Category: Science

Sometimes I will pull up to a red light and be, in the middle of the day, the first car in line waiting for the green.  (Northern Virginia, of course, has its fair share of traffic, so this is unusual but it does happen.)  I often wonder: should I be happy?

Under one view, I should be unhappy.  The absence of other cars means the light hasn’t been red for very long.  That suggests I have a relatively long time to wait for a green.

Under another view, I should be happy.  It is a brute fact, carved into "the furniture of the universe," when the light will turn green.  How many cars I see won’t change that.  I should be happy that no cars will impede my forward progress.

Much rests on this question.  I am very happy to have the friends I do.  But exactly how happy should I be?

Should I be happy if I know the answer to this question?  Or would knowing be like seeing no other cars around?

Adam Phillips remains one of our most underrated thinkers:

However much we want inspiration, if it disturbs our normal sense of ourselves then we are going to resist it. Most people are not seeking self-knowledge; they believe – they live as if – they already know who they are. So self-knowledge in this sense is the enemy of inspiration, our best defence against this alien invasion. As in sex, we may long to lose our composure and self-control but there is one thing we desire even more, and that is not to. Self-knowledge protects us from inspiration; inspiration, like sexual desire, undoes us. For non-believers, inspiration is more like sexual desire than anything else; a fascination, a fear, and something we think of as having a secret solitary pleasure attached to it.

Read the whole thing.  If you want to try one of his books, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored is the best place to start.

Saturn moon spewing water vapor.  Or so it seems…

My admittedly uninformed perspective is that after the robot arm, progress in the field of robotics slowed greatly.  Fixed location, repetitive movement robots for industrial production worked very well but the problems of autonomy turned out to be much more difficult than had been anticipated.  It appears to me, however, that many roadblocks have fallen in recent years.  The robots are on the move.

    Case in point?  Check out this movie of big dog.  Further info here.

Thanks to Robin Hanson for the pointer.

Roughgarden said that pairings are often better explained by creating a viable team than by finding the highest quality genes. Couples are usually genetically similar, she said, and their differences are often complementary: Both members provide the team with the strengths the other lacks.

"To make an analogy with humans, the number of children a couple can raise to adulthood is more influenced by the income of the family rather than the genetic makeup," Akcay said. "We think that in most species, this is what is going on: Males and females choose each other for ecological benefits rather than superior genetic makeups."

Read more here, including criticisms, hat tip to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.

"It could be there’s a moment of pain before the end," [Robin] Hanson says. "But you could be comforted by the fact that versions of you will go on, even if you don’t."

Yes that is our Robin Hanson, on quantum mechanics and multiple universes, picked up by New Scientist.  Here is Robin guest-blogging quantum mechanics for us; see also here.  The bottom line?  Finish that novel you are working on.

Herr Andrew Hammel believes that German can be a happy language too:

I have tried smiling while saying umlauted vowels, and it seems to work just fine, it’s only a little tricky with the ‘ü’, since you’ve got to tighten your cheek muscles a bit to really get it right.

Hammel’s blog is frequently interesting, here is a good post on German compound nouns.

Germans can be grumpy, unpleasant people–and it’s not because of post-Nazi guilt or a diet filled with bratwurst, says one American researcher. It’s because of their vowels. Hope College psychology professor David Myers says saying a vowel with an umlaut forces a speaker to turn down his mouth in a frown, and may induce the sadness associated with the facial expression. Myers added that the English sounds of "e" and "ah" naturally create smile-like expressions and may induce happiness. Clearly the solution for the Germans, much like the solution for every other people in the world, is to become more like Americans. The German Embassy would not comment on the findings, saying they were "too scientific."

Here is the link, which contains a few other tidbits as well.  Thanks to Alina Stefanescu for the pointer. 

“We found that when the choice was for something simple, such as purchasing oven gloves or shampoo, people made better decisions – ones that they remained happy with – if they consciously deliberated over the information,” says Dijksterhuis.

“But once the decision was more complex such as for a house, too much thinking about it led people to make the wrong choice. Whereas, if their conscious mind was fully occupied on solving puzzles, their unconscious could freely consider all the information and they reached better decisions.”

Here is the link.

Andrew Crompton at Manchester University, UK, wanted to see how good we are at judging distances in the real world.

He
asked 140 architecture students in their first, second and third years
of study to estimate the distance from the university’s student-union
building to familiar destinations along a straight road, so the length
of journeys that they would have strolled (or staggered) many times.

The
more times students had walked the route, the further they estimated
the journey to be. First year students, for example, estimated a
mile-long path to be around 1.24 miles on average, while third year
students stretched it to 1.45 miles. Crompton publishes his results in Environment and Behavior¹.

The
results match those from other studies in which, for example, people
moving through a virtual world tend to overestimate how far they have
travelled…

The finding backs the idea that
distances elongate in our minds because, over time, we begin to notice
more and more minutiae about a route, an idea called the
feature-accumulation theory. "As detail accumulates, the distance seems
to get bigger," Crompton says.

Here is the full story.  Remember the earlier result that if you are going and returning only once, the ride back seems shorter.  Furthermore life speeds up as you get older.  There is no contradiction across these results, if you hold all ceteris paribus, but my subjective time clock will admit to being confused.  Thanks to the still-excellent www.geekpress.com for the pointer.

Here is the answer, obtained by experimentation.  This is a fundamental question of applied physics, namely when "viscous drag" becomes a dominant force. 

It is amazing how heavily this investigation was regulated:

The most troublesome part of the experiment was getting permission to do it in the first place. Cussler and Gettelfinger had to obtain 22 separate kinds of approval, including persuading the local authorities that it was okay to put their syrup down the drain afterwards.

Here is Randall on the assortive mating of the autistic, and its possible increase.  Here is Randall on how to make your bathroom into a mini-office.

Why not, say, 44 dimensions?  I won’t call this short article an explanation, but I did learn something fundamental from it.  Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.

Matt Yglesias links to these, and yes the scientist is a relative of Ali G.