Category: Science

Here is the list.  This one surprised me:

[Myth] "A penny dropped from the top of a tall building could kill a pedestrian"

[Truth] A
penny isn’t the most aerodynamic of weapons.  A combination of its shape
and wind friction means that, tossed even from the 1,250-foot Empire
State Building, it would travel fast enough merely to sting an unlucky
pedestrian.

Researchers have shown women rate a man as more attractive after
they’ve seen another woman smiling at him.  By contrast, being a jealous
bunch, male observers rate a man as less attractive after they’ve seen
a woman smiling at him.

Here is more.

The atomic bombs were the product of an industrial effort which cost just under $2bn ($20 bn in 1996 dollars).  One billion dollars to destroy a city which would have been destroyed at minimal additional cost by one conventional raid represented an awful lot of ‘bucks per bang.’  Another way to look at it is that it cost $3bn to manufacture the 4,000 or so B-29s which were used exclusively in long-range operations against Japan, including as atomic bombers…Another index was that the total cost of the atomic bombs was the equivalent of making one-third more tanks or five times more heavy guns.

That is intriguing but it misses two points.  First, the cost of making subsequent atomic bombs is lower.  Second, atomic bombs have superior signaling power about the willingness to destroy.  That excerpt is from David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900.

Apparently, even real frogs will jump out of slowly heated water.

That is from Robin Hanson.  You are not encouraged to experiment at home.

When Nobel Laureate and University of Chicago economics professor Robert Fogel found his desk becoming massively piled he simply installed a second desk behind him that now competes in towering clutter with the first.

That is from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abramson and David Freedman, an intriguing defense of…um…mess.  Here is my previous post on this topic.

Most of the really important parts of our lives — who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when — have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence.

Here is more.  Here is a full directory of optimistic prognostications.  Arnold Kling comments on same.

Bruce Charlton asks:

What is the worst designed everyday object?

Bruce Charlton answers:

My vote would go to the standard, hard plastic, hinged CD case.

Its functionality is terrible at best, and it breaks way too easily;
especially the hinge – upon which functionality depends.  And I have
hundreds of them!

That was my answer too.  I am also frustrated by the prevalence of non-sharp knives, although perhaps this is best for the children.  Do you all have other answers?

According to Patric Bach and Steven Tipper of Bangor University, the mere sight of Wayne Rooney
[a soccer player] inhibits the control you have over your feet.  Apparently, looking at
Rooney automatically triggers football-related activity in the movement
control parts of your brain, leading to the paradoxical effect of
impairing your own foot control.  By contrast, Bach and Tipper found the
sight of the British tennis player Tim Henman impairs observers’ hand
control, but not their foot control.

Here is the full story.

Here is the link.  The pointer is from Chris Masse.

Elsewhere, from my Indiana hotel I found Dwight Lee on whether money can buy happiness, and Brad DeLong on Milton Friedman.  Jane Galt won’t go see Borat, I prefer the skits, most of all Bruno talking to the pastor.  And here is an NYT article about a free market think tank in Kenya.

Young children aged between two and four years believe that you only
have to hide your head to become invisible – if your legs are on view,
it doesn’t matter, you still can’t be seen.

That’s according to Nicola McGuigan
and Martin Doherty who say this is probably because young children
think of ‘seeing’ in terms of mutual engagement between people. It
explains why kids often think they can’t be seen if they cover their
eyes.

Here is further discussion.

The explanation [of chevron deposits] is obvious to some scientists.  A large asteroid or
comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population,
smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at
least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated
Indonesia nearly two years ago.  The wave carried the huge deposits of
sediment to land.

Most astronomers doubt that any large comets
or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years.  But
the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old
Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not
known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the
world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean.

Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts
during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong
enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a
violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion.  Instead of once
in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate,
catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand years.

Here is the full story.  I should add there are reports that a tidal wave (not nearly of this size) may hit Japan today.  Here are our posts on asteroid deflection as a public good.

Ogi Ogas is a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at Boston University.  He got a spot on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and used his knowledge of neuroscience to win $500,000.   And no, none of the questions were about neuroscience.

Hat tip to Paul at Truck and Barter.