Category: Science

Number one is:

Street brawlers sometimes arm themselves with potato peelers, according to the Home Office, which wants to make them banned weapons.

But we are wiser yet:

Crows apparently like the taste of windscreen-wiper blades.

Here is the full list.  And the nationality most likely to read spam?  The Brazilians, of course.  Sightings of UFOs are way down since the late 1990s, but for a step backwards:

Lasagne has replaced chicken tikka massala as the favourite dish of Britons.

If you want to lose weight, stop worrying about which diet is most effective and simply pick whatever programme you find easiest to follow.

Read more here.

Leading scientists and creative thinkers were asked to address this question.  My favorite answer was from Judith Harris:

I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three – not two – selection processes were involved in human evolution.

The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness.

The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty – not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren’t potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it.

Nicholas Humphrey gave another good answer:

I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance – so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others’ lives.

The New York Times offers the full list of responses.  Arnold Kling offers further commentary.

Addendum: Eric Crampton points me to 120 additional answers, including Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and many other notables.  My answer?  I will go with Denis Dutton, with honorable mentions to Robert Trivers and Alexander Vilenkin.  I like Carlos Rovelli too.  Yes I know you don’t all click on all of the links but these are worth checking out. 

This one is about quantum Darwinism.  Worlds in which micro-states collapse into macro-states coherently have superior survival properties, or so it would seem…

Those are the latest odds of an asteroid hitting the earth in 2029.  Here was my previous post.  Here is a related article.

Thanks to Bruce for the pointer.

Addendum: Here are links.

Those are the current odds of a 1,300 foot asteroid hitting the earth in 2029, read more here.  Here is our previous commentary on asteroids.

…participants [at a retreat for autistics]…can wear color-coded badges that indicate whether they are willing to be approached for conversation.

I will be very happy if this ever becomes socially acceptable practice for non-autistics, or for that matter in mixed autistic and non-autistic company.

Here is the New York Times story, fascinating in its own right, about how many autistics do not wish to be "cured."

Christmas is the deadliest day of the year for Americans with 12.4 percent more deaths than normal, researchers said on Monday.

More
Americans die from heart attacks and other natural causes on Christmas,
the day after and on New Year’s Day than on any other days of the year,
the researchers reported.

It is probably because people are
feeling too busy or too festive to go to the hospital over the winter
holiday season, the researchers wrote in Monday’s issue of the journal
Circulation.

I would have expected a different gloss — my mother always claimed that people feel more depressed on Christmas and New Year’s.  In any case, here is the full story.

In rural Peru, 24% of young women say they lost
their virginity to a rapist. In rural Uttar Pradesh (in India), 83% of
married women surveyed said that before they moved in with their
husbands, they didn’t know how women become pregnant.

There is more, over at www.2blowhards.com.

Letting children play video games on a Game Boy in the operating room before undergoing surgery can help relax them better than tranquilizers or holding Mommy’s hand, researchers say. 

Here is the full story.   

Here is my post from last year:

Experiences, not possessions. Concerts and travel are remembered for
longer than clothes and jewelry. The result is robust to different ages
and groups, but tends to be strongest for high-income individuals.

See the above link for references and more information.  I was reminded of this post by scrolling through John Palmer’s new economics (and miscellany) blog, The Econoclast.  Here is the web site for John’s group, the Philistine Liberation Organization.  Here is John’s list of economics-related websites.

The researchers [Norbert Schwartz, Daniel Kahneman, Alan Krueger, David Schkade, and Arthur Stone] assessed how people felt during 28 types of activities and found that intimate relations were the most enjoyable, while commuting was the least enjoyable.

More surprisingly, taking care of their children was also among the less enjoyable activities, although people generally report that their children are the greatest source of joy in their lives…

In addition to intimate relations, socializing, relaxing, praying or meditating, eating, exercising, and watching TV were among the most enjoyable activities. Commuting was the least enjoyable activity, with working, doing housework, using the computer for e-mail or Internet, and taking care of children rounding out the bottom of the list.

Interactions with friends and relatives were rated as the most enjoyable, followed by activities with spouses or significant others, children, clients or customers, co-workers and bosses. At the bottom of the list: activities done alone.

…"When people are asked how much they enjoy spending time with their kids they think of all the nice things—reading them a story, going to the zoo," said University of Michigan psychologist Norbert Schwarz, a co-author of the Science article. "But they don’t take the other times into account, the times when they are trying to do something else and find the kids distracting. When we sample all the times that parents spend with their children, the picture is less positive than parents expect. On the other hand, we also find that people enjoy spending time with their relatives much more than they usually assume."

General reports of what people enjoy may also differ from descriptions of how people actually feel in a specific situation because many people hesitate to report socially inappropriate feelings. This is less of a problem when they report on specific episodes. "Saying that you generally don’t enjoy spending time with your kids is terrible," Schwarz said, "but admitting that they were a pain last night is quite acceptable." The new Day Reconstruction Method provides a better picture of people’s daily experiences by improving accurate recall of how they felt in specific situations…

…general life circumstances—such as how secure people think their jobs are, or whether they are single or married—had a relatively small impact on their feelings throughout the day. These factors were closely linked with how satisfied people said they were with their lives in general, but had little influence on how positive they felt during specific activities.

"It’s not that life circumstances are irrelevant to well-being," notes Schwarz. "On the contrary, we found that people experience large variations in feelings during the course of a normal day. This variation highlights the importance of optimizing the allocation of time across situations and activities. If you want to improve your well-being, make sure that you allocate your time wisely."

Unfortunately, that’s not easy. When the researchers examined the amount of time spent on various activities, they found that people spent the bulk of their waking time—11.5 hours—engaged in the activities they enjoyed the least: work, housework and commuting.

Here is the full story, with thanks to the ever-excellent www.politicaltheory.info.  Here is more information, and it seems you can order the study here.