Some of you may recall the fun experiment that was done by the astronaut David Scott on the Moon during the Apollo 15 mission when he tested Galileo’s idea that in the absence of air resistance, a hammer and a feather would fall to the ground at the same rate.
We have pretty much all had this experience at some time or other in some form. You are driving along a narrow road that has just one lane of traffic each way. The direction you are traveling in is jammed with very slow-moving traffic while the other lane for cars going in the opposite direction is empty. What do you do? If you are a normal person and not a jerk, you put it down to the vagaries of life and continue to crawl along.
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In a post a couple of days ago, I wrote about a Minneapolis venture capitalist Tom Austin who challenged a group of black men when they entered the gym in his office building because he felt that they had no right to be there. He told them that he was going to call the police because they were behaving in a threatening manner. It turned out that the men also had an office in the same building and thus they were perfectly entitled to use the gym. (I am calling Austin ‘Biff’ for acting like the male equivalent of a ‘Karen’, which is “a mocking slang term for an entitled, obnoxious, middle-aged white woman.”)
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How can people behave like this?
A woman who drove through a protest in Denver on Thursday appeared to deliberately try to run over a young black man, swerving directly at him and knocking him to the ground, according to a video of the incident.
The protest was one of many that have broken out nationwide over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis after an officer pushed a knee into his neck as he repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe.”
Video of the incident shows a car driving through the crowd, with the young man clutching onto the hood. He falls off the hood, landing on his feet.
The car then sharply turns, knocking him to the ground, before speeding away in the other direction.
…A spokesperson for the Denver Police Department told BuzzFeed News it is “aware of the incident” and is “looking for the victim as well as the driver.”
Downtown denver. Some girl turned around to run this guy over #GeorgeFloyd #icantbreathe #downtowndenver #denver pic.twitter.com/eirohGGPr5
— Anabel (@bellers03) May 29, 2020
She could have easily driven off after the man fell off her hood. I hope someone had the presence of mind to get her license plate number.
This morning, authorities announced that Derek Chauvin, who was the Minneapolis police officer whose knee on George Floyd resulted in his death, has been arrested and charged with third-degree murder.
Last night, protests continued in Minneapolis by people demanding that justice be done and some of those protests turned violent with buildings being set on fire.. As is often the case, the police in the US make bad situations worse by using excessive force against people who are protesting or just covering the protests even when it is clear that they could have de-escalated the situation. Last night a black CNN reporter and his producer and camera operator were arrested while covering the ongoing protests even as they politely asked the police where they should move to avoid interfering with whatever the police were doing.
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You would think that given the wide publicity surrounding the recent incident where Amy Cooper, a white woman whose dog was off leash in New York’s Central Park, was fired from her job after calling the police and telling them that she feared for her life because Chris Cooper, a black birdwatcher, had told her that the area they were in required dogs to be on leashes, people would be more cautious about calling the police on black men for the most trivial of reasons.
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Adapting to living in isolation in the woods is not easy.
There have been large demonstrations following the death of George Floyd after a Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the ground and kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for over five minutes, despite Floyd protesting that he couldn’t breathe and bleeding from his nose. Some of the demonstrations erupted into violence and looting and the police are again accused of over-reacting.
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A few years ago, I attended a seminar by a researcher on aging. He explained what goes on when a person ages and also what kinds of behaviors can shorten or prolong life. Towards the end of the talk he showed a slide of a smiling older woman whom he identified as a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 at the age of 122 and held the record for being the world’s oldest person ever. Calment would tell people that her ‘secret’ was that she drank and smoked, thus defying the best medical advice. The researcher used that amusing anecdote to illustrate that one can always find outliers for any statistical result.
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