BobRingReflections

It’s almost that time of year again - March Madness and the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.  I watch a lot of college basketball on TV during the regular season, but the Tournament is special, and as a basketball fanatic, I try to watch as many games as possible.  (If you’re a fan, you know that, early in the Tournament, that amounts to 16 separate games in a single day - on successive days!)   Last year, I wrote about March Madness - haranguing about problems with the TV coverage, including scheduling, broadcast organization, sideline interviews, the length of games, repetitive TV commercials, studio-game sound differences, and aggressively pushing gambling on Tournament game broadcasts.                                   (See https://bobringreflections.blogspot.com/2022_04_11_archive.html ) This year, watching the final conference basketball games leading up to the Tournament,...

Once in a while, among numerous blog posts on history and science, I feel the need to get something off my chest.  This time the subject is how mainstream media news is declining before our eyes.    In this opinion piece, I will start with a discussion of where Americans get their news today, and follow that with a definition of mainstream media news.   Then, I will cover what I feel are the troubling problems of mainstream media news; the special cases of newspapers, television, and online news; and how social media amplifies all the negative aspects of mainstream media news.   I’ll conclude with some thoughts about how to get “better” news. My principal sources include my own aging, frustrated brain, “More than eight-in-ten Americans get news from digital devices,” supremecourt.gov; “Broad agreement in U.S. - even among partisans - on which news outlets are part of the mainstream media,” pewresearh.org; “What is Mainstream Media? Definition, Meaning, and...

The February 6, 2023 major earthquake in southern Turkey and northwestern Syria, with its horrible destruction and loss of life, reminded me that I don’t know much about earthquakes - how, why, and where they happen.  So, researching this article will give me a chance to learn about the subject. After a short introduction, I will cover historical views of earthquakes, the science of earthquakes, earthquake magnitude and intensity, measuring and locating earthquakes, the damage from earthquakes, major earthquakes in the past, predicting and forecasting earthquakes, and a word about preparedness for earthquakes.  I will close with a short update on the recent Turkey-Syria earthquake. My principal sources include “Earthquake,” “List of historical earthquakes,” and “Richter magnitude scale,” Wikipedia.com; “The Science of Earthquakes” and “Earthquake Magnitude, Energy Release, and Shaking Intensity,” usgs.gov; “Highest Magnitude & Biggest Earthquakes,” sma-tsunami-warning....