Category: Science

I’m not sure they are all true, or for that matter politically incorrect, but here is the list.

Thanks to a loyal reader for the pointer.

Even on a clear, sunny day, the people who keep the subway going have to pump 13 million gallons of water away.  Otherwise the tunnels start to flood.

That is from the July 2007 Scientific American, drawing upon Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us; I have pre-ordered my copy and I am waiting for his secret blog.

The buds or leaves of many plants are arranged not randomly but in sophisticated spiral structures that exhibit many mathematical properties involving Fibonacci sequences and golden angles. 

A theist might see evidence of intelligent design in these structures.  An evolutionary biologist (or economist) might see evidence of unintelligent design i.e. they will assume that since the patterns are far from random there must be some functional advantage to spiral patterns and that natural selection operating over many generations results in a convergence to or near the optimum.

There is, however, a third – often overlooked – possibility.  Sophisticated structures may be the result of unintelligent, non-design.  Here’s an interesting article, for example, arguing that the spiral patterns in flowers are the result of physical processes of attraction and repulsion.  In particular, check out this cool movie which shows magnetized drops of ferrofluid being dropped into a dish that is magnetized at its
edge and filled with silicone oil. The droplets are attracted to the edge of the dish and repelled from one another.  What’s interesting is that when the droplets are dropped slowly they float directly away from one another in a simple pattern but when they are dropped quickly they form intricate spirals with different properties depending on how quickly they are dropped.  (Note that the movie is a bit long – just grab the slider and you will see what is going on).  The physical model is only suggestive of what is going on in flowers, of course, but the idea is generating new testable predictions about the kinds of patterns we should see in real flowers.

My suspicion is that quite a few of the sophisticated patterns that we see in nature and elsewhere is neither intelligent nor unintelligent design, i.e. not functional in any direct sense, but rather the result of unintelligent, non-design.

Prehistoric Polynesians beat Europeans to the Americas, according to a new analysis of chicken bones.

Here is more.  When I was 9 I read Kon-Tiki at least five times.

It’s called Ortho-K, or Orthokeratology, and involves wearing special contact lenses while you sleep, to correct the curvature of the eye.  When you wake up the next morning and take out the lenses, you have perfect vision throughout the day.

Here is more.  When I ponder the possibility of laser eye surgery, I start calculating the probability of a sudden Virginia earthquake.  I’m now at the point where I need glasses for more than half of my reading material.  I don’t mind the look but it slows me down ever so slightly…

The Economist says so:

But one feature–whether a language uses pitch as well as vowels and
consonants to convey word meanings–stood apart.  Those, such as Chinese,
that encipher meaning in pitch are called “tonal languages”.  Those that
do not, like English, are “non-tonal”.  And it was versions of Dr
Dediu’s and Dr Ladd’s two microcephaly-related genes that matched the
49 populations along tonal and non-tonal lines.

Language Log (one of the best blogs) has excellent commentary.

Are you a good liar? Most people think that they are, but in reality there
are big differences in how well we can pull the wool over the eyes of others.
There is a very simple test that can help determine your ability to lie. Using
the first finger of your dominant hand, draw a capital letter Q on your
forehead.

Some people draw the letter Q in such a way that they themselves can read it.
That is, they place the tail of the Q on the right-hand side of their forehead.
Other people draw the letter in a way that can be read by someone facing them,
with the tail of the Q on the left side of their forehead. This quick test
provides a rough measure of a concept known as "self-monitoring". High
self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be seen by
someone facing them. Low self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in
which it could be read by themselves.

High self-monitors tend to be concerned with how other people see them. They
are happy being the centre of attention, can easily adapt their behaviour to
suit the situation in which they find themselves, and are skilled at
manipulating the way in which others see them. As a result, they tend to be good
at lying. In contrast, low self-monitors come across as being the "same person"
in different situations. Their behaviour is guided more by their inner feelings
and values, and they are less aware of their impact on those around them. They
also tend to lie less in life, and so not be so skilled at
deceit.

Long time readers will not be surprised to learn that I find it difficult to see things from other people’s perspective and thus, consistent with the theory, I am a lousy liar!

More here.  Hat tip to Koettke. 

A quick test: how many of you can name the product being advertised in
the banner ad at the top of the page?  Chances are, the ad’s presence
didn’t even register with most seasoned web browsers.  But that’s
probably okay, at least according to research that appears in June’s Journal of Consumer Research.
The research concludes that repeated exposure to a product via banner
ads generates a positive feeling towards that product.  The good news
for consumers is that a critical reevaluation of the product can make
these positive feelings vanish.

Here is more.  I’ve also thought that clicking to make the ad go away makes the ad, in terms of your subconscious, more effective than watching it.  Once you associate the ad with feelings of control, the product becomes something you can deal with.

The pointer is from www.geekpress.com.

In many data series a surprising number of entries begin with the number 1, and the number 2 is also more common than a random distribution might suggest.  This is called Benford’s Law.  For instance about one third of all house numbers start with one.  That may be a quirk of bureaucratic numbering psychology, but the principle also applies to the Dow Jones index history, size of files stored on a PC, the length
of the world’s rivers, and the numbers in newspapers’ front page headlines.  It does not apply to lottery-winning numbers, see the graph at the above link.  Here is an exact statement of the law:

Besides the number 1 consistently appearing
about 1/3 of the time, number 2 appears with a frequency of 17.6%,
number 3 at 12.5%, on down to number 9 at 4.6%.  In mathematical terms,
this logarithmic law is written as F(d) = log[1 + (1/d)], where F is
the frequency and d is the digit in question.

