Really? Vaping is the bridge too far for Trump supporters?

Donald Trump has famously said that his base is so loyal to him that he could openly kill someone and they would still stick with him. There is some evidence to support that claim. But it appears that there is something that matters more to his supporters than murder and that is their right to vape.

When reports of the deaths and mysterious lung-related ailments that are thought to be associated with vaping first emerged, Trump came out in support for a federal ban on it. That would be understandable for Trump since he does not smoke or drink alcohol and he likely sees vaping as in the same category of things he personally dislikes. But it turns out that many of his supporters are passionate about this issue and are threatening to revolt against him if he carries out his threat, and Trump is apparently caving in to them
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Reality and consciousness

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive neuroscientist and in this interview, he discusses his own ideas of what makes up reality and consciousness. He argues that what we call the ‘reality’ of the world we experience need not have any correspondence with what we might consider the ‘real’ world but is just a construct that our brains have evolved over time that better fit us for survival.
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John Denver’s Country Roads in minor key

Thanks to modern technology, one can do things that one could formerly only dream about, such as taking a pop song and changing it from a major to a minor key and vice versa. Major keys tend to be used for upbeat songs while minor keys are favored if you are trying to achieve a more melancholy sound.

Via Rob Beschizza, I came across what such a transformation sounds like when you do it to one of the best known John Denver songs, Country Roads.
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The extended mind and the problem of consciousness

How the brain produces the feeling of subjective experience (i.e., what is it like to be a bird or dog or whatever) has been labeled as ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness. Science journaloist Michael Hanlon writes that claims to be making progress on solving this using the latest developments in neuroscience, computation, and evolutionary science have proved to be premature.

For long periods, it is as if science gives up on the subject in disgust. But the hard problem is back in the news, and a growing number of scientists believe that they have consciousness, if not licked, then at least in their sights.
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Despite such obstacles, the idea is taking root that consciousness isn’t really mysterious at all; complicated, yes, and far from fully understood, but in the end just another biological process that, with a bit more prodding and poking, will soon go the way of DNA, evolution, the circulation of blood, and the biochemistry of photosynthesis.
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Committed materialists believe that consciousness arises as the result of purely physical processes — neurones and synapses and so forth. But there are further divisions within this camp.
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Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Daniel Dennett wrote that: ‘Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.’ A few years later, Chalmers added: ‘[It] may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.’ They were right then and, despite the tremendous scientific advances since, they are still right today. I do not think that the evolutionary ‘explanations’ for consciousness that are currently doing the rounds are going to get us anywhere. These explanations do not address the hard problem itself, but merely the ‘easy’ problems that orbit it like a swarm of planets around a star. The hard problem’s fascination is that it has, to date, completely and utterly defeated science. Nothing else is like it. We know how genes work, we have (probably) found the Higgs Boson; but we understand the weather on Jupiter better than we understand what is going on in our own heads. This is remarkable.

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The Good Samaritan ransomware fighter

Ransomware is the practice of hackers getting into computers, encrypting all the data, and then demanding a ransom payment, usually in the form of bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, for the key to decrypt the data. Many institutions have paid up.

ProPublica profiles Michael Gillespie who has helped hundreds of people recover their files for free, although he and his family are really hard up. Although he is just 27, he is a cancer survivor and his wife is a diabetic and they have a lot of medical expenses and he does not earn much at his regular job, so much so that he took on a 2:00 am newspaper delivery route to earn a little extra money. But he refuses to charge ransomware victims for his services because he doesn’t want to take advantage f people who have already been taken advantage of.
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Cultured meat

Some of the arguments against eating meat are that it is morally wrong to kill animals, that the factory farming practices that it leads to create conditions for the animals that are repugnant and ethically indefensible, and that growing animals for meat is a waste of resources and is economically wasteful and environmentally damaging, since it takes a lot of land and plant products to produce animals for meat. And yet people seem to have a taste for meat.
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Is coffee good or bad for you?

Hasan Minhaj looks at why there seems to be so much contradictory reporting on this question and says that one problem is the pressure to publish papers that result in some researchers finding ways to hype results that are not firmly grounded in the evidence.

I myself drink just one cup of coffee and one cup of tea a day, or two cups of coffee if no good tea is available.

(Thanks to Jeff Hess.)

Donald Trump bungles even the simplest photo op

Given the horrendous couple of weeks that Donald Trump has had, his advisors must have been pleased to have the opportunity to schedule a feel-good photo op with the two American women astronauts who did the first all-female space walk. It should have been a slam-dunk, where all Trump had to do was congratulate them on achieving a milestone. And yet he managed to bungle even that when he thought it was the first time that any woman had done a space walk. The astronaut had to gently correct him.


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The need to tighten vaccination mandates

The editors of Scientific American magazine have come out with a strong editorial arguing that the present exceptions for vaccinations given to people based on their religious and philosophical beliefs is threatening public health. While many of the people seeking exceptions do so on religious grounds and come from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities or Muslim or Christian academies or alternative-learning institutions, quite a few claim philosophical exemptions because they have been frightened by the refuted study of Andrew Wakefield that has been touted by celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and spread widely over social media.
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