The Open Society and its Enemies

Philosophize This! has a rather timely talk on Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies.  In that book Popper, among other things, explained why authoritarian governments are bad: they make mistakes which would be quickly corrected in a democracy.

You can listen to the talk at various places:

• Podbean
• PlayerFM
• Youtube

However, you probably don't want to go to philosophizethis.org itself because the links there are implemented in Javascript and seem to be broken.

Food Hygiene Ratings as Biosafety Levels

For the past few years most restaurants, cafes and fast food outlets in Reading have displayed these FSA Food Hygiene Ratings at their entrances. 

Today it occurred to me that these can be seen as a continuation of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention Biosafety Levels for laboratories and other facilities that handle potentially dangerous microorganisms:

Maybe there is some overlap.

Foot stamping gulls

A pair of herring gulls (Larus argentatus) on the lawn in front of our flats.

The gull on the left was persistently stamping its feet on the ground, presumably to encourage worms to come to the surface.  The gull on the right only did it occasionally and most of the time just seemed to be waiting for the other one to finish.

Photo taken in Reading, UK on 2022-01-27