Category: Science

The odds are small, but the expected value of this development is high.

Here is more detailed information. And here is a related piece on why aliens might instead prefer to throw rocks at us.

Betting on the greatest unsolved problems in the universe is no longer the preserve of academic superstars such as Stephen Hawking. From Thursday anyone will be able to place bets on whether the biggest physics experiments in the world will come good before 2010.

For two weeks, British-based bookmaker Ladbrokes is opening a book on five separate discoveries: life on Titan, gravitational waves, the Higgs boson, cosmic ray origins and nuclear fusion.

Here is the full story. The origin of cosmic rays is the big problem most likely to be solved soon, and bettors are more optimistic about nuclear fusion than are physicists.

Our colleague, Robin Hanson, has long argued that gambling could save science by encouraging scientists to more honestly reveal their true estimates of the likelihood of various theories. Here is some refreshing evidence that he may be right:

“I’d be tempted to take a bet on the Higgs [particle] at 6-1,” says Brian Foster who heads the particle physics group at the University of Oxford in the UK. “I’ve been quite instrumental in betting the taxpayers’ money on us finding it, so I’d better put my money where my mouth is.”

Jim Ward sends this nice proof:

1/3=.3333333…

  .33333333333333333333...
+ .33333333333333333333...
+ .33333333333333333333...
------------------------------------------
= .99999999999999999999....

but 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1

Of course this proof requires that we understand that 1/3=.333… but that at least can be shown by long-division. Steve Landsburg, who has a PhD in mathematics in addition to being a brilliant economist, writes to warn, however, that we haven’t defined what we mean by an infinite series like .999… nor have we proven that multipying by 10 (in the earlier proof) is equivalent to moving the decimal point. These are all valid points. As a lay consumer of mathematics, rather than a producer, I find these “proofs” helpful but do take them with a grain of salt.

Addendum: Here is more on Kakutani’s theorem for the mathematically strong of heart.

QED: Beauty in Mathematical Proof by Burkard Polster is a short book with some elegant proofs (about 1 per page) from elementary geometry and number theory. Here are two that caught my eye. I know that .999…. =1 but I have always thought of this as something like a convention. Not so. Here is the proof.

Let x=.999…
then 10x=9.999…
now subtract x from both sides and we get
9x=9 or x=1

QED

And here is a just too lovely proof for the sum of the first n natural numbers.

By studying large groups of participants, researchers have identified certain general behaviors that liars are more likely to exhibit than are people telling the truth. Fibbers tend to move their arms, hands, and fingers less and blink less than people telling the truth do, and liars’ voices can become more tense or high-pitched. The extra effort needed to remember what they’ve already said and to keep their stories consistent may cause liars to restrain their movements and fill their speech with pauses. People shading the truth tend to make fewer speech errors than truth tellers do, and they rarely backtrack to fill in forgotten or incorrect details. [emphasis added]

“Their stories are too good to be true,” says Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written several reviews of the field of deception research.

Liars may also feel fear and guilt or delight at fooling people. Such emotions can trigger a change in facial expression so brief that most observers never notice. Paul Ekman, a retired psychologist from the University of California, San Francisco, terms these split-second phenomena “microexpressions.” He says these emotional clues are as important as gestures, voice, and speech patterns in uncovering deceitfulness.

And a (scant) few people can serve as super lie-detectors:

O’Sullivan now says that her further studies of federal agents, forensic psychologists, and other groups of professionals indicate that a very small percentage of people are extremely good at spotting a phony. “We always found one or two people who were very good,” she says.

Here is the full story.

Here from a survey of translators are the top ten most difficult to translate words.

THE TEN FOREIGN WORDS THAT WERE VOTED HARDEST TO TRANSLATE

1 ilunga [Tshiluba word for a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time; to tolerate it a second time; but never a third time. Note: Tshiluba is a Bantu language spoken in south-eastern Congo, and Zaire]

2 shlimazl [Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person]

3 radioukacz [Polish for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain]

4 naa [Japanese word only used in the Kansai area of Japan, to emphasise statements or agree with someone]

5 altahmam [Arabic for a kind of deep sadness]

6 gezellig [Dutch for cosy]

7 saudade [Portuguese for a certain type of longing]

8 selathirupavar [Tamil for a certain type of truancy]

9 pochemuchka [Russian for a person who asks a lot of questions]

10 klloshar [Albanian for loser]

†¢ THE TEN ENGLISH WORDS THAT WERE VOTED HARDEST TO TRANSLATE

1 plenipotentiary

2 gobbledegook

3 serendipity

4 poppycock

5 googly

6 Spam

7 whimsy

8 bumf

9 chuffed

10 kitsch

My take: It’s rather common to hear that language determines thought and thus if a language has no words for a concept then that concept can’t really be understood by a speaker of that language. I find this theory difficult to believe (perhaps it was first proposed in a language other than English.) If the theory is true, however, I would like to learn the language where “spam” is untranslatable.

