I read yesterday that Larry Tesler had died at the age of 74. I had never heard of him but when I read the article I realized that I owed him a lot for the things he invented that have made using computers and especially word processing so much easier, because he created, among other things, the ‘cut and paste’ and ‘find and replace’ commands.
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Some of you may have noticed that I did not post anything yesterday. That was because on Monday evening, I decided to upgrade the operating system of my MAC computer to the latest version called Catalina that was released in October 2019 and had got some pretty good reviews. Since the OS I had been using (El Capitan) was pretty old, I felt that I should upgrade since older software is more vulnerable to hacks.
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I am not sure what to make of this story about a doctor who took his own life possibly because of regrets that he had provided parents with fraudulent documents that their their children were vaccinated when they were not. These were parents who wanted their children to be vaccinated but he had decided in the last decade of his life that vaccinations were harmful and unilaterally pretended to vaccinate them.
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I have been lucky to never experience a serious earthquake, the closest being slight tremors that I would likely not have even noticed if I had been outdoors or asleep. The video below was taken at an airport during the 2011 earthquake in Japan. It is quite terrifying. The tremors last for about two minutes.
What amazes me is that the person taking the video was so committed to doing so that they did not seek to run outside to avoid being injured if the balcony they were on collapsed, or to hide under something to prevent being hit by falling debris.
It is clear that when Donald Trump speaks extemporaneously, he goes off at weird tangents and finds it hard to sustain a coherent train of thought, meandering all over the place, laced with non-sequiturs. A retired speech pathologist says that when you analyze his speeches and compare them with the way he spoke long ago, that it is clear that he has a serious language disorder called aphasia.
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It is always fun to see how everyday household items work. Very often, these ‘simple’ devices reveal ingenious engineering designs, like in the case of a nice animation of how rotating desktop fan works.
ProPublica has an investigative report that finds that the manufacturers of child car seats give recommendations about the transition to booster seats that run counter to the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Why? Because of the obvious reason: they put profits over safety, even when it involves young children.
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I like optical illusions but I have to say that my enjoyment has diminished somewhat now that there is always a possibility that it involves computer trickery and not created out of real, physical objects. The illusion below is nice but the fact that it was created by a VFX artist may mean that it is not the real thing.
Chemist Peter Atkins writes that it is only science that can answer real big questions, as opposed to invented ones such as Why are we here? What are the attributes of the soul?.
They are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence. Thus, as there is no evidence for the Universe having a purpose, there is no point in trying to establish its purpose or to explore the consequences of that purported purpose. As there is no evidence for the existence of a soul (except in a metaphorical sense), there is no point in spending time wondering what the properties of that soul might be should the concept ever be substantiated. Most questions of this class are a waste of time; and because they are not open to rational discourse, at worst they are resolved only by resort to the sword, the bomb or the flame.
Sharon Lerner details the story of how the oil company Chevron is using the US legal system to hit back against a US lawyer Steven Donziger who won a big environmental case against them in Ecuador brought by the indigenous people there whose land had been massively contaminated by the oil giant.
LAST AUGUST, DURING the second-hottest year on record, while the fires in the Amazon rainforest were raging, the ice sheet in Greenland was melting, and Greta Thunberg was being greeted by adoring crowds across the U.S., something else happened that was of great relevance to the climate movement: An attorney who has been battling Chevron for more than a decade over environmental devastation in South America was put on house arrest.
Few news outlets covered the detention of Steven Donziger, who won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over the massive contamination in the Lago Agrio region and has been fighting on behalf of Indigenous people and farmers there for more than 25 years.
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