Dubious diets

Yesterday in the late afternoon, I felt hungry but it was too early for my evening meal and if I eat too early I get hungry in the middle of the night. I decided to have a cup of coffee to keep me going until dinner time. Normally I have just one cup of coffee per day in the morning.

Coffee and cigarettes are known to be appetite suppressants which is why they are commonly used by actors and others who feel the need to be thin. Coffee is socially acceptable but cigarettes are now frowned upon so many of those people smoke in secret.

My having coffee to suppress my hunger reminded me of a fellow physicist that I used to know a long time ago. He told me that he only drank coffee and smoked cigarettes the whole day and ate just once a day, a meal in the evening. In those days, smoking was not banned in offices and public places as they are now in the US so he could always be seen with a cigarette and often with a coffee mug. He and I were both in our mid-thirties then and had the sense that is common among young people that our bodies could withstand anything. But even I, though not hyper-vigilant about healthy living, felt that his habits were not good for his health.

Our paths parted after a couple of years but I sometimes think of him and wonder what happened to him. Given that at that time he had a young child two years of age (the same age as my own daughter then), I wished that he would be a little more sensible about his diet in order that he would be more likely see his child grow up and possibly even see his grandchildren, as I now do. I hope he was able to beat the odds and do so. But I did not feel at the time that it was my place to advise a colleague about how to live and eat.

Unbelievable cruelty being inflicted across the globe

This article from ProPublica describes the chaos that has fallen upon all the aid groups that were providing life-saving humanitarian services to people around the world as a result of the Trump administration’s executive orders to stop everything at once.

On Friday morning, the staffers at a half dozen U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan who care for severely malnourished children had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.

They chose the children.

In spite of the order, they will keep their facilities open for as long as they can, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation. The people requested anonymity for fear that the administration might target their group for reprisals. Trump’s order also meant they would stop receiving new, previously approved funds to cover salaries, IV bags and other supplies. They said it’s a matter of days, not weeks, before they run out.

American-funded aid organizations around the globe, charged with providing lifesaving care for the most desperate and vulnerable populations imaginable, have for days been forced to completely halt their operations, turn away patients and lay off staff following a series of sudden stop-work demands from the Trump administration. Despite an announcement earlier this week ostensibly allowing lifesaving operations to continue, those earlier orders have not been rescinded.
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Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?

I do not use TikTok. I have also stopped using Twitter/X. I closed my Facebook account a long time ago, much to the chagrin of some friends who use it to advertise events and get-togethers that they think I would be interested in. When asked by them why I limit myself this way, I tell them that I dislike the ethics of Facebook and its parent company Meta and that I am not at all worried about the phenomenon of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). If I miss an event because it was only announced on Facebook, it does not bother me. I know what things I value and find ways to learn about them.

I do use the internet a great deal but when it comes to communicating with other people, email and text messages are about it. Even there, I avoid group chats and emails because they often degenerate into squabbles that I think are petty and have no interest in.
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New DeepSeek AI chatbot challenges other chatbots and US monopolies

A new AI chatbot called Deep Seek created by Chinese investors has been released and sent shock waves through the US AI industry because it seems to be able to do all that the other chatbots can do (and perhaps more) for much lower cost and with less sophisticated chips.

Investors punished global tech stocks on Monday after the emergence of a Chinese chatbot competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DeepSeek, raised doubts about the sustainability of the US artificial intelligence boom.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index in New York opened lower after investors digested the implications of the latest AI model developed by the startup DeepSeek.

Nvidia, the most valuable listed company in the US and a leading maker of the computer chips that power AI models, lost more than $400bn (£321bn) in stock market value in early trading as its shares declined 13.6%, while Microsoft shed $130bn and Google’s parent, Alphabet, declined by $80bn.

Nvidia’s fall – which wiped about $465bn off its value, was the biggest in US stock market history, according to Bloomberg.
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The anti-science attacks begin

One of the things that has made the US a leader in the global economy is the high quality of its science research. The infrastructure that has been set up to promote science, with organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation giving out grants to scientists or, in the case of the NIH, also doing research doing research internally, has resulted in prospective students and researchers from around the world flocking to the US. That has changed more recently with China luring foreign scientists with promises of greater access to research funds. India too has been making attempts to have scientists return to that country.

But the moves by the Trump administration may threaten US dominance much more than the efforts of those countries to attract scientists away.
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Kurt Gödel’s belief in the afterlife

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was a powerful logician whose contributions to logic, mathematics, and philosophy were immense. He was deeply interested in those aspects of philosophy that touched on religion and one of those was his ontological proof for God’s existence.

