A miscellany of links

1. Penrose on Hawking.

2. The 2018 Sony World Photography Awards.

3. An MP has tried being a rough sleeper for a week - for the second time.

4. Everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about different health systems across the world. It seems that American healthcare is really expensive because they pay their doctors and nurses loads of money, and they pay more for the drugs too.

5. A light-skinned, green-eyed young Pakistani woman (yes, her appearance is relevant) devised a game about arranged marriage. It put off suitors for a bit, but now she's had over 50 proposals.

6. Emailed love-letters to trees. And some replies.

7. "Can we have kale salad with lemon parmesan dressing?" and other questions asked by American children with (what seem to me) strange diet and entertainment options.

8. Even Harvey Weinstein mostly failed: a piece about how hard it is to be violent. "To be skilled in violence is to keep your own adrenaline level down to medium levels, while driving up your opponent’s to high levels that make them incompetent. On the other hand, if adrenaline levels are equal, neither side performs worse than the other, and the confrontation stalls out, the fight aborting or winding down by losing momentum." A Martin Amis character in Money said that the trick of fighting is to persuade the other guy as quickly as possible that he is losing. I think that is the same advice in different words.

9. The Washington Post has a piece (by a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations) about aircraft with certain highly advanced technical capabilities. It discusses "videos, along with observations by pilots and radar operators, [that] appear to provide evidence of the existence of aircraft far superior to anything possessed by the United States or its allies. ... In some cases, according to incident reports and interviews with military personnel, these vehicles descended from altitudes higher than 60,000 feet at supersonic speeds, only to suddenly stop and hover as low as 50 feet above the ocean. The United States possesses nothing capable of such feats. ... these mysterious aircraft easily sped away from and outmaneuvered America’s front-line fighters without a discernible means of propulsion." You can watch a video of one of them at the link. The point the author makes is that these aircraft should be investigated. That sounds pretty reasonable to me: if, say, the Russians or the Chinese have developed such aircraft then the Americans surely ought to be interested in learning more about them. But there are two schools of thought on this subject. Why? Well, let me put it this way: I've managed to get all the way to the end of this without using the word "UFO".