TedEd: The art forger who tricked the Nazis

A TedEd by Noah Charney

In the strangest trial in Dutch history, a man's life depended on proving his work was a forgery. Han van Meegeren was an artist whose original works failed to make money. Angry toward his critics, he decided to make fools of them. He researched the old masters, their methods, their paints, their biographies. He decided to copy Johannes Vermeer, who was famous for his meticulous domestic scenes. Van Meegeren bought 17th century canvases, the pigments available in Vermeer's time, and created his own brushes. When he was done, he used synthetic resin and baked the paintings to make them look old. In his time, there were few forensic tests available to test the veracity of his paintings, and whether or not a painting was real was a matter of judgement by critics. Through research, van Meegeren found that many historians believed that Vermeer was influenced by Caravaggio in his early years. Luckily for him, the leading authority on Vermeer, Abraham Bredius, believed this theory and pronounced the paintings authentic. He sold forgeries for many years, making millions. When the Nazis invaded Holland, a German general wanted to add a Vermeer to his collection of stolen European art. So, van Meegeren sold him a forgery. But when the war was over, he was arrested for selling important pieces of Dutch history to the enemy. So in court, van Meegeren had to prove that the work was a forgery. He showed them the entire process, and escaped the death sentence - replaced with a 1 year sentence for forgery. After that, he became a sort of hero for swindling the Nazis, and his works gained a reputation of their own. So much, in fact, that he was later forged by his own son.

TedEd: The Infinite Hotel Paradox

A TedEd by Jeff Dekofsky

The Infinite Hotel Paradox was created in the 1920's by David Hilbert to show how difficult the concept of infinity is. Imagine a hotel with infinite rooms, all booked for the night. A person walks in and asks for a room. But you don't have to turn him down. You can ask every guest to move over one room, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, and so on until guest number n goes to room number n+1. Then the new guest takes room number 1. Now let's say that a bus with an infinitely countable number of passengers shows up. How do you fit all of them? If the guest in room 1 goes to room 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6, and so on, each guest will move to room number 2n from n. This will fill all the even rooms, leaving an infinite number of odd rooms open. But now an infinite number of buses with an infinite number of passengers on each arrives. How do you fit all of those people? We can use Euclid's statement that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. So every current guest goes to the first prime number, 2, raised to the power of their current room number, so room 2^n. Then, the passengers on the first bus go to the next prime, 3, raised to the power of their seat number, or 3^n. The next bus, powers of 5, 7, 11, and so on to the last bus. Since each room is a prime to the power of a natural number, each one is unique, and there will be no overlapping rooms. This is only possible, however, with the lowest level of infinity, or the countable infinity of the natural numbers. This is 1, 2, 3 ... infinity. This is also called aleph-zero. With higher orders of infinity, though, our strategies fall apart. For example, the real number infinity hotel would have radical, irrational, and negative rooms. This all shows us just how hard the concept of infinity is.

National Geographic: Why weren’t we ready for this virus?

National Geographic: Why weren’t we ready for this virus?

By Robin Marantz Henig

We have missed many warning signs of the pandemic. Starting in the 1990s, scientists coined the term "emerging virus". It was first used by virologist Stephen Morse. He described modern conditions like urbanization and animal-human proximity that could release deadly pathogens that had never been seen before. He and others warned that globalization could then aid these diseases in moving around the world. Even though the warning signs were there, many doctors believed the next pandemic would be the flu. Why?

    It was easy to pretend something like coronavirus doesn't exist, and besides, it is very hard to track and predict the evolution of pathogens. Also, many didn't believe a global pandemic would be coming because, in our sheltered world, we saw viruses like SARS and Ebola mainly contained to their regions. It was easy to just say other countries were susceptible. We've dodged a bullet so many times that we became aloof, and this one brought humanity to its knees.