The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm’s ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: “God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist.” A more elaborate version was given by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716); this is the version that Gödel studied and attempted to clarify with his ontological argument.
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Gödel is not known to have told anyone about his work on the proof until 1970, when he thought he was dying. In February, he allowed Dana Scott to copy out a version of the proof, which circulated privately. In August 1970, Gödel told Oskar Morgenstern that he was “satisfied” with the proof, but Morgenstern recorded in his diary entry for 29 August 1970, that Gödel would not publish because he was afraid that others might think “that he actually believes in God, whereas he is only engaged in a logical investigation (that is, in showing that such a proof with classical assumptions (completeness, etc.) correspondingly axiomatized, is possible).”[2] Gödel died January 14, 1978. Another version, slightly different from Scott’s, was found in his papers. It was finally published, together with Scott’s version, in 1987.

(For more see Oppy, Graham. 2017. “Ontological Arguments.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2017 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta.)
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Palisades fire and Monday morning quarterbacking

The fires that are raging in southern California are taking a terrible toll on lives and property. They have been intensified by the strong Santa Ana winds that reached high speeds passing through the funnel that makes up the valley and feeding on the dry vegetation.

Of course, whenever a disaster like this strikes, there is immediate finger-pointing at :(1) who or what might have been the cause of the fire; (2) who might be responsible for not responding correctly and quickly enough; and (3) who might be responsible for not anticipating the scale of the disaster and making sure that the response would be adequate. Some of this finger pointing is by people acting to deflect attention from themselves. But others indulging in this activity are those who have no connection to the events nor have any particular expertise in this area but still think they know what should have been done to deal with it and are not shy about sharing their conclusions.

Kevin Drum writes that this kind of after-the-fact pontificating is useless when you are dealing with events that lie outside the normal range that can be, and have been, anticipated, and this fire is one such event. He takes aim at one particular accusation, that authorities had not taken into account the amount of water needed is such a fire occurred in this location, and that using sea water or desalinated water would have helped.
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Drive now, talk later

People tend to think of time spent driving as wasted, and try to use it to multitask, most commonly by talking on the phone. I know people who specifically use the time driving to catch up on their phone calls. While most people know (or should know) that using a hand-held mobile phone while driving is not a good idea (and it is banned in some states and countries), many have the impression that using hands-free devices (as many cars have now) is safe. But that is not true. There has been considerable research to show that hands-free devices are as distracting to drivers, making them as dangerous to use. This article summarizes the research.
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Black bears are clever and resourceful. I am keeping well away from them.

I like nature and wildlife and support efforts to preserve both but prefer to view them from a safe distance. Not for me safaris and camping and hiking in the wilderness in the hope of seeing wildlife. Nature documentaries are more my thing.

My aversion to seeing nature up close was enhanced by this article about how black bears have become very common in the very popular (and expensive) resort area of Lake Tahoe that is in the Sierra Nevada mountain region and straddles northern California and Nevada. During the pandemic, a lot of Silicon Valley types moved there and took advantage of the work-from-home policy to decide to stay permanently. But the increase in population and the garbage generated has attracted black bears that now roam the streets of towns and invade homes and cars looking for food. The problem is exacerbated by those the locals call ‘tourons’, a portmanteau of ‘tourist’ and ‘morons’, who are careless about keeping food out of reach and act in ways that attract bears.

Unlike grizzly bears that can be aggressive and vicious, black bears supposedly tend to avoid confrontations and can be scared away fairly easily.
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More on card randomization

After writing my post on the randomization of a deck of cards, I became more curious about this topic. In a deck of 52 distinct cards, there are 52x51x50…x3x2x1 possible arrangements. This is written in the mathematical notation 52! and is an enormous number. Perfect randomization of a deck means that starting with any given arrangement, after the shuffling process, all possible arrangements are equally likely and have the probability 1/52!. One can also think of it as saying that after the randomization process, a card that started out in any given position should be equally likely to be found in any of the 52 positions.

I learned that magicians for some of their tricks use the fact that shuffles do not guarantee randomizing of the deck, and so was curious to see how that might work. To illustrate this very simply, I started with a deck of just ten cards numbered 1 through 10 in order. I then cut the deck in two so that one half contained 1through 5 and the other half contained 6 through 10. Then I imagined a perfect riffle shuffle where the cards from each side are dropped one at a time alternately. You then get the order shown under the heading Shuffle 1.

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