Category: Science

"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.

Why did avian flu in Turkey become more dangerous to human beings?  How does avian flu mutate more generally?  Revere of Effect Measure offers four excellent posts on this critical topic.

Toxoplasma gondii is a favorite parasite of evolutionary biologists because it has an incredible property.  The parasite lives in the guts of cats where it sheds eggs in cat feces that are often eaten by rats.  Now how to get back from the rat to the cat?  Amazingly, Toxoplasma gondii infects the brains of rats making them
change their behavior in a subtle way that increases the genetic
fitness of the parasite.  Toxoplasma makes the infected rats less scared of cats and so more likely to be eaten! 

Now here is the kicker.  Toxoplasma gondii also infects a lot of humans.

[With] open-source reviewing…the journal posts a submitted paper online and allows not just assigned reviewers but anyone to critique it. After a few weeks, the author revises, the editors accept or reject and the journal posts all, including the editors’ rationale…

Open, collaborative review may seem a scary departure. But scientists might find it salutary. It stands to maintain rigor, turn review processes into productive forums and make publication less a proprietary claim to knowledge than the spark of a fruitful exchange. And if collaborative review can’t prevent fraud, it seems certain to discourage it, since shady scientists would have to tell their stretchers in public. Hwang’s fabrications, as it happens, were first uncovered in Web exchanges among scientists who found his data suspicious. Might that have happened faster if such examination were built into the publishing process? "Never underestimate competitors," Delamothe says, for they are motivated. Science – and science – might have dodged quite a headache by opening Hwang’s work to wider prepublication scrutiny.

Here is a bit more.  What might be some arguments against this practice?

1. It is too easily manipulated by your friends, or perhaps by your enemies.

2. The resulting morass of comments must be interpreted.  We are back to editorial  discretion, but it is better to have some referees rather than none.

3. The purpose of journals is not to always make the right decision, but rather to certify the quality of outstanding work to more general audiences.  By blurring the evaluation process, open source reviewing would make journals as a whole less reliable.

4. Don’t we already have this option?  I could post a paper on this blog, open up the comments, and receive a call from the AER, asking for a submission.  I guess my answering machine isn’t working.

5. The current system allows for editorial manipulation through the choice of referees.  This is good.  An innovator needs only to convince a single editor, not a jackal-like pack of seething commentators [hey guys, that’s you!].

What is the goal of publishing anyway?  To assign "just outcomes"?  To make sure that the one percent of worthwhile papers find a prestigious outlet?  To provide incentives for those papers to be written in the first place?  To increase the prestige of science as a whole?  Since I don’t understand why on-line publishing hasn’t already taken over, this scheme is hard to evaluate.  Comments are open….