It’s good to know when to abandon a plan

I learned that in order to write, I could not depend upon the muse to inspire me but instead had to have a regular writing schedule that would compel me to write every day. That experience resulted in me even writing an article titled Seven Suggestions for Becoming a More Productive Writer in which the first suggestion was to set aside time every day to write, whether one wanted to or not. I like to quote Peter de Vries who said, “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

It is similar to exercise. For most people, physical exertion is not pleasant but seen as a necessity. We are told that having a regular exercise routine, or ‘plan’, is a good thing. Having a steady daily routine is a good way of maintaining discipline. Ad hoc exercise, where you do it only when the mood strikes you, tends to not work well because other things that are more interesting or seem more important can easily distract you, whereas if you prioritize a set time for exercise, you are more likely to stick to the plan.
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Betting and honors in the UK

The general election in the UK to be held on July 4th has been sidetracked by the election betting brouhaha that has revealed how widespread betting is in that country, as more and more members of parliament are found to have bet on the date of the election. At a time when he should be putting out the final message to voters as to why the Conservatives deserve to continue to govern, the prime minister Rishi Sunak has had to bat down allegations that people close to him have taken advantage of that proximity to place wagers on inside information about the date of the election.

Apart from the question of whether any of them had such information, news reports have also discussed how honors (colloquially referred to as ‘gongs’) seem to be handed out. The UK has an intricate set of honors that are awarded to individuals, ranging from knighthoods to lesser ones like the OBE, MBE, and CBE, and who knows what else (where the labels show their imperial history), as well as peerages of various kinds.

A knighthood is an honour awarded by the British monarch for exceptional national service.
The female equivalent, a damehood, holds the same official title: Grand Cross of the British Empire (GBE).

Among the levels of Honours, there are also CBE, or Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, OBE, or Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, and MBE, or Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

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Getting religion back in schools

Religious conservatives in the US are determined to get Christianity back into the school curriculum. For the longest time, they were on the retreat as the US Supreme Court pushed back against attempts to use public schools as vehicles to teach religious ideas, arguing that the First Amendment to the constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” implied that no agency of the state could show preference to one religion over another or to religion over no religion. Thus not only was teaching the Bible excluded but even religious ideas such as intelligent design creationism could not be taught in science classes as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
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Supreme Court rejects Sackler deal

The US Supreme Court rejected the bankruptcy deal that had been negotiated by the Sackler family, the people behind Purdue Pharmaceuticals that was responsible for aggressively and falsely marketing opioids to large numbers of doctors and their patients, resulting in the massive opioid epidemic that we currently have in the US that has devastated families and communities. The drug was heavily marketed to doctors as having low risk of addiction, which was not true.

The Sacklers had brought the settlement in front of a friendly bankruptcy judge that effectively shielded much of the vast personal fortunes they had accumulated and instead passed the cost on to the company, which has filed for bankruptcy, on friendly terms, while not having to admit guilt and getting total immunity from future lawsuits that will leave their personal fortunes intact. For more details on why the bankruptcy deal was so bad, see here.
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Trump lies and dodges throughout the debate

The debate played out pretty much as I expected.

Joe Biden tried to give wonky answers to policy questions while serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) lied and lied repeatedly and avoided answering questions, pivoting almost immediately to complaining about the borders, and how everything was great when he was president and has gone to hell under Biden. It was basically the stuff that he says at his rallies.

His shtick was to largely claim that the US is weak and despised around the world because Biden has allowed open borders that allow millions of criminals and insane people into the country who are murdering people. He kept saying that over and over again. The moderators did not do any fact checking at all. The only thing they did was to repeat the question when SSACFT did not answer but then SSACFT would largely ignore it again.

While Biden tried to combat this with data, his presentation was not forceful enough.

On the optics, Biden seemed hesitant and soft-spoken and stumbled occasionally, while SSACFT portrayed confidence even as he flat-out lied. And in the US, since optics tends to win over substance, Biden would not have inspired his supporters with confidence.

Visualizing spacetime

One of the insights of the general theory of relativity has been to change our understanding of the relationship between gravity and spacetime. We now say that mass has the effect of distorting spacetime and it is that distortion that causes other objects with mass to move in ways that formerly we used to describe as being acted upon by a gravitational force that could act at a distance.

But visualizing that distortion of spacetime and its effects is not easy because the distortions are not visible in the three spatial dimensions that we can ‘see’ and must be described mathematically.

However, this video makes a valiant effort.

Cars powered by sea salt batteries

As the move from gasoline to electric cars gains steam, there is an increasing demand for batteries and the raw materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel that make them up and the competition for those fairly rare resources is becoming fierce.

So I was pleased to learn that there is an alternative battery power source that is made from plain old salt.

Lithium – the main component in most electric batteries – can be costly to mine. But researchers have made a breakthrough with alternative ‘molten salt’ batteries.

Your electronics could soon be powered by an ultra cheap sea salt battery.

Researchers have built a new cheap battery with four times the energy storage capacity of lithium.

Constructed from sodium-sulphur – a type of molten salt that can be processed from sea water – the battery is low-cost and more environmentally friendly than existing options. 
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Julian Assange finally walks free

He is now back in Australia, after years of being hounded by the US government that was angered by Wikileaks publishing documents that showed the horrific abuses by the US in Iraq, such as the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning of US forces in a helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed civilians in a street, after the gunners misidentified the camera equipment they were carrying as weapons.


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Debate mind games

The first debate between Joe Biden and serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) will be held on Thursday from 6:00-7:30 pm (Eastern Time) in Atlanta, GA in the studios of CNN that is hosting the debate. It is not clear if CNN is only streaming it on its own cable channels. If so, since I do not have cable TV nor do I subscribe to CNN, I will not be able to watch it live and will have to see it later when (if?) it is streamed online.

We are currently in the familiar game of setting expectations. Each side will of course claim victory whatever happens but beating expectations is one important metric that is used and is easier to do if each side sets a low bar for their own person and a high bar for the opponent.

SSACFT’s team and their right-wing echo chamber have had to do some serious contortions because I think that they really are afraid of what the debate might show. For the longest time they have been portraying Biden as doddering, drooling, and senile. But that hurt them when he turned in a feisty State of the Union speech and so now, fearing that this will happen again, they have started repeating the mantra that he was on drugs then and will be so again. There is zero evidence for any of this but that has not prevented them from spreading lies before on any number of issues so why stop now?
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Cricket World Cup update

The T20 World Cup now entering its final stages has seen some major surprises. One of the biggest was the rank outsider US team beating perennial powerhouse Pakistan in its group game. That proved pivotal in taking the US to the second round of just eight teams of the 20 that started out, with Pakistan not making it. Then we saw another powerhouse New Zealand get completely routed by Afghanistan in their group game, enabling the latter to make it into the final eight while eliminating the former.

In the games involving the final eight teams, Afghanistan pulled off another shocker by beating Australia, the team that, along with India, were favored to win the tournament. They then went on to beat Bangladesh, propelling them into the semi-finals where they will play South Africa. The other semi-final will be between India and England.

It is clear that Afghanistan is the Cinderella team of this tournament and one hopes that they can keep pulling off these upsets and beat South Africa and then whoever they meet in the finals.