I feel as if someone is pulling my leg.  And I keep thinking of nominal interest rates being bounded from below at zero.  Yes this has practical implications:

…because a year’s accounting data of a company
should fulfill the law, economists can detect falsified data, which is
very hard to manipulate to follow the law. (Interestingly, scientists
found that numbers 5 and 6, rather than 1, are the most prevalent,
suggesting that forgers try to “hide” data in the middle.)

The law was first discovered by an economist (and astronomer), Simon Newcomb.  Here is Wikipedia on the law.  Here is more startling data on where the law applies.  From a completely orthogonal but I suspect not totally irrelevant direction, here is Tim Harford on price stickiness.

This whole topic makes me feel like an idiot for even bringing it up, with apologies to Pythagoras. 

Paul Rubin argues that our evolutionary heritage biases us against seeing larger moral communities.

Our primitive ancestors lived in a world that was essentially static; there
was little societal or technological change from one generation to the next.
This meant that our ancestors lived in a world that was zero sum — if a
particular gain happened to one group of humans, it came at the expense of
another.

This is the world our minds evolved to understand. To this day, we often see
the gain of some people and assume it has come at the expense of others.
Economists have argued for more than two centuries that voluntary trade, whether
domestic or international, is positive sum: it benefits both parties, or else
the exchange wouldn’t occur. Economists have also long argued that the economics
of immigration — immigrants coming here to exchange their labor for money that
they then exchange for the products of other people’s labor — is positive sum.
Yet our evolutionary intuition is that, because foreign workers gain from trade
and immigrant workers gain from joining the U.S. economy, native-born workers
must lose.

…we tend to interpret other people’s actions as saying something about them, whereas we interpret our own actions as saying more about the situation we’re in.  So, when we picture ourselves acting in the third-person, we see ourselves as an observer would, as the ‘kind of person’ who performs that behaviour.  "Seeing oneself as the type of person who would engage in a desired behaviour increases the likelihood of engaging in that behaviour", the researchers said.

Here is the article, which claims you should envision your desired successes through the perspective of a third person, to better bring them about.

I think what this post is really telling you is that an individual’s sense of clinical judgement is overrated to the point of being dangerous.  A similar circumstance applies to psychologists, who are most accurate in making diagnoses when they are young, and tend to rely on checklists.  Later, as experienced practicioners, they rely on clinical judgement and misdiagnose.  This means that psychologists become demonstrably less skilled as they become more experienced.  A sort of inversion of expertise. See Robin Dawes, House of Cards.

Here is Robin’s post that evoked the comment, here are the comments.  Here is the recommended book.  We cannot be sure this is the Michael Crichton, you know, the Jasper Johns collector…in any case my favorite Michael Crichton novel is Sphere.

European astronomers have spotted what they say is the most Earth-like planet yet outside our solar system, with balmy temperatures that could support water and, potentially, life.

Here is the story.  That planet is only about twenty light years away.  Are earth-like planets so common?  That probably means lots more civilization-supporting planets than I had expected.  But where are the alien visitors?  As suggested by the Fermi paradox, we must revise our priors along several margins, one of which is the expected duration of an intelligent civilization.

We already have a civilization, so the added optimism on that front doesn’t help us much.  On the other hand, we don’t know how long our civilization will last, but now we must be more pessimistic. 

I might be happier if I were more altruistic toward possible alien races; right now my appreciation for them is mostly aesthetic (modally speaking, that is), not empathetic.  All you alien altruists should be jumping for joy.  Holders of selfish, planet-based moralities should despair.

No matter what the proper galactic welfare function, I suppose I should be wracked with emotion.  I’m not.

The female students were asked to rate the men for their attractiveness as long-term partners.  Overall, the better looking men were rated as more attractive, as were those men with higher status.  Crucially, however, there was an interaction between facial attractiveness and status, such that good-looking men with high status were actually rated as less attractive than good-looking men of medium status.

Here is the full report.  Remember when Yogi Berra said (more or less): "No one goes there anymore, it is too crowded."

I am not sure that being rated less high is, for these wealthy, handsome men, a sexual or mating disadvantage.  I do not feel sorry for them.

From a private point of view, only one:

In comparing identical twins, Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while fathers’ happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter [TC: remember the result that fathers with sons are less likely to leave?].  The first child’s sex doesn’t matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.

Interestingly, second and third children don’t add to parents’ happiness at all.  In fact, these additional children seem to make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child–though still happier than women with no children.

"If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child," concludes Kohler, adding that people probably have additional children either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too.       

Here is the longer story.  See this paper.  Here is the researcher’s home page. 

I am hardly an expert in this area, but I find the logic appealing.  One kid is quite able to fill your time and thoughts.  I call this the "parent as empty vessel" model.  The argument for more than one kid, in this view, would rest on risk-aversion and the chance that one kid might die or not work out so well.

Note the contrast between Kohler with Bryan Caplan’s theory that you should have more kids now than you want, so you may enjoy them when you are old.  At that point in time, no single kid "fills the empty vessel" and so more of them are needed.

I believe that men enjoy children more than women do, as they are less stressed by worry.  Whether men want children more is a different question [this last sentence has been altered from a previous version.]

The pointer is from the still totally awesome www.politicaltheory.info.