I’m Just Sad (1,000,000 In U.S. Dead From COVID)

We were very encouraged by the rapid development of the vaccines, and everybody really thought we were going to vaccinate our way out of this,” he said.  “But then we had people that wouldn’t even take the damn vaccine.”
…
“We know vaccines work.  We know masks work.  We know social distancing works, and we know crowd control, limiting crowded spaces, works.  This is like a no-brainer, but we cannot seem to do it.”
—     Dr. Robert Murphy
Executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health
Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine
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2020	Listening To A #IncompetentDonald COVID-19 Press Briefing
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2018	True Measures
2017	Hoping For Tapes
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2016	On Viewing This Mudball
2015	It Takes A Village
2014	In God’s Eyes
2013	We Root For Ourselves
2012	Like A Shark
2011	Discernible Virtue

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Not Exactly Preventing Or Realizing

History is not an exact science.  And ‘the historian of the future’ is as much artist as scientist or academic.  But the futurologist cannot be taken lightly.  He bases his conclusions on perceived trends, and his predictions themselves may possibly have some effect on the future:  in helping either to prevent his predictions coming true or to realize them.
—     General Sir John Hackett (et al)
From:  “The Third World War: August 1985“
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2018	Sunrises, Rainbows And Newborn Babies
2017	Untold Agony
2016	Just Borrowed
2015	Warning
2014	Always More Productive
2013	Is Not
2012	Loosely Translated
2011	Your Opinions Are Not My Facts

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Might Still Flicker Or Shine

The central contention of physics has it that the building blocks of the universe will endure even if, or even when, the humans who tally them, and the planet we live on, all die.  To see into the deathless universe is to try to see nothing so flamboyant as [William] Wordsworth’s favorite daffodils and walnut groves, but to peer into the coldest spaces, the black holes and the fractional electric charge of theoretical subatomic particles.  These entities have no blood flow, of course, but also no DNA;  they’re not susceptible to pandemics, however virulent, or the dividends and ravages of carbon.  They don’t live, so they don’t die.  To model the universe as precisely as possible is to try to see the one thing that even the strictest atheist agrees is everlasting — to try to achieve, in a lab, an intimation of immortality.
Back to the living world that’s under our feet.  [Carlo] Rovelli is right to caution against the potential delusions of those who are greedy for eurekas.  But, as a fellow physicist with a radical streak, he is also sympathetic to their ambitions, a drive to “learn something unexpected about the fundamental laws of nature.”  To Rovelli, whose latest book describes quantum mechanics as an almost psychedelic experience, a truly radical discovery entails the observation of phenomena that fall outside three existing frameworks in physics:  quantum theory, the Standard Model of particle physics, and general relativity.  Only by blowing up one of those frameworks can one achieve the kind of immortality that scientists get, the glory of someone like Einstein or Heisenberg.
But to keep looking, as Rovelli has, as Fermilab has with this study on the muon’s magnetism, is also to apprehend hints.  To follow hints.  In that way, the physicist’s work and the poet’s are the same.  And if Wordsworth is right, immortality can be found, of all places, in the hint — the staggering proposition by nature itself that, in spite of all the dying around us, something of all we love might be imperishable, might still flicker or shine or wobble when the rest of our world is gone.
—     Virginia Heffernan
From her article:  “Muonstruck“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine;  dtd:  June 2021
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On This Day In:
2021	Keep Growing
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2020	I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Plans
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2019	Beautiful Rules
2018	Skepticism
2017	WWGD?
2016	Growing Greatness
2015	When It Is Darkest
2014	Knowledge And Doubt
2013	Three Thoughts
2012	Gentle Reader
2011	Leave The Light On For Me Anyway

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Hope And Fear: Global Warming / Climate Change

The limit of your present understanding is not the limit of your possibilities.
—    Guy Finley
In these times – where social appearance is more important than spiritual substance – what has become our longing to change is really the unconscious desire to control not just the shape of our bodies (according to prevailing values) but to dominate our environment as well, regardless of the cost.
—    Guy Finley
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On This Day In:
2021	I Should Have Started Earlier
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2019	Today’s Question
2018	A Moment Of Union
2016	Symptoms
2016	Tossers
2015	Hunger
2014	Outside Dependence
2013	Doing Right
2012	A Short Course In Human Relations
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2011	I’m Working For A Living

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This Dot – Our Home

Consider again that dot.  That’s here.  That’s home.  That’s us.  On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.  Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.  Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.  Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.  In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.  There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.  Visit, yes.  Settle, not yet.  Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.  There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.  To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
—    Carl Sagan
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2018	Respect Is Long Gone
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2016	Dear Automakers
2015	And Some Not So Brave Too
2014	In My Lifetime…
2013	Democracy
2012	Borrowed Expectations
2011	Not Necessarily True

