Category: Science

In rural Hindu villages in India…widows are expected
to be perpetual mourners, austere in their habits, appetites and dress;
even so, they often jockey for position, said Richard A. Shweder, an
anthropologist in the department of comparative human development at
the University of Chicago.

“Many
compete for who is most pure,” Dr. Shweder said.  “They say, ‘I don’t
eat fish, I don’t eat eggs, I don’t even walk into someone’s house who
has eaten meat.’  It’s a natural kind of social comparison.”

The article focuses on the psychology of fame-seeking.

In one experiment, experts in karate, boxing, kung fu, and tae kwon do all took turns striking the dummy in the face.

The researchers were surprised to find that boxing is the fighting style capable of delivering the most force in a single punch.

Boxer Steve Petramale delivered about 1,000 pounds (453.6 kilograms) of impact force, the equivalent of swinging a sledgehammer into someone’s face…

The tae kwon do spinning back kick delivered more than 1,500 pounds (680.4 kilograms) of force, while the kung fu flying double kick produced about 1,000 pounds (453.6 kilograms) of force.

But the undisputed winner practices a discipline known for its ability to deliver a knockout: Muay Thai, also known as Thai boxing. 

Melchor Menor, a former two-time Muay Thai world champion, uses a simple technique to incapacitate his opponents: a knee to the chest at close quarters [TC: I guess that doesn’t count as a "punch"  Oh well.].

Menor himself was surprised at how powerful this move can be.

"I wasn’t expecting to have the highest force. When he said the power of the knee [kick] was equal to the power of a 35-mile-an-hour [56.3-kilometer-an-hour] car crash, it was humbling."

It also turns out that a kung fu punch is as fast as a snake.  Who would have known?  Here is the full story, which perhaps explains why I prefer tennis.

Here is the list, courtesy of GeekPress.  But they are not trying very hard.  Here is one candidate:

3. Superfluid space-time

One of the most outlandish new theories of cosmology is that space-time is actually a superfluid substance, flowing with zero friction. Then if the universe is rotating, superfluid spacetime would be scattered with vortices, according to physicists Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina and George Chapline at Lawrence Livermore lab in California – and those vortices might have seeded structures such as galaxies. Mazur suggests that our universe might have been born in a collapsing star, where the combination of stellar matter and superfluid space could spawn dark energy, the repulsive force that is accelerating the universe.

Duh!  That’s not weird at all.  My favorite weird cosmology is missing from the list: time is an illusion, all possible universes exist, and that includes many universes with false memories and traces of a supposedly distant past.

Then there is always "elephants all the way down…"

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)

Here is the source.  Here is a video of Feynman.

The air conditioner is one of them.  Count inadequate sleep and medications as well.  Michael Blowhard piles on.

Here’s a sentence you don’t read very often.

Radioactive scorpion venom a safe cancer cure.

and this was pretty cool:

Bacteria made to sprout conducting nanowires.

Hat tip to Boing Boing Blog.

1. Here is the story.

2. Your English is better than you think.  But on incorrect uses of "hopefully" I will not cede ground.

3. Some books do better in paperback.

4. A Delta list of best barbecue restaurants, based on reader input, via Bob Lawson.  The Virginia selections are weak plus they left off Lockhart, Texas altogether.  It is a better list for the South proper.

5. Jane Galt on deficits, and also on "unfair competition," do go send her some compliments in return…

6. Gorbachev on Bush and Putin.

Take The Big Here Quiz, via Jason Kottke.  I got about five right out of thirty-four.

Nominal variables matter, even when we are deciding how much to eat on our plates:

To test [the unit bias], the researchers left a bowl of M&M sweets in the
hallway of an apartment building with a sign that read “Eat Your Fill:
please use the spoon to serve yourself”. Some days they left a
tablespoon-sized scoop, other days they left a quartercup scoop that
was four times as big. Passers-by could obviously help themselves to as
little or as much as they wanted regardless of which spoon was
provided, but on average, 1.67 times more M&M’s were taken on the
days the big scoop was left compared with the tablespoon-sized scoop.

In
another experiment, the researchers found that, measured by weight,
significantly more pretzels were taken by passers-by when a
complimentary bowl of 60 whole pretzels was left in an apartment
building, compared with when a bowl of 120 half-pretzels was left. And
it was a similar story when either a bowl of 80 small Tootsie rolls (an
American snack bar) or a bowl of 20 large Tootsie rolls was left in an
office building.

