Making airports into solar farms

Matt Simon writes that airports have lots of open spaces and big buildings that are never in shadow, which would make them perfect places to locate solar panel arrays. It would be much easier and provide a bigger return than an equal area spread out over residential roofs. For example, Denver International Airport has 53 square miles of usable space, enough to provide up to 30% of its annual energy needs and, on sunny days, all of it.
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India’s massive second wave of covid-19

It was just a month ago that I posted about how the numbers of covid-19 cases in so many countries in Asia and Africa were much lower than models predicted and India was cited as one example. That situation has changed dramatically since then. The average number of daily deaths in India had reached a low of less than 100 on March 8th but as of yesterday had rocketed up to about 2,500. This figure shows that it is now around Brazil’s daily death rate. That country’s leader Jair Bolsonaro is being blamed for his downplaying of the danger of covid-19 and ignoring expert advice on how to deal with it.

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A new low in US anti-vaccine misinformation

A private school in Florida (of course!) is actually barring vaccinated teachers from interacting with students. The school fees are pretty high which shows that this school caters to the high income and high wealth population.

A Miami school has discouraged teachers from getting the Covid vaccine, saying any vaccinated employees will be barred from interacting with students.

Centner Academy leadership cited debunked claims of non-vaccinated people being “negatively impacted” by contact with vaccinated people.
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Perceptions of time

I have long been interested in how we perceive time. There are many markers of time’s passage, daily and seasonal changes and biological changes being just some of them. Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of time by saying that physical time of an event is what is given by clocks placed at the location of the event, and then showed that the interval in clock readings between any two events depended on the state of motion of the clocks.

But there is also the psychological perception of time, the sense of how much time has elapsed when one has no external means such as a clock or diurnal rhythms to keep track of it. In an experiment, 15 volunteers were kept in a deep cave for 40 days without any means of knowing the passage of time other than their sense of it.
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The problem with cryptocurrencies

I know almost nothing about cryptocurrencies or the blockchain technology that undergirds it. I was aware that all transactions by currency holders are recorded on a distributed public ledger, which apparently is what is meant by a ‘blockchain’. I had been aware that these currencies, of which there are many in addition to the best known one of bitcoin, are not backed by any government like ‘real’ currencies are. Their value is maintained by having their production limited by having it ‘mined’, which is a metaphor for actions that are done by computers.

Elizabeth Kolbert writes about how this ‘mining’ works.
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The pandemic and hygiene habits

I have been seeing a lot of stories such as this one about how staying at home and social isolation has resulted in some people changing their personal hygiene habits, sometimes entirely jettisoning some of them.

Working from home, shielding, not socialising or just losing the will to blow-dry appear to have had many of us questioning whether our pre-pandemic personal hygiene and grooming habits were really necessary. And, with routines disrupted, it is perfectly possible to get to the end of the day before wondering if you have brushed your teeth. Or putting off your morning shower until you have done some lunchtime exercise, and then not bothering to do that either.

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The US should send its excess vaccines to countries that need them

Vaccination rates in the US are slowing down as the people who want to take it have increasingly done so, leaving mostly the so-called vaccine-hesitant and the vaccine deniers. The US is reaching a point where there are excess stocks of unused vaccines.

The United States could have around 300 million excess Covid-19 shots by the end of July, health policy experts at Duke University estimated in a report Thursday, calling on the country to share doses more widely to address the stark inequality around global vaccine distribution.
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The problem of changing scientific conclusions

People tend to like certainty. One of the things that people get wrong about science is that they think it should provide them with that certainty. But scientific conclusions, while they tend to be the most reliable that we have at any given time, can change in the light of new evidence which is why results are usually phrased conditionally. Unfortunately that nuance is often missing when the media reports science results and this can be disconcerting for some people when new results seem to contradict the old. I deal with this question quite extensively in my book The Great Paradox of Science.
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Creating a more accurate flat map of the Earth

Projecting the surface of a globe on to a flat surface always introduces distortions. Richard Gott, Dave Goldberg, and Bob Vanderbei claim to have created created a projection that minimizes the errors more than any projection before.

Previously, Goldberg and I identified six critical error types a flat map can have: local shapes, areas, distances, flexion (bending), skewness (lopsidedness) and boundary cuts. These are illustrated by the famous Mercator projection, the base template for Google maps. It has perfect local shapes but is bad at depicting areas. Greenland appears as large as South America even though it covers only one seventh the area on the globe.
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