Rats should get more respect

As time goes by, there is greater awareness of the need to treat non-human animals better, with louder calls for an end to factory farming and the campaigns led by vegans to end our dependence on animal products entirely. When it comes to animal experimentation for science, there are now far stricter restrictions to try and ensure that the use of such animals is really necessary. Even those who are not animal rights activists tend to oppose the idea of using dogs and cats and pigs for experimentation.
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Coronavirus epidemic shows the danger of having a lying, incompetent president

It is clear that what got Donald Trump’s attention about the coronavirus was that it caused a slump in the stock market, the only piece of data he seems to pay attention to and cares about. He is reportedly thinking of tax cuts as a response. His initial response was that it was a hoax, no doubt thinking that that comment would reassure and rally the stock market. Of course, the fact that he is anti-science and that vice president Mike Pence, the person he has appointed to oversee the government response, is also an anti-science religious nut who thinks prayer is a good way to treat epidemics, is not reassuring. Trump has also said, without any evidence, that things are under control, that a vaccine will be ready soon, that the virus is less dangerous than the flu and that the virus will disappear as if by magic come April with the arrival of warm weather.
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Fascinating documentary on the north and south poles

In a break from the ‘all Bernie, all the time’ mode that this blog has been in recently, I want to alert readers to the PBS documentary series Nova that has produced a fascinating two-hour documentary titled Polar Extremes about how the polar regions have experienced dramatic shifts during the history of the Earth. There have been periods when the poles had warm climates and consisted of swamps and forests and at other times when the entire Earth was covered with a sheet of ice.
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Beware of Catalina

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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A strange and sad story

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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What it is like to experience an earthquake

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.