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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How many T. Rex dinosaurs have ever lived?

The headline that 2.5 billon T. Rex dinosaurs walked the Earth was definitely something that caught my attention. It turns out that that number was just the average with a massive variation in possible values. What I was more interested in was how one sets about even making an estimate of the number of animals in a species that has been extinct for 65 million years. The paper lays out the problem and basic method they used.

Although much can be deduced from fossils alone, estimating abundance and preservation rates of extinct species requires data from living species. Here, we use the relationship between population density and body mass among living species combined with our substantial knowledge of Tyrannosaurus rex to calculate population variables and preservation rates for postjuvenile T. rex. We estimate that its abundance at any one time was ~20,000 individuals, that it persisted for ~127,000 generations, and that the total number of T. rex that ever lived was ~2.5 billion individuals, with a fossil recovery rate of 1 per ~80 million individuals or 1 per 16,000 individuals where its fossils are most abundant. The uncertainties in these values span more than two orders of magnitude, largely because of the variance in the density–body mass relationship rather than variance in the paleobiological input variables.

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The Johnson & Johnson vaccine and blood clots

The US is temporarily halting giving this vaccine, pending further study, because of the potential danger of blood clots. Six women developed a rare form of blood clots after receiving this vaccine and one died.

The acting FDA chief, Janet Woodcock, said: “We’re recommending this pause while we work together to full understand these events.” The decision was taken in coordination with the CDC.

US health agencies have recommended states pause the administration of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine, after reports of rare and severe blood clots emerged in six women. More than 6.8m doses have been administered nationally.

The concerns mirror those of drugs agencies in Europe and Australia over the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has not been authorized in the US. There have been no significant safety concerns raised about the two other vaccines that make up the majority of US supply, from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Woodcock said: “Right now, I’d like to stress these events appear to be extremely rare. However, Covid-19 vaccine safety is a top priority for the federal government. We take all reports of adverse events related to the vaccine very seriously.”

The FDA and CDC said in a joint statement: “People who have received the J&J vaccine who develop severe headache, abdominal pain, leg pain, or shortness of breath within three weeks after vaccination should contact their healthcare provider.”

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The strange story of Yuri Gagarin’s return to Earth

Yesterday April 12th 1961 was the 60th anniversary of when Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth.

Over the course of 108 minutes, Vostok 1 traveled around the Earth once, reaching a maximum height of 203 miles (327 kilometers). The spacecraft carried 10 days’ worth of provisions in case the engines failed and Gagarin was required to wait for the orbit to naturally decay. But the supplies were unnecessary. Gagarin re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, managing to maintain consciousness as he experienced forces up to eight times the pull of gravity during his descent.

Vostok 1 had no engines to slow its re-entry and no way to land safely. About 4 miles (7 km) up, Gagarin ejected from the spacecraft and parachuted to Earth. In order for the mission to be counted as an official spaceflight, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the governing body for aerospace records, had determined that the pilot must land with the spacecraft. Soviet leaders indicated that Gagarin had touched down with the Vostok 1, and they did not reveal that he had ejected until 1971.

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China pushes ahead on vaccine diplomacy

In the US, it is reported that we are almost at the point where there is going to be a surplus of vaccines. Now that vaccine programs are underway all over the world, the issue of inequality of access has started to loom large, with accusations that wealthy countries are hogging most of the supplies.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has criticised what it describes as a “shocking imbalance” in the distribution of coronavirus vaccines between rich and poor countries.

The group’s chief said a target of seeing vaccination programmes under way in every country by Saturday would be missed.

The WHO has long called for fairer distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.

It is leading the Covax scheme which is designed to get jabs to poorer nations.

So far, more than 38 million doses have been delivered to around 100 countries under the scheme.

Covax hopes to deliver more than two billion doses to people in 190 countries in less than a year. In particular, it wants to ensure that 92 poorer countries will receive access to vaccines at the same time as wealthier countries.

“There remains a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference on Friday.