Ron Bailey reports on The World Transhumanist Association’s annual conference. Plently of interesting material on the prospects for life-extension and other improvements. Perhaps the most optimistic speaker, however, was my colleague Robin Hanson.

George Mason University economics professor Robin Hanson argued that super-rational posthumans in the future won’t be able to “agree to disagree,” chiefly because they’ll agree on everything. Hanson argues that disagreements among less than super-rational people today exist largely because we deceive ourselves about what we really know to be true. There are good “reasons” for us to think that, for example, “the more you believe in yourself, the more you can get other people to believe in you,” and thus get them to do what you want. But super-rational posthumans won’t be able to deceive themselves or others, suggests Hanson.

I shall have to discuss this with him at lunch tomorrow but only if we can agree on what restaurant to eat at.

New research has revealed that the vowel sounds in your name could influence how others judge the attractiveness of your face.

Amy Perfors, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who carried out the study, believes the effect is subconscious. Observers unwittingly deem others better looking if they have the right moniker, she says.

Perfors made the discovery by posting pictures of 24 friends on hotornot.com, a website that allows users to award marks out of ten for others’ attractiveness. Names are not usually displayed with the pictures, but for her experiment Perfors made sure that a name (not necessarily a truthful one) was displayed in the photo’s upper corner.

She later posted the same photographs with different names, and once again collected the feedback. Average scores for the faces changed depending on the name they were given, Perfors told the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society last week in Chicago, Illinois.

OK, so what works?

…what are the ingredients of a sexy name? For boys, a good name will contain vowel sounds made at the front of the mouth, such as ‘e’ or ‘i’ sounds [TC: hey, I think “y” counts…]; names with fuller, rounder vowel sounds such as ‘u’ tend to score lower. So pat yourself on the back if you’re called Ben… but if your name is Paul you might have to work harder to snare a date.

The opposite is true for girls, Perfors found. Women with round-sounding names such as Laura tended to score higher than those with smaller vowel sounds. “Unfortunately for me, Amy is one of the bad names,” Perfors laments.

The finding that men with ‘small-sounding’ names are attractive might seem counterintuitive, Perfors admits. “Front-mouth vowels imply smallness,” she says. “But when girls are looking for mates, they don’t necessarily want a super testosterone-charged guy. They want someone who will hang around and be a provider.”

Here is the full story, with some additional results as well. And right here you can judge Amy, the researcher. Take care to remember that her middle name is Francesca.

In no sphere of human life is self-deception punished so brutally as in chess:

…novices were more likely to convince themselves that bad moves would work out in their favour, because they focused more on the countermoves that would benefit their strategy while ignoring those that led to the downfall of their cherished hypotheses.

Conversely, masters tended to correctly predict when the eventual outcome of a move would weaken their position. “Grand masters think about what their opponents will do much more,” says Byrne. “They tend to falsify their own hypotheses.”

I enjoyed this bit:

…in reality, many people find falsification difficult. Until the latest study, scientists were the only group of experts that had been shown to use falsification. And sociological studies of scientists in action have revealed that even they spend a great deal of their time searching for results that would bolster their theories.

Here is the full story. The recent saga of Bobby Fischer indicates, however, that such fidelity to the truth is often strictly context-specific. And here is a depressing account of medical experts and possible self-deception.

I have long believed that chess players are an especially unhappy lot. If you lose, you cannot even blame it on the weather. And everyone is ranked on a common rating scale with a clearly defined dimension of winning or losing. Sad to say, but a strict meritocracy is not great fun for the majority of participants.

Unlocking cars and activating devices securely could soon be a matter of simply touching them, thanks to a communications system that transmits data across the skin.

“We are using the body as a signal transmitter,” says CEO Peter Rosenbeck. “You simply have a transmitter, a person and a receiver.”

Rosenbeck says the system operates at just 30 nanoamperes, making it entirely safe for people to use. The code transmitted by the electric signal allows cars to be unlocked, doors opened or other devices started.

You do need to carry a credit card-sized object in your pocket. Here is the full story.

Just ask Randall Parker.