Category: Science

1. On average lightning strikes one hundred times per second.

2. From 1959 to 1994 an average of 363 Americans are struck a year, 90 are killed.

3. The annual odds of being struck are about 576,000 to 1. The annual odds of being killed are about 2.32 million to 1. In other words, one in 87,000 bolts hits someone, one in 345,000 bolts kills someone.

4. Florida is the most dangerous state for lightning. In per capita terms New Mexico is the most dangerous state.

5. Alaska and Hawaii are the least dangerous states, with zero reported lightning deaths.

6. July is the most dangerous month.

7. 3 p.m. is the most dangerous time of day, it is five times more dangerous than 9 a.m.

8. Men account for 84 percent of lightning deaths. Can we be that stupid? Yes.

9. Golfer Lee Trevino has been struck by lightning twice.

These facts are from LIfe: The Odds (And How to Improve them), by Lee Baer.

Here is a color-coded map of where lightning is most likely to strike. Here is an association of lightning survivors. Here is a medical description of what happens to you if you are struck.

Happy golfing!

Economist David Romer says yes. Teams would enjoy higher returns if they would try for the first down more often. Furthermore his work has influenced how professional football is played.

The real question is why this mistake was made in the first place. Could it be the economist’s well-known distinction between the seen and the unseen? If you punt, no one sees the first down you didn’t make. If you don’t punt and fail to make a first down, you feel bad and are easily blamed. For agency-related reasons, we might expect coaches to be more risk-averse than players. The coach wants to hold onto his job, whereas a superstar player captures upside returns to a greater extent. The variance of player salaries, especially if you include endorsements, is typically much higher than the variance of coach salaries. So the coach plays it safe to a greater extent, and of course a punting decision is usually in the hands of the coach.

Addendum: Here is further discussion from Nick Schulz.

I’ve been an economist for so long that I don’t flinch when the paper abstract starts as follows:

“This paper models love-making as a signaling game. In the act of love-making, man and woman send each other possibly deceptive signals about their true state of ecstasy. Each has a prior belief about the other’s state of ecstasy. These prior beliefs are associated with the other’s sexual response capacity…”

Or if that is not enough for you: “In this paper, love is formally defined as a mixture of altruism and possessiveness. Love is shown to alter the man and the woman’s payoff functions in a way that increases the equilibrium probability of faking, but more so for the woman than for the man.”

Here is the full paper. I could go on with quotations, but why don’t we look at the empirical results, drawn from an extensive data set and questionnaire:

1. 72 percent of women admit to having faked it in their current or most recent relationship, for men the number is 26 percent.

2. You are more likely to fake an orgasm if you are in love. “It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most,” said Marguerite Duras.

3. Being in love and faking are less positively correlated for men than for women. Perhaps men want to look like studs, regardless of the seriousness of the relationship.

4. Women mind less if their partners fake orgasm. (Might some be positively relieved to have it over?)

5. Faking is correlated with age, but in complicated ways. It depends on whether you love your partner, whether you are a man or woman, and how old you are.

6. The more education you have, the more likely you are to fake orgasm. I found this to be the most interesting result.

The author, Hugo Mialon, is on the job market right now and he has a forthcoming co-authored AER piece, plus a revise-and-resubmit at the Rand Journal. His dissertation is “Five Essays on the Economics of Law and Language.”

OK, the orgasm stuff is not his most marketable side, but Hugo seems to be a guy with both ideas and good technical skills. Hire this man. If we had a slot at GMU I would be pushing for him, even though he probably fakes his orgasms.

Thanks to Newmark’s Door for the initial pointer to the paper.

I have heard of or experienced the following ideas for improving the running of meetings:

1. Make everyone stand up until the meeting is over.

2. Make everyone talk on the phone, even if you are in adjacent offices.

3. Give everyone a chess clock to limit the number of minutes they are allowed to speak for (this is a variant of an idea from Robin Hanson. Read here for some commentary.