In other words, throughout the study, people
took more food when the unit on offer was larger. “Consumption norms
promote both the tendency to complete eating a unit and the idea that a
single unit is the proper portion”, the researchers said.

Here is further information.  There is a lesson for macroeconomics in here, somewhere.

The technologies of mass agriculture, including genetic engineering, prevented the mass starvation of humanity in the last century.  But today most of humanity lives on just 12 plant species and some scientists are worried that a lack of variety may prove our undoing.  Some types of banana, for example, have already been wiped out or are threatened (Snopes is more cautious but verifies the basic facts). 

To protect our seed patrimony is the goal of the Svalbard International
Seed Vault.

The high-security vault, almost half the length of a football field, will
be carved into a mountain on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. If the
looming fences, motion detectors and steel air-lock doors are not disincentive
enough for anyone hoping to breach the facility’s concrete interior, the polar
bears roaming outside should help….

Its precious contents? Seeds  —  millions and millions of them  —  from
virtually every variety of food on the planet.

Thanks to Carl Close for the pointer.

In species where females are promiscuous, there is a big conflict of
interest between males and females over the amount of resources each
child should get. The father of one child probably won’t be the father
of the next (or even of others in the same litter), so his genes —
which he passes on to the child — should evolve to try to get more
resources for his offspring. Genes that come from the mother,
meanwhile, evolve to suppress this effect, so that all her offspring
aren’t fighting each other for resources. In species where females are
monogamous, in contrast, male and female interests are more or less the
same, since the same male is likely to sire many litters with the same
female.

In humans, mice and other mammals of our sort, the
activities of the placenta are — ready for this? — largely controlled
by the father’s genes. Now consider what happens when certain close
species try to mate. Female deer mice are much more promiscuous than
female oldfield mice, so a male deer mouse’s genes are predicted to
fight for resources much more than a male oldfield mouse’s genes would.
Consistent with this, when a male deer mouse mates with a female
oldfield mouse, both placenta and fetus become huge, and the mother
often dies. Any fetus that manages to be born is one third bigger than
babies from either species usually are. When the oldfield mouse is the
father, on the other hand, the pregnancy is much less risky for the
mother — but the baby is a runt.

…female chimpanzees are much, much more promiscuous than human females.
So, assuming you could get fertilization, here’s my prediction: if the
chimpanzee were the father, the pregnancy would be extremely dangerous
for the mother. Probably, few pregnancies could be carried to term. Any
children that did result would be huge. In contrast, if the human were
the father, the children would be small, and both mother and child
would be more likely to survive.

Tyler, Alex, Alex’s wife Monique, Bryan (Caplan), Ilia (Rainer) and I had a fun conversation on Thursday.

A standard story says that women like cads for short term relationships, to get good sex (i.e., genes), and dads for long term relationships, to get security and comfort (i.e., resources to raise kids).  Of course some men are good in both roles, but most men are thought to be better at one role than the other.

Woman always want both sex and security, but they seem to prefer "bad  boy" cads more when they are young, and dads more when they are older.  Why?  We were looking less for proximate psychological causes and more for functional explanations.  We came up with these four theories:

1.  Young women must practice having relationships, in part to discover the distribution of guys out there and their own ability to attract guys.  This requires short term relationships.  But it is not clear why these should be more with cads rather than dad candidates.  And this would predict young women avoid sex when practicing, to avoid having kids.  This theory applies to better to young teens than to young women.

2.  Instead of having all her kids with a dad, many women may have enough negotiating power to get a dad to support her even if she has one kid with a cad.   Dads object less to supporting a cad kid created before they met, as a cad kid created during their relationship suggests that it won’t be the last.  A cad kid early in life can be written off to the "foolishness of youth," and she can credibly claim that she didn’t intend for this to be a cad kid; she had hoped the cad would be a dad.

3.  Girls more than women expect parents to help with their mistakes.  A young woman expects a cad kid to be cared for not by a dad but by her parents and extended family.  Since parents die eventually, older women are less likely to have such support available.  This theory predicts that women without living parents would be less attracted to cads, all else equal.

4.  Young people have stronger incentives to signal than older people, since they are still forming long term attachments, and want to attract the best partners.  Young women compete to attract cads in order to signal their attractiveness and social power, and having sex with cads helps to attract cads.   Women compete more for cads than for dads because cad quality is easier to see in young men – it can take many years to reveal who are the best resource providers.  This theory predicts young women have less interest in private unobserved relationships with cads.

The truth is probably a mixture of these theories.   But some are probably more important that others.

TC: Here are related posts on the topic.