Hopeful covid-19 statistics

Despite the sombre milestone of 500,000 deaths being passed, the numbers in the US continue to move in a good direction. The average number of daily deaths and the number currently hospitalized have now dropped to about the values that they had at their peak in April of last year. We still have some way to go before we reach the lowest values that were arrived at around July. I just hope people will not relax but continue to be vigilant and follow the guidelines for safety.

Falsification and neoliberalism

Karl Popper’s idea that science evolves by means of falsification and that it can also serve as a demarcation criterion to distinguish science from nonscience was quickly attacked by other philosophers of science who showed that not only was the idea unworkable in practice, it did not even correspond to actual scientific practice. My own book The Great Paradox of Science discusses the problems with falsification in some depth and argues that there are much better ways to understand the evolution of scientific theories.

Charlotte Sleigh extends the criticisms of falsification even wider, arguing a cadre of prominent economists and scientists used the concept to advance the cause of neoliberalism.
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Depressing milestones in coronavirus deaths

The number of pandemic-related deaths worldwide is now close to 2.5 million.

The US has now around 500,000 deaths due to covid-19. I remember when the figure reached around 200,000 and experts warned us that it would go over 300,000 and I thought, “Wow, that’a lot. Surely it won’t reach such a high figure?” Then it was repeated when the toll reached 300,000 and then 400,000, and now here we are.

Even though infection, hospitalization, and death rates are falling and people are getting vaccinated, it seems likely that the ultimate toll will reach over 600,000 and maybe even 700,000. And that is assuming that there are no fresh outbreaks due to a combination of new, more contagious variants taking hold and careless behavior on the part of people not taking basic precautions.

We are a far cry from the beginning of the pandemic when Trump predicted back in February of last year that we would have 15 deaths, tops, and that the virus would disappear when spring arrived.

How the Mars rover landed

The rover named Perseverance landed on the surface of Mars. It is big, weighing about a ton, and since the atmosphere of Mars is so thin, parachutes are not sufficient to slow it enough to use airbags to cushion the final landing so they had to find another way.

Perseverance approached Mars at around 12,400 miles per hour, although when it hit the top of the atmosphere, a heatshield slowed it down to about a tenth of this speed. Then a supersonic parachute popped out of the rover to reduce its speed to a few hundred miles per hour.

At that point, descending under the parachute, Perseverance was still travelling far too fast to land safely. So it cut itself loose from the parachute and used rocket thrusters to slow down further. The thrusters allowed it to hover roughly 20 metres above the surface, before the rover was lowered by cables to the surface using a rocket platform called a sky crane.

Here is a video simulation of the landing.

You have to hand it to the engineers and scientists behind this project for a really impressive achievement.

You can see some of the first still images sent back here. There should be video soon too.

The consequences of the Republican-libertarian point of view

Texas is reeling from a severe winter storm that has resulted in huge swathes of the state being without power and caused 20 deaths so far.

Anger over Texas’s power grid failing in the face of a record winter freeze is mounting, as millions of residents remained shivering, with no assurances that their electricity and heat – out for 36 hours or longer in many homes – would return.
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Between 2 and 3 million customers in Texas still had no power, nearly two full days after historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created a surge in demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such extreme lows, buckling the state’s power grid and causing widespread blackouts. Meanwhile, people’s water pipes are bursting and hours long lines have been wrapping around grocery stores as people search for food.

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How the planets and moons got their names

I had not given much thought to how planets and moons were named. I just assumed that there was some scientific body that was authorized by the community of scientists to carry out this task. And while that is the case now, with the International Astronomical Union entrusted to do so, in the early days this naming process seems to have been quite ad hoc and a source of much controversy with egos, self-aggrandizement, and nationalist sentiment all playing roles.

Stephen Case, a historian of astronomy, explains how initially the planets in the Solar System got named after Roman gods but as the numbers of planets proliferated, disputes arose about who got the right to name them, with arguments being proffered for prioritizing the discoverers, starting with what we now know as Neptune. French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier, the person usually credited with that discovery, wanted to name it after himself and as part of his campaign, suggested that the planet we know as Uranus and that had been found earlier should be named Herschel after its discoverer, William Herschel. Herschel himself had named it Georgium Sidus after King George III, the king who had recently lost the British colonies in North America and is sometimes referred to as ‘Mad King George’.
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Postage stamp honoring C. S. Wu

If asked to name a famous female physicist, the name Marie Curie is the one most likely to come to mind. But there are many others and one of the people who should be much better known is Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997), who used to be often referred to as Madame Wu.

It was her careful experimental work that showed that parity violation did indeed occur, as predicted by theoretical physicists Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee. Yang and Lee received the Nobel prize for this in 1957 but Wu’s contribution was not recognized, an omission that has been widely criticized.

Wu was a remarkable physicist who did receive many other honors, as can be read in this biographical article. She was the first Chinese-American elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1958 and in 1967 she served as the first female president of the American Physical Society.

Yesterday, on the occasion of the sixth International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the U.S. Postal Service issued a new forever stamp to honor her.

Cautious optimism about the pandemic

There is a glimmer of light in the pandemic darkness. The number of hospitalizations has been dropping and is close to half of what it was at its peak in early January. The number of deaths is also dropping.

But the current figures are still well above the previous peak values in the spring and summer of 2020.

We should also be concerned that people will take this news as license to let their guard down and that could cause yet another spike, which is what happened after numbers came down last summer.