The deadly consequences of Trump’s magical thinking

From the very beginning of this pandemic, Donald Trump has downplayed the seriousness of it and avoided taking the tough actions required to curb it. Tim Dickinson has compiled a list of the 22 times that Trump has indulged in magical thinking, claiming that the virus would just go away all by itself, because of warmer weather or by some kind of ‘miracle’ or that it was not dangerous or some such nonsense, ignoring the warnings of public health experts that we needed concerted national action, and praising himself relentlessly for his non-action.
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Fun with gravity

Suppose you could get a layer of liquid to stay suspended in mid-air, then you could observe counter-intuitive things such as objects like toy boats floating on both the top and bottom surfaces, being right side up on the top surface and upside down on the bottom surface.

But how could you get such a layer of liquid to defy gravity in this way? It turns out you can, as can be seen in this video.

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Yet another challenge to Chomsky on language

Learning a language is not easy, as I can personally testify. So the ease with which children all over the world learn the language of their environment, despite the fact that the languages are very different, has always been a source of great curiosity for researchers. Linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory revolutionized the field. To the extent that I understand it, he argued that there was something known as a Universal Grammar, common but deep rules that all languages shared, and that our brains were hardwired and coded to be receptive to them. As children heard adults around them speaking, various switches were thrown in the brain that converted these general rules into the specific ones for that particular language, enabling children to quickly pick up the syntactic structures of that language.

Over time, the question of what constituted those basic rules of grammar has shifted but the basic idea of some kind of universal grammar has remained. But there have been periodic attempts to upend the Chomsky model as the dominant paradigm and this article is one such attempt, though the author Vyvyan Evans, while claiming to target Chomsky, seems to be aiming his fire more at Stephen Pinker’s interpretation and popularization of Chomsky’s ideas. Another article critiques Evans’s arguments.

While I find the subject fascinating, I simply do not have the expertise to evaluate the competing theories or to judge whether Chomsky’s or any of the alternative view is correct but I pass along the articles because they discusses the issues involved fairly clearly.

The deadly menace of Facebook

I think that it has become very clear that Facebook is the source of much of the dangerous disinformation that is spreading rapidly across the world. And this can result in real harm. One example is that of Erin Hitchens, a 46-year old woman who died from complications of covid-19 because she and her husband thought the virus was a hoax and so they disregarded all the recommended precautions. Her husband now regrets their foolishness.

A Florida taxi driver, who believed false claims that coronavirus was a hoax, has lost his wife to Covid-19.

Brian Lee Hitchens and his wife, Erin, had read claims online that the virus was fabricated, linked to 5G or similar to the flu.

The couple didn’t follow health guidance or seek help when they fell ill in early May. Brian recovered but his 46-year-old wife became critically ill and died this month from heart problems linked to the virus.
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Erin, a pastor in Florida, had existing health problems – she suffered from asthma and a sleeping disorder.

Her husband explained that the couple did not follow health guidance at the start of the pandemic because of the false claims they had seen online.

Brian continued to work as a taxi driver and to collect his wife’s medicine without observing social distancing rules or wearing a mask.

They had also failed to seek help as soon as possible when they fell ill in May and were both subsequently diagnosed with Covid-19.
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Brian said he and his wife didn’t have one firm belief about Covid-19. Instead, they switched between thinking the virus was a hoax, linked to 5G technology, or a real, but mild ailment. They came across these theories on Facebook.

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This does not seem like a good idea

It is true that China has managed to curb the spread of covid-19 by taking draconian measures such as completely shutting down regions of the country, especially the city of Wuhan where the first major outbreak occurred. As a result, reports say that life has gone back to pretty much normal, something that I have personally heard vouched for by people I know who live there.

But I was still startled to see these photographs, one of which is reproduced below, taken in Wuhan over the weekend, one of many showing a large number of people crammed together at a water park.


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I am giving a talk on my book this Sunday

This coming Sunday, August 23 at 8:00pm (US Eastern Time), I will be giving a talk on the topic of my latest book The Great Paradox of Science: Why Its Conclusions Can Be Relied Upon Even Though They Cannot Be Proven.

The talk is being sponsored by the Freethinkers group in Cleveland. It will be on Zoom and those readers of this blog who wish to join in can find the necessary information here.

See Yale and die?

Colleges and Universities are beginning their new academic year. When I was still teaching, I used to enjoy the week before classes began when you saw new students excitedly arriving on campus with their families to move into the dorms. It was a feeling of new beginnings and possibilities. My university had a whole slew of programs during orientation week for new students that were a mixture of information providing and socializing. At the end of it just before classes began, we had a big culminating event for all the new students in the huge Severance Hall, home of the famed Cleveland Orchestra. I would be one of the speakers at this event and each year, I would try to get students excited about what I felt was the chief attraction of being at a university.
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Trump attacks New Zealand

You can tell that the charges that Trump has been utterly incompetent in the way that he has handled the pandemic leading to far more people dying than necessary, is getting under his skin by the way that he gloated yesterday when New Zealand reported a cluster of new cases. That country and its leader Jacinda Ardern had been widely praised for their vigorous and decisive science-based response that resulted in a period of over 100 days with no new cases. To be compared unfavorably to the leader of another country, and a woman at that, must have really stung.
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