Can we stop ‘going forward’?


In reading and listening to news items, I find many people using the phrase ‘going forward’. It has become so overused that I find it grating to hear. It is often redundant but seems to be a more a rhetorical device, a filler, to end a sentence. For example, an analyst discussing financial news might say “It is not clear what the Fed will do going forward” when “It is not clear what the Fed will do” conveys the same sentiment. After all, ‘will do’ implies the future and besides, the Fed cannot go backwards anyway.

Other phrases that have become cliches are ‘perfect storm’ and ‘think outside the box’. Mercifully the latter seems to seems to be going out of vogue, probably because everyone is sick of hearing it so much and it is the kind of corporate jargon that managers like to inflict on their employees.

These are my personal pet peeves. My dislike of them is largely because of their overuse, not necessarily because there is something wrong with them. This article lists other ‘junk’ words and phrases that the author thinks people should try to avoid for various reasons.

Making new friends as an adult

Friendships are important to one’s well being, even for introverts like me, with quality being more important than quantity. It is easier to form friends when one is younger, during one’s school and college days, when one is thrown together with peers for extended periods of time with few responsibilities and relationships can develop organically. But once one starts working and settles into a nuclear family, it becomes more difficult to form new friends, since work place friendships can be tricky to handle. Also, when one starts working, one tends to move to different locations and lose not only the physical proximity that is conducive to maintaining existing friendships but one has fewer opportunities to make new friends.
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John Oliver on the abuse of TANF

The program known as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) “provides states and territories with flexibility in operating programs designed to help low-income families with children achieve economic self-sufficiency.  States use TANF to fund monthly cash assistance payments to low-income families with children, as well as a wide range of services.”

On the latest episode of his show, John Oliver describes how this program has been abused so that a lot of the money does not go to the people it was meant for.

Part of the problem is that although it is a federal program, rather than the federal government giving the money directly to needy people, conservatives lobbied to have the federal government give it in the form of block grants to states who were given guidelines on how the money could be spent. But the guidelines were loose enough to allow states to siphon money away to build things like a new college volleyball stadium. This is why proposals to convert federal programs into block grants to states should always be viewed with extreme caution.

Death of an ivermectin influencer

Thanks to the internet and the rise of social media, we now live in a world where there are vast numbers of so-called ‘influencers’, people who try to tell others what to do in pretty much every area of their lives, even if they have no expertise or credentials in that field. What is surprising (to me at least) is that there are so many people willing to follow their advice.

Daniel Lemoi was one such influencer and he died on March 3, 2023 at the age of 50. He used his channel on the social media app Telegram to advocate for the use of the drug ivermectin, the deworming medicine that gained popularity as a prophylactic and treatment for Covid. While there is a version of ivermectin that has been developed to treat humans for certain specific ailments, he chose instead to use the version used by vets for large.animals like horses and cows, something that has been strongly discouraged by medical professionals. But its use took off after some people promoted it as an alternative to Covid vaccines and treatments.
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Controversy over claims of room temperature superconductors

Superconductivity is the phenomenon where the resistance to current flow in a material drops to zero. This means that there will be no loss of energy due to heat generation when current flows through the superconductor. Since resistive heat losses are one of the main limitations associated with any current-generated devices, superconductors open up enormous possibilities for technology that could revolutionize our lives. Unfortunately this phenomenon, first discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911, only seemed to work at extremely low temperatures close to absolute zero that required cooling with liquid helium, making it impractical for everyday use.

Creating materials that would be superconducting at room temperatures became the Holy Grail of this area of research and a big breakthrough came in 1986 when materials were found that were superconducting at around 90K (-183C) which could be reached using liquid nitrogen. Even higher temperature superconducting materials at about 203K (-77C) have been found but that required enormous pressures, of about 106 times atmospheric pressure.

Recent papers by a research team headed by Ranga Dias and Ahskan Salamat at the University of Rochester have claimed that they have found materials that are superconducting at temperature of 294K (17C) and at a pressure of 10 kbar or ten thousand times the atmospheric pressure. This is big news.
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Having fun with ChatGPT and Bell’s theorem

There has been a lot of buzz in the media about the AI software ChatGPT and its ability to turn out essays that have at least a superficial plausibility. I decided to give it a spin and gave it variations of the same prompt on a topic about which I knew something but was probably too esoteric for non-physicists, just to see what it would come up with.

Here are the prompts and what I got back.

Prompt: Explain Bell’s theorem

Bell’s theorem is a concept in quantum mechanics that describes the phenomenon of entanglement. It states that when two particles are entangled, the properties of one particle are intimately linked to the properties of the other, regardless of the distance between them.

This means that if one particle is measured and its properties are determined, the properties of the other particle are automatically determined as well, even if the two particles are separated by great distances.

Bell’s theorem suggests that this entanglement is not due to some hidden force or connection between the particles, but rather it is a fundamental property of the universe itself. It challenges our everyday understanding of physics and suggests that there are deeper truths waiting to be discovered.

The implications of Bell’s theorem are far-reaching and have been the subject of much research and study in the field of quantum mechanics. It has also led to the development of new technologies, such as quantum computers and quantum cryptography, which rely on the principles of entanglement to function.

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Remaking Caligula

This 1979 film about notorious Roman emperor Caligula had a script written by Gore Vidal, a well-known director Tinto Brass, and featured a cast of A-list actors like Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, and John Gielgud. I saw the film a long time ago and despite the sterling credentials of the people involved, it was a mess. But that was not the fault of any of the above luminaries, but of the producer Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine who financed the film.

Guccione took charge of the final cut and seemed to think that it was a good idea to waste all this star power by inserting, after filming had been completed by Brass, large amounts of gratuitous sex scenes to make what some considered a pornographic film. He probably thought that all those sex scenes would draw audiences who would seize on the chance to see a mainstream film that was soaked in sex and violence, since in those pre-internet days, video of explicit sex was not available to the general public except in selected theaters that showed low-budget, crudely made films. He may well have been right since the film made $23.4 million at the box office, exceeding its cost of $17.5 million.
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Culture wars forever!

Now that Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, speaker Kevin McCarthy is paying off his debt to all those in his caucus who held him hostage in his attempt to become speaker by letting them hold all manner of hearings on culture war issues.

(Non Sequitur)

However, I think that they will never run out of things to be outraged about. Outrage over trivialities serves to distract from their lack of any program of action that can command mass support.

It does not snow in Sri Lanka

I was forwarded this photograph that purported to show snow in Sri Lanka.

As soon as I saw it I was skeptical. The catch is that Sri Lanka is a tropical island that is just a few degrees north of the equator, somewhat like Hawaii in climate, so snow would be very unusual even given the erratic weather patterns caused by climate change. Furthermore, I lived for many years in the area shown in the photograph and I cannot recall even needing a sweater at any time. It is at an elevation of less than 2,000 ft above sea level.

My initial reaction was that this is one of the many doctored images that float around the internet, especially since there was no sign of snow on the trees or on top of the cars and buildings.

But a friend in Sri Lanka says that while it is not snow, it is not a hoax either, that the material used to resurface the roads results in a soap-like foam emerging after it rains. This apparently happens all over the globe but I have never encountered it myself.

Has anyone observed this?