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I Learn Something New

THE IMPORTANCE OF PERIODIC REVIEW
For precisely the reasons I’ve just outlined — that science is a process, not a set of accepted facts — it’s a good idea (and very common) for scientists, whether professionals or students, to review for themselves both how the scientific web of knowledge was assembled historically, and how it holds together nowadays.  This kind of exercise is a sort of brain calisthenics;  it keeps the mind fresh and clear.
Every time I reconsider what I know from scratch, I learn something new.  Typically I find connections between well-known facts that I hadn’t previously recognized.  Sometimes I discover gaps in my own logic, and a couple of times in my career I’ve even discovered gaps in the scientific community’s logic.  So it’s well worth going through this kind of introspection, even starting at the beginning with basic astronomy.
—     Professor Matt Strassler
[Found at one of the blogs / websites I follow:  “Of Particular Significance“, at:  https://profmattstrassler.com/
The specific post is:  https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/02/11/why-simple-explanations-of-established-facts-have-value/
Please visit the original site if you have a few spare moments.    —    KMAB]
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2014	…Am Too
2013	Credible?
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2011	Risking Hidden Linkage

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A Little Perspective

Who are we?  We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
—    Carl Sagan
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2015	I’ve Got To Run
2014	Which Is It?
2013	Making You Stronger
2012	Sick Of Being Sick
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2011	Clear, Specific And Measurable
2010	The Runner’s High
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Republican Ambling

Science is … a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.  If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.
—    Carl Sagan
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2018	Or A President
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2016	Why Not?
2015	Je Suis Charlie
2014	To The Nines
2013	Higher And Truer
2012	Life’s Last Question
2011	A Single Heartbeat
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And Still Don’t Understand

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
—    Robert M. Pirsig
From his book:  “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values“
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2017	My Fear For America
2016	Proceeding Still
2015	Seeing Rainbows
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2014	The Law Of The Perversity Of Nature
2013	One Standard Deviation
2012	High Anxiety
2011	And I’m Taking Me There
2010	1,000

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Overcoming Fear And Deflated Pretensions

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.  We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter.  We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star.  We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth.  We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects.  We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death.  We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions.  We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half.  We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars.  We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.
—    Carl Sagan
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2015	Just Plain Wrong
2014	Finding Beliefs
2013	Pretty Confident
2012	Effective Ranges
2011	Three Wisdoms
2010	I’m Just Askin’…
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Too Bad Politics And Greed Get In The Way

There is no other species on the Earth that does science.  It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason:  it works.  It is not perfect.  It can be misused.  It is only a tool.  But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.  It has two rules.  First:  there are no sacred truths;  all assumptions must be critically examined;  arguments from authority are worthless.  Second:  whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.  We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.
—    Carl Sagan
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2017	Federal Deficit, National Debt And Tax Cuts For The 1%
2016	Picky, Picky, Picky
2015	Another Limitation On Religion
2014	Enduring
2013	Tell Me More…
2012	Passing…
2011	Fake It ‘Til You Make It

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And / Or A Profound Falsehood

The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.
—   Niels Bohr
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2014	A Very Unusual Mind
2013	Just Lucky
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2011	What Is Your Canvas?
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And Fields Of Green

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery.  But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red?  It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
—    Carl Sagan
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2020	Build It To Last
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2018	One Of The Great Ones
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2016	What’s Your Excuse?
2015	Some Meaningful Resemblance
2014	Bloom
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2013	Walking The Walk
2012	Legacy Of Star Trek (TOS)
2011	Tolerating The Intolerant
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2010	Giants Win Game 1 In Philly (4 to 3)!!

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What You’ll Find

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.  What have we to offer in exchange?  Uncertainty!  Insecurity!
––     Isaac Asimov
Quoted by:   John Allen Paulos
From his book:  “Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences“
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2018	Basic Rights
2017	Thoughtful Attitudes
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2015	It Is What It Is
2014	What Have You Learned (Gently) Lately?
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2013	Ignore The Man Behind The Curtain
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2012	What Are Your True Measurements
2011	What It Is All About
2010	The Magnificent Seven
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MAGA Choice: Reality Or Lies

Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life.  Because it has that character, the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and the paradigm is at issue.  When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular.  Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense.
—     Thomas S. Kuhn
From his book:   “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions“
[Unfortunately for Democracy, Trumpers STILL choose lies…    —    KMAB]
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2014	Others’ Footsteps
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2013	Doin’
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2011	What Have We Found Here
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