“On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people have received a Covid-19 vaccine. In low-income countries, it’s one in more than 500,” he said.
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High-income countries currently hold a confirmed 4.6 billion doses, while low-middle income nations hold 670 million, according to research by the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

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I am tired of posting these but feel I must

Once again we have a case of police using unnecessary force on a driver of color. He is now suing the police department.

Army Lt. Caron Nazario filed suit against police officers Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker last month, and video from the officers’ body cameras and Nazario’s cellphone has gone viral in recent days.

Nazario seeks $1 million plus punitive damages from the officers, saying they violated his constitutional rights.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, said the videos raise the question of whether the officers overreacted and used more force than necessary.

The videos “make it seem that Lt. Nazario has a persuasive case,” Tobias told USA TODAY.

The officers said in the police report that they stopped Nazario’s Chevrolet Tahoe because it didn’t have a rear license plate, although the report acknowledges the officers later noticed a temporary plate displayed in the back window.

The fact the Nazario was released at the scene and not charged and that the two police officers “threatened to destroy the lieutenant’s military career with “baseless” criminal charges if he reported them for misconduct” show that the police realized that they had gone too far.

You can see for yourself.


I am amazed the Nazario was able to speak so calmly while being threatened and humiliated by people pointing guns at his face.

I keep posting these because I feel that these cases must be widely publicized to build the case that the police in the US need serious reform and curtailment of their powers. We simply should not let these things pass and become seen as normal.

It gets crazier and crazier

We have a man at Disney World refusing to have his temperature checked and then being charged with trespassing, handcuffed, and escorted out of the premises.

A man who was arrested after refusing a temperature screening at Disney Springs in Florida told authorities that he couldn’t be told to leave because he had spent $15,000 on his vacation.

The man, Kelly Sills, a tourist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, bypassed the Orlando attraction’s medical screening in February and refused to get his temperature checked when asked by Disney employees, according to a report from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
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Sills also claimed to be a Disney stockholder at another point.

What is surprising is that he was wearing a mask. For some reason, having his temperature taken with the remote sensor that takes a couple of seconds, tops, was too much for him. Did he know he had a temperature and not want it revealed? Or did he think that the thermometer was sending radiation towards him? Some people do believe this, not understanding that the thermometer measures radiation coming from the person.

The plastic recycling scam

Plastic pollution is a global menace. In. his latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver exposes how the plastics industry has managed to pull off one of the biggest scams on the public by persuading us that tackling plastic pollution is our responsibility and urging us to ever greater recycling efforts while making false promises about their own efforts to reduce plastic contamination. In one episode of his excellent series Adam Ruins Everything, host Adam Conover made some similar points.

One of their triumphs was to get legislatures to force manufacturers to put those triangles on almost all plastic items, suggesting that they can all be recycled when in fact most of them can’t. Only those with the numbers 1 and 2 have a reasonable shot at being recycled. Worse, by having the public think that all of them can be recycled, it contaminates the plastic pool making it harder to even recycle the plastic that can be. What then happens is that the ‘recycled’ plastic from the US ends up in landfills all over the world.

The best thing we can do is to dispose of all plastics with numbers 3 and higher in the trash and not in the recycling bins, enact legislation that creates strong disincentives for single use plastics by manufacturers, and put the burden for reducing plastic pollution where it really belongs, on the manufacturers and not the public. Some countries are doing just that.

Cold and colds

Growing up in Sri Lanka, it was an article of faith with my mother (and the mothers of many of my friends) that after a shower, we should not go outside while our hair was still wet because that increased the risk of us catching a cold or getting a chill. If we happened to get caught in the rain, we were told to quickly dry ourselves thoroughly so that we did not catch a cold. But Sri Lanka is a tropical country where what is considered ‘cold’ would be like a balmy summer day in the US. Furthermore houses have very open architecture with open windows and doors so that air is freely circulating and hence there is little difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ except that inside one had a roof over one’s head. Hence these restrictions made no sense. But given the power of confirmation bias, it was always easy to find such a cause to blame whenever one caught a cold.
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