I recently heard that depression is a risk factor for covid. It was actually in a commercial. In the commercial, a bunch of celebrities with various risk factors were telling people with those risk factors to be extra careful. It surprised me. I have depression, but never thought it put me at higher risk for…
I’ve been hearing it my whole life, television rots your brain. Video games are worse. And now that we have screens, we’re doomed. Thanks to these technologies, people no longer have attention spans. People are lazy. The ability to memorize is gone. Actually, all learning and thinking is in danger. At least that’s what they…
Why is there a speed of light? Why is there a speed of sound? These have never made sense to me. From what I can find (and remember from Physics class), light travels at 186,000 miles per second and sound at 761.2 miles per hour. The speed of sound is more variable than the speed…
You’ve probably heard people say things like the sun isn’t really yellow or the sky and ocean are not really blue. You might have heard that polar bears aren’t really white. Heck, pink doesn’t even exist. Oh, and the night sky isn’t black. There are probably more examples that I can’t think of right now….
I used to be a climate change optimist. Not a naive optimist, mind you, just an optimist. I wasn’t expecting a silver bullet or anything. I thought tackling the problem would be difficult and people would have to sacrifice quite a bit, but I thought it was doable. Over the last few years, I’ve become…
I’m officially an old man. I have a fairly new hobby; I started it last fall. I set up bird feeders in my yard and now I enjoy watching the birds that visit my feeders. I used to have a neighbor that fed birds. I always appreciated seeing them as I went out my back…
Recent research is showing that it may be possible to diagnose mental health conditions through blood tests. It’s intriguing work. One of the most frustrating parts for patients with mental health issues is the process of diagnosing the condition. It’s a lot of trial and error and it takes a long time. Like with any…
The second Sunday in March is the worst day of the year. It is the day that, here in the US, we switch from standard time to daylight saving time. We won’t go back to standard time until November. The entire eight months is worse than it would be if we didn’t switch, but the…
We have made a couple of posts lately about scientific concepts that we don’t really understand (here and here). I don’t know if this will be an ongoing thing or not, but I decided to add to it with a little bit about gravity. Gravity is one of those things that, according to my teachers…
