humans lived alongside dinosaurs because they are portrayed that way in the cartoon show The Flintstones, one cannot totally discount the possibility.