Category: Science

The author is Will Wilkinson, of The Fly Bottle, and his new endeavor is http://happinesspolicy.com.  The mission of the blog is to study the policy implications of "happiness research."  Here is one of my previous posts on the topic.  Here is my (slightly different) more recent opinion.  If you are into the validity of introspection, here is one happy girl.  Here is one happy guy. 

We do not have final answers, but I learned something from this paper.  Thanks to Michael Vassar for the pointer.

The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all the previous facts — the punch-line…Reinterpretation alone is insufficient.  The new model must be inconsequential.  For example, a portly gentleman walking toward his car slips on a banana peel and falls.  If he breaks his head and blood spills out, obviously you are not going to laugh.  You are going to rush to the telephone and call an ambulance.  But if he simply wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him, and then gets up, you start laughing.  The reason is, I suggest, because now you know it’s inconsequential, no real harm has been done.  I would argue that laughter is nature’s way of signaling that "it’s a false alarm."  Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint?  I suggest that the rhythmic staccato sound of laughter evolved to inform our kin who share our genes; don’t waste your precious resources on this situation; it’s a false alarm.  Laughter is nature’s OK signal.

That is from V.S. Ramachandran’s A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.

Matt Yglesias quotes Franz de Waal’s new book:

They [people conversing] settle on a single hum, and it is always the lower status person who does the adjusting. This was first demonstrated in an analysis of the Larry King Live television show. The host, Larry King, would adjust his timbre to that of high-ranking guests, like Mike Wallace or Elizabeth Taylor. Low-ranking guests, on the other hand, would adjust their timbre to that of King. The clearest adjustment to King’s voice, indicating lack of confidence, came from former Vice President Dan Quayle.

The same spectral analysis has been applied to televised debates between U.S. presidential candidates. In all eight elections between 1960 and 2000 the popular vote matched the voice analysis: the majority of people voted for the candidate who held his own timbre rather than the one who adjusted.

On another note, Matt wonders whether he has a new worry.

Randall Parker has the scoop.  Here is one excerpt, quoted by Randall:

…when confronted with thoughts of death, people tend to act in ways that will boost their self-esteem. They also have fewer cognitive resources to resist behaviors that are not central to their self-image. People for whom being slim or fit is important to their self-image, for instance, will not be as likely to overeat, but if physical appearance isn’t as important, the willpower to resist that fudge sundae will plummet.

Here is my previous post, with an assist from Robin Hanson, on the same topic.  Let me note in passing, this is one reason why I would expect a bimodal response to a major crisis such as avian flu.  Most people will behave quite heroically; those who take pride in being social rebels/misfits will act like scoundrels.

Virtually all 500,000 of the world’s thoroughbred racehorses are descended from 28 ancestors, born in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, according to a new genetic study. And up to 95% of male thoroughbreds can be traced back to just one stallion.

Read more here.  Here is another account.

It’s time someone
praised and defended reckless teenage girls and young women who behave
badly, dress provocatively, engage in risky sex, and get pregnant. They
are the normal ones. The rest of us are the deviants. They are behaving
in the most natural way. The rest of us are mutants…

Sexually active
teenage girls, and sexually promiscuous women of any age, carry the
greatest social burden of judgements, punishments, restrictions and
risks because we haven’t got the child-care equation right.

That turns out to be a conservative argument, believe it or not.  Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the pointer.

Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputations, psychologists say, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safety net for group members who feel in danger of falling out.

Here is the story.  Gossip is also a means of signaling ability.  It is not easy to gossip well and gossip discreetly.  What better way of sorting people by their social and communicative abilities?  So when you gossip, you are the one being tested and evaluated.

If you liked the chessboard you will also enjoy the Dragon Illusion.  A video at the link shows you what the illusion looks like but it’s more fun to make a dragon for yourself using the PDF (provided at the link) and some scissors and tape.  You will be amazed!

Thanks to Mitch Berkson for the link.

As scientists discover more about the "epigenome," a layer of biochemical reactions that turns genes on and off, they’re finding that it plays a big part in health and heredity…

The epigenome can change according to an individual’s environment, and is passed from generation to generation. It’s part of the reason why "identical" twins can be so different, and it’s also why not only the children but the grandchildren of women who suffered malnutrition during pregnancy are likely to weigh less at birth.

"Now we’re even talking about how to see if socioeconomic status has an impact on the epigenome," Szyf said.

The link is mine, but read more here.  Here is further explanation.

Today we have crayons called "Inch Worm," "Jazzberry Jam," "Tropical Rain Forest," "Manatee," "Bittersweet" and "Razzmatazz."  Or have you noticed you can’t understand half of the ice cream flavors these days?

Miller and Kahn discovered that there’s method — and perhaps even profit — to this maddening name game. In one test, 100 students taking part in an unrelated study were told that after they had finished the research task they should select jelly beans from six containers as a reward for their participation. They were told that each container held a different flavor of jelly bean. Half the students saw containers labeled with ambiguous names ("white Ireland," "moody blue"), while the other half saw those same containers with more specific descriptive names ("marshmallow white," "blueberry blue"). As the researchers had hypothesized, students took nearly three times as many jelly beans on average from a container that bore a vague name as from one that carried a specific name. In another study involving 60 students, participants were told to pretend they were ordering sweaters from a catalogue. The sweaters in question came in various colors, and these shades were described either ambiguously or using common descriptive names. Again, the students clearly preferred the vague names when making their buying choices. A third test turned up similar results.

Why does ambiguity seem to sell? Miller and Kahn theorize that, without real information, consumers try to understand why the product has such a jazzy name and fill in the blanks with imagined desirable qualities.

Here is the full story.  Here is another summary.  Here is the paper.  Here is one researcher’s home page.

Thermodynamics lets us make engines, refrigerators and much more.  But why does it work?  The usual answer is that physical changes are deterministic (i.e., one-to-one), and the early universe was highly ordered (i.e., flat).  But why was the early universe so ordered?  Various new fundamental principles have been proposed to explain early order, but so far these have not been fruitful.

A century ago Boltzmann suggested that the order we see (billions of light years of flat space) is a rare random fluctuation in a much larger universe.  One might hope that observer selection could explain why we see such a rare event; only if there is a big fluctuation can there be observers to see it.  But observer selection predicts a fluctuation just big enough to make one observer.  This is the “Boltzmann’s brain paradox;” the order we see is much larger than is needed to explain just your brain.

Andreas Albrecht explains that while technical problems remain, it now seems hopeful that inflation is the missing key here (along with assuming the universe is large).  Since early order is required to create inflation, inflation cannot by itself explain the order we see.  But inflation can eliminate the difference between brain-sized and visible-universe-sized fluctuations.  A fluctuation that creates inflation is more likely than one that just makes a brain, and any fluctuation big enough to make inflation creates order on the scale we see.

Perhaps we now just need ask: why is the universe so big?

Well, sort of human, compared to other existing robots, check out the photos.