CNN 10 7/27/2020 ~ 7/31/2020

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Monday, July 27, 2020

On Saturday, Hurricane Hanna made landfall in Padre Island, Texas. It was a Category 1, the weakest class of hurricanes, but dropped more than a foot of rain, cut power to many homes, and caused the governor to issue a disaster declaration. Making things worse, many areas affected are also seeing high rates of COVID-19, making rescue efforts difficult. Hurricane Hanna was also the first hurricane of the Atlantic season. Former Representative John Lewis was not only an important political figure but a fighter for civil rights as well. He led the Selma March for Voting Rights in 1965 with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which shed light on some states that were resisting Black voting rights and led to laws preventing that. Lewis died recently at age 80 after a long battle with cancer. A comet called NEOWISE is passing Earth through late August. It can be seen just before sunrise and just after sunset, and won't be returning for another 6,400 years. Don't miss out! The CDC is recommending schools reopen with proper precautions, but that could cause transportation problems for some people. Due to social distancing, buses will only be able to operate at partial capacity, with priority for special eduction, low income, and homeless families. But many more families who have single parents or full time working parents also have problems.

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Sports have restarted. In the MLB, games began on the 23rd and 24th with a shortened season of 60 games. However, there have been postponements, for example, the Miami Marlins’ opener when 14 players tested positive for coronavirus. The NBA will resume on the 31st with 22 of the 30 teams playing 8 remaining games to determine the playoff roster. The NFL will begin as scheduled in September. However, no fans are allowed inside stadiums - only cardboard ones - and the sounds are missing as well. In South Korea, though, a small percentage of fans are allowed into baseball games. To get in, one must receive a temperature check, check-in with a barcode for contact tracing, and use hand sanitizer. Fans are spread out across the bleachers, and the atmosphere just isn’t the same. Many big cities are seeing slowed growth, and it may be because a generation is aging. Millennials make up the majority of the population, and they were moving to the big cities in the early parts of the century to be with the sights, sounds, and social interactions. But with the pandemic, many of these qualities are missing, and since the Millennials are also aging, they are starting to move back to the suburbs. Still, Gen Z may save the cities when they begin their own wave in the future.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Congress is debating more stimulus bills to help the US economy. They will assist businesses that are closed due to coronavirus and people who have lost their jobs. Both the Democratic and Republican packages would send direct checks to Americans, support jobless people, and spend billions on education. But they're not the same. The Democrats support spending $3 trillion while the Republicans call for $1 trillion. There are also disagreements over who would get the money. New research has found that the COVID-19 has already mutated. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many mutations to viruses, which occur when DNA/RNA is copied, end up being neutral or even harmful to them. The one in the coronavirus is on the spike protein, which helps it enter human cells. Even though it makes the virus spread faster, it doesn't appear to make it more lethal. The only major problem is, how are we going to make a vaccine? The pandemic has also affected graduating seniors. Many of them are paying to go to college when learning will actually be remote. Hear what they have to say here.

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Since January, scientists around the world have been racing to find a vaccine for COVID-19 to try to stop its spread. In fact, Russia plans to approve its first one in just two weeks. However, the speediness is creating valid concerns over the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. Normally, vaccines take years to develop, and the coronavirus vaccine is being developed over a matter of months. And even when it does come out, there are concerns that people will refuse to receive the vaccine. One poll found that just 1/3 of the population would take it, while others show 2/3 would. But if not enough people get the vaccine, we can’t have herd immunity, making the vaccine much less effective. Contact tracing is another tool that could potentially help against the pandemic. Used properly, it could alert people if they were in the vicinity of a person who tested positive for the virus. There are, however, concerns that people’s privacy could be breached. I believe these concerns are invalid. Take South Korea, a country in which contact tracing has helped contain the pandemic. No personal information is disclosed, no names, nothing. Just the fact that a person with COVID was in a certain area at what time. Back to the story. Many companies are creating devices that could help in the workplace. Cameras, which can track whether employees are wearing masks and social distancing, and wearables that maintain social distance.

Friday, July 31, 2020

America has seen its greatest GDP drop ever. Between April and June, it decreased by 9.5%, which is higher than the biggest quarterly drop during the financial crisis. The reason is coronavirus. More than 20 million jobs were reportedly lost due to closed businesses. And even though many businesses created jobs and rebounded when the US reopened, the economy still has not recovered its record-setting levels of growth. As reported on Wednesday, Congress is spending trillions to help small businesses and the jobless. Still, many small businesses are evolving or struggling. Perseverance is the name of the 2020 Mars rover. It launched this week and is scheduled to arrive on the Red Planet in February 2020. It has all sorts of new tools like cameras and sample collection kits, and it will be searching for evidence of past life. It will also carry a helicopter that may become the first to fly on another planet.