Category: Science

A penny dropped from the Empire State Building would not kill someone standing below, most likely. The observation deck is 1050 feet high, and the penny would reach a maximum velocity of 57 miles an hour after falling 500 feet. That’s enough to hurt pretty bad, but only a very very lucky (unlucky) shot would kill you. Most importantly of all, there is an updraft. Tossed coins generally land on the setback roof of floor 80.

The calculations come from the February issue of Popular Science, the article itself is not available on-line.

Addendum: Cecil offers some more detailed observations. Here is another supporting account, albeit with different details, in engineering language.

Here is an update on the quest for a Theory of Everything. It is written by Lee Smolin, of inflation theory fame, and recommended to me by Robin Hanson. In pdf format it is over sixty pages long but makes for fascinating albeit difficult reading. Smolin defends “loop gravity” theories over string theory. He claims that within ten years we may have real experimental evidence to resolve the dispute.

Recent research suggests the following:

The reward mechanism involved in addiction appears to regulate lifelong social or pair bonds between monogamous mating animals, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study of prairie voles published in the January 19 edition of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The finding could have implications for understanding the basis of romantic love and disorders of the ability to form social attachments, such as autism and schizophrenia.

In other words, if you are monogamous, your feelings toward your partner bear some resemblances to other addictions.

Unstable housing conditions, so it seems. Read the full story.

A good night’s sleep can help you think better and solve problems more effectively.

German scientists say they have demonstrated for the first time that our sleeping brains continue working on problems that baffle us during the day, and the right answer may come more easily after eight hours of rest.

The German study is considered to be the first hard evidence supporting the common sense notion that creativity and problem solving appear to be directly linked to adequate sleep, scientists say. Other researchers who did not contribute to the experiment say it provides a valuable reminder for overtired workers and students that sleep is often the best medicine…

Scientists at the University of Luebeck in Germany found that volunteers taking a simple math test were three times more likely than sleep-deprived participants to figure out a hidden rule for converting the numbers into the right answer if they had eight hours of sleep. The results appear in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

Here is the full story. Here is another account, with a link to the original research. I will note that I typically review previously written MR postings after a night of good sleep.

Read this recent article. They just didn’t have the technology to adopt to colder climes. You also can feel better about Homo Sapiens. According to this account, human beings, far from having killed off the Neanderthals, almost suffered the same fate of extinction.

You operate the brakes, the computer controls the car and fits it into the parking space. This is now a $2,200 option, available on some Toyotas in Japan. Here is the full account. Eighty percent of the eligible customers are opting for this package. My view? If you can’t parallel park, I bet you screw up on the operation of the machine.

Mark A. Walker and John C. Wooders, economists at the University of Arizona, recently studied old videotapes of tennis matches involving stars like Bjorn Borg, Ivan Lendl and Pete Sampras. The economists looked at the serves in each match to see how well players randomly altered playing the ball to an opponent’s forehand or backhand.

Many people do poorly on similar tests when they are conducted in a laboratory. Ask somebody to write down a list of hypothetical coin-flip outcomes, for example, and the result will probably contain too few streaks of heads or tails. Because people know that the overall odds are 50-50, they underestimate how often three straight tails or four straight heads turn up.

But professional tennis players realize, on some level, that their opponent will have an advantage if he knows that a serve to the forehand is likely to be followed by one to the backhand. They do a relatively good job of mixing serves, though still not as randomly as a computer program would, Professors Walker and Wooders reported in a 2001 paper.

Controlled experiments yield similar results, read this account from The New York Times.

Here is the bottom line:

The more uncertainty that people face – be it caused by wind on a tennis court, snow on a football field or darkness on a country highway – the more they make decisions based on their subconscious memory and the less they depend on what they see.

Related research by Doru Cojoc of Clemson shows that chess players play mixed strategies to keep their opponents off balance. Furthermore they are more likely to play such sophisticated strategies, the higher the rewards on the line.

By the way, even plants seem to perform implicit calculations when they breathe, read this recent account. Armen Alchian, of course, once postulated a similar conjecture, namely that plants maximize sunlight without any conscious awareness of such a process.

Evidence is building for hormesis, the theory that suggests that moderate doses of bad things like radiation and toxins can improve health. Interestingly, much of the evidence has been around for a long time but it has been ignored because the focus was on proving the harm that toxins can cause and because low-dose effects are, by their nature, harder to identify so positive effects at low doses were typically discounted. Edward J. Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, however, has collected thousands of already published examples and is conducting original research of his own into hormesis. Other researchers are beginning to take notice. Hormesis is controversial, however, as you might imagine from this bombshell:

Calabrese suspects that in many cases, the benefits of hormesis may occur at levels higher than the recommended safe doses for humans.

Hormesis is a similar idea to the hygiene hypothesis (more here) which asserts that “reduced microbial exposure because of increased sanitation and cleaner lifestyles has facilitated the rise in asthma and allergic disease in the Western world.” (The mechanisms of the two effects appear quite different, however.)

Many smokers manage to smoke fewer cigarettes. The problem is that they often puff all that much harder. In the long run they may not end up much healthier, read this account. By the way, Sam Peltzman has studied this phenomenon more generally. We can do things to make people safer, but they respond by taking more risks. Thanks to Jon Klick for this latter link.

The evidence suggests that fathers prefer boys over girls. For instance a couple is more likely to stay married when they have a boy rather than a girl. Here is my earlier summary of the research.

At the same time couples are far more likely to adopt girls rather than boys? How can this be?

A recent Slate article offers some figures:

Numbers vary, but it’s pretty safe to say that somewhere between 70 percent and 90 percent of parents looking to adopt register some preference for a girl with an agency. It doesn’t matter if they’re adopting from China, where girls far outnumber boys; from Russia, where the numbers are about even; or from Cambodia, where there is typically a glut of orphan boys and a paucity of girls. Everywhere, demand tends to favor the feminine.