4. Lock the door when the meeting starts on time and do not allow latecomers to enter.

Or how about this idea, channeled through Randall Parker:

Aided by tiny sensors and transmitters called a PAL (Personal Assistance Link) your machine (with your permission) will become an anthroscope – an investigator of your up-to-the-moment vital signs, says Sandia project manager Peter Merkle. It will monitor your perspiration and heartbeat, read your facial expressions and head motions, analyze your voice tones, and correlate these to keep you informed with a running account of how you are feeling – something you may be ignoring – instead of waiting passively for your factual questions. It also will transmit this information to others in your group so that everyone can work together more effectively.

So perhaps a bunch of buzzers go off when somebody says something confusing. Or the boss knows when no one is paying attention.

I’m all for voluntary experimentation, but let’s not forget what many meetings are about. Meetings are not always about the efficient exchange of information, or discovering a new idea. Meetings can be about displays of power, signaling that a coalition is in place, wearing down an opponent, staging “theater” to make someone feel better, giving key players the feeling of being insiders, transmitting information about status, or simply marking time until something better happens. It’s one thing to hate meetings. But before you can improve them, make sure you know what meetings are all about.

A genetically engineered plant that detects landmines in soil by changing colour could prevent thousands of deaths and injuries by signalling where explosives are concealed.

The plant, a modified version of thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), is sensitive to nitrogen dioxide gas, which is released by underground landmines. The leaves of the plant change from green to red after three to five weeks of growth in the presence of this gas. “They are easy to spot,” says Carsten Meier of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who served as scientific adviser to Aresa, the Danish company that developed the plant.

Here is the full story. Note that the technology is not yet fully proven.

On a separate note, it appears that simply putting a tea strainer (mesh cylinder) in your neck could stop a large number of strokes.

They are bolder and more confident, but have poorer memories, here is the story.

And humans?

Studies are needed to see if test-tube humans are similarly affected, he says…In the Western world, around 1% of children are conceived through assisted reproductive technologies. In one common method known as in vitro fertilization, eggs are fertilized in a test tube, cultured for a short while and then returned to the womb. Over a million ‘test-tube’ babies have been born worldwide. But little is known about the long-term effects of culturing embryos. The world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born just 26 years ago. There have been few systematic attempts so far to assess the long-term health and behaviour of these children.

Food for thought, perhaps we are engaging in social experimentation here without knowing it.

Maybe so, according to Futurepundit. Here are some options (not all of this represents Futurepundit’s words, some is from his links):

Proposed options for reducing carbon dioxide pollution currently include underground burying of liquefied carbon dioxide; disposal in the sea; fertilising its absorption by marine algae; reflecting the sun’s rays in the atmosphere; and stabilizing sea-level rise. These and other macro-engineering ideas will be evaluated against a strict set of criteria, including effectiveness, environmental impacts, cost, public acceptability, and reversibility. All of these options go beyond the conventional approaches of improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon intensity by using more renewable energy sources, and may be needed in addition to these conventional approaches.

And further out on the limb:

… the scientists backed more way-out systems for reflecting the sun’s rays back into space. Plan A would float thousands of bubble-making machines across the world’s oceans to send huge amounts of salt spray into the atmosphere. The trillions of tiny droplets would make the clouds bigger, whiter, and more reflective — enough, in theory, to shut down several decades worth of global warming.

Plan B would flood the stratosphere with billions of tiny metal-coated balloons, “optical chaff” to backscatter the sun’s rays. Most sophisticated of all, Plan C would assemble giant mirrors in orbit, ready to be positioned at will by a global climate controller.

The BBC reports on 4 major categories of conceivable climate engineering approaches.

* “sequestering” (storing) carbon dioxide, for example in the oceans, by removing it from the air for storage, or by improved ways of locking it up in forests
* “insolation management” – modifying the albedo (reflectivity) of clouds and other surfaces to affect the amount of the Sun’s energy reaching the Earth
* climate design, for example by long-term management of carbon for photosynthesis, or by glaciation control
* impacts reduction, which includes stabilising ocean currents by river deviation, and providing large-scale migration corridors for wildlife.

Here is another article on the topic. I’ll never be competent to assess these proposals, but they could be among the most important scientific innovations we come up with. Global warming may well be real and the result of human activity, follow Chris Mooney. For better or worse I’ll predict the world won’t much cut its CO2 omissions in the near future, so we need to look toward other solutions.

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.