Science
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Portland in 1921: Professor Einstein yields to the Bolsheviks
Not all news stories wear well. On December 13, 1921 the Oregonian printed this intriguing item: ROTARIANS DITCH EINSTEIN. — Because the Einstein theory of relativity has been knocked higher than a kite, according to the story published in The Oregonian yesterday morning, the Rotary club has seen fit to strike the subject from its…
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Ted Cruz would eat his words, if he had electricity to cook them with
Except now it's Texas that can't perform even basic functions of civilization as millions of Texans are without power because the state elected to go it alone with its electric grid. Ted Cruz took off for a vacation in Cancun, where the state government is able to provide power and water.
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Schrödinger’s senator gives us our first quantum-state president
To explain one aspect of quantum mechanics, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger imagined his eponymous cat as a feline shut into a box with a timed mechanism that releases poison and kills the cat at some unknown time in the next six hours. He argued that until you opened the box, the cat was neither alive…
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Harvard Professor Raj Chetty explains COVID-19’s impact in a nonpartisan way based on actual data and economics. We should listen.
Here is a link to actual data on the effect of the pandemic on the American economy. It's a website, "Track The Recovery," maintained by a group of economists led by Harvard professor Raj Chetty. Bloomberg News has a good description of Professor Chetty's work, and the data on which it's based, here. Among the…
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Are you better off than you were four years ago (III)?
https://www.statista.com/chart/21269/daily-deaths-covid-19-selected-countries/
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention orders a stop to evictions. Why doesn’t it order everyone to wear a mask in public?
This week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acting under authority given to the Surgeon General and the Department of Health and Human Services, issued an order entitled "Temporary Halt in Residential Evictions to Prevent the Further Spread of COVID-19," which you can read in the Federal Register here. The order prohibits landlords from…
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John T. Molloy has some advice for Donald Trump
Donald Trump calls his opponent “Crooked Hillary.” Based on his half-century of research, John T. Molloy says that Mr. Trump is not only unmannered but making a political mistake.
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The Washington Post calls out another bit of Trumpery
During the Democratic debate Saturday, Hillary Clinton returned late to the podium from a bathroom break. Yesterday Donald Trump said, "I know where she went – it's disgusting, I don't want to talk about it." Then today Post columnist Zachary Goldfarb said that in using the word "disgusting," Mr. Trump had played a clever trick,…
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John T. Molloy takes on the American voter
John T. Molloy has turned his attention to researching voter patterns. The author of "Dress for Success," a book on business dressing based on research instead of opinion, took 18 months away from his blog, resurfacing on July 5 with the intriguing news that he had been training a Democrat and a Republican (not competitors)…
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Keep the team names simple: let’s call them “pro-measles” and “anti-measles”
Years ago the opponents of abortion renamed their cause from "anti-abortion" to "pro-life," followed by their adveraries renaming themselves from "pro-abortion" to "pro-choice." This follows a long tradition of factions renaming themselves (q.v. "Bolsheviks" and "mahayana") to claim the moral high ground, and renaming their opponents (q.v. "Mensheviks" and "hinayana") for propaganda reasons. The contenders…