Steven Landsburg had suggested an adverse selection argument. Yes boys are favored but if a boy is put up for adoption, you can figure there is something wrong with the boy, for precisely that reason.

Or perhaps it is easier to nurture girls, and the nurturing motive may be central to the adoption decision. It also may be the case that mothers prefer girls and mothers also drive adoptions:

“The extent to which women are the driving force in most adoptions is probably a factor,” he says. “It’s usually true that the women are filling out the paperwork, going to the conferences, the support groups.” He adds, “If I speak at a conference–whether it’s on adoption or family issues–at least 80 to 90 percent of any of these audiences are women.”

My take: Having a boy is a riskier investment than having a girl. The risk rises dramatically with adoptions, given the associated genetic uncertainty. Males are more likely to have genetic roots for criminality and mental illness. So if you don’t know much about the parents, better to play it safe and opt for a girl.

At first, I was merely uninspired by President Bush’s plan to resend men to the moon and then on to Mars (Here are better ideas from MR readers). Now I am upset and saddened. The Hubble telescope is one of the great achievements of the recent space program, especially after the amazing in-space eyeglass repair job. Data from the Hubble have helped us to understand the universe in all its awesomeness and yet the Hubble will now die an early death because of the budget shift.

Here is Hubble’s picture of the eye of Sauron:

Just kidding about the last one, it’s MyCn18, a young planetary nebula, the glowing relic of a dying, Sun-like star.

This is the Cartwheel Galaxy, located 500 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Sculptor.

Here are two galaxies, NGC 2207, is on the left and IC 2163 on the right that are slowly colliding.

Here are more Hubble pictures.

John Gottman has spent decades studying how married couples interact. His most striking finding is the tendency of couples at risk of divorce to have markedly different interaction styles. His recent book, The Mathematics of Marriage, summarizes his observations of married couples and presents a parsimonious model of marriage (see here for Slate’s review). The highlight of the research is that couples where the dominant mode of interaction includes criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling are very, very likely to divorce. Successful marriages involve a great deal of mending and reworking of the relationship. The mathematics links some theories about emotions and interaction to this observed pattern.

What I find interesting is the implication for thinking about politics. Let’s assume that political order is a sort of “marriage” between state and citizen. At least from the perspective of the citizen, it’s a relationship that can be broken, if warranted. This is a premise of many normative theories of revolution – the citizens have a right to a new government if they feel the written and unwritten rules have been violated. Unfortunately, what we know about exactly how this happens – moving to abandon the social contract – is sketchy at best, although political scientists and sociologists have a hunch that it involves some combination of repression of the population and a de-legitimizing of the government, which itself might have multiple causes.

Gottman’s approach to studying relationships offers a useful way to think about these issues. Gottman’s point is that there may be varying sources of the emotions that destroy marriages, but the road to divorce usually starts in the same place – once spouses have learned certain interaction strategies, they create hard to change feedback loops. Similarly, governments and populations that learn certain strategies for interacting with each other probably set up hard to break cycles leading to long term stability or perpetual crisis. The nice thing about Gottman’s analysis of marriage is that the math predicts stability or decline, and not much in between – a non-trivial prediction. The same prediction for states is that states tend to be on a tough to change road to constant crisis (like in Africa and the Middle East) or stability (like in the US). Switches from one path to the other should be infrequent and difficult, which seems to describe the world pretty well.

Read the ever-impressive Randall Parker over at Futurepundit.com. Here is a quotation from one of his links:

Lahn and his colleagues found that the ASPM gene showed clear evidence of changes accelerated by evolutionary pressure in the lineage leading to humans, and the acceleration is most prominent in recent human evolution after humans parted way from chimpanzees.

“In our work, we have looked at evolution of a large number of genes, and in the vast number of cases, we see only weak signatures of adaptive changes,” said Lahn. “So, I was quite surprised to see that this one gene shows such strong and unambiguous signatures of adaptive evolution – more so than most other genes we’ve studied.”

By contrast, the researchers’ analyses of the ASPM gene in the more primitive monkeys and in cows, sheep, cats, dogs, mice and rats, showed no accelerated evolutionary change. “The fact that we see this accelerated evolution of ASPM specifically in the primate lineage leading to humans, and not in these other mammals, makes a good case that the human lineage is special,” said Lahn.

The bottom line: The plausibility of the view that human beings are special has just gone up.

Parker is one of the most rigorous and versatile writers in the blogosphere, here is his recent account of our greater ability to predict earthquakes.

Addendum: Read this article on exactly why monkeys have trouble with human language.

Sometimes you share just to shut people up:

Stevens [the researcher] placed chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) or squirrel monkeys (Saimiri boliviensis) in a cage and provided them with a meal of fruit. In an adjoining cage was a hungry member of the same species.

The primates rarely passed food through the cage to their hungry mate next door. But if the partition was opened – giving the hungry animal the chance to beg, steal or fight for food – sharing was common.

It is analogous to a parent buying a child a toy just to shut them up, says Stevens. “It’s a selfish way to stop the constant pestering,” he says.

Intriguingly, hungry chimps harassed their neighbour more when the food was cut into small chunks. This could reflect the fact that a beggar is more likely to get a handout if it doesn’t seriously deplete the donor’s stash.

This form of ‘strategic begging’ could help scroungers find success by setting their sights low, Stevens speculates. “It’s like a kid saying: ‘Can I have four cookies? Ok, how about one?’,” he says. Likewise, most street-corner beggars ask passers-by for nothing more than their small change.

Here is the full story. Right now the link to the original paper is not working.