An August 13, 2008 University of California, Irvine press release heralds the advent of the possible future arrival of technology even more advanced than the Paperless Office: Scientists to study synthetic telepathy —Researchers get grant to develop communication system based on thoughts, not speech— A team of UC Irvine scientists has been awarded a $4 […]
Month: September 2008
An Impartial Price Survey of Various Household Liquids as Compared to a Gallon of Gasoline
With the price of oil surging past $100 per barrel recently, consumers and the media in the United States have been in an uproar over the outrageous price of gasoline. In my opinion, however, they have failed to place this cost in context to other common, household liquids. Thus, I decided to perform an informal […]
Miss C’s advice for new students
3. Required page lengths are a prediction. Being told to write a “five-page paper” drove me crazy in college, and then I became a professor and discovered that my students didn’t really know what that meant any more than I did at their age. So let me decode it for you. An X-page paper doesn’t […]
Blue Eyes Glued on Blue-Eyes
“Why Do Blue-Eyed Men Prefer Women with the Same Eye Color?” Bruno Laeng, Ronny Mathisen and Jan-Are Johnsen, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, vol. 61, 2007, pp. 371–84( http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00265-006-0266-1). The authors, at the University of Tromso, Norway, report: “Close-up photos of young women and adult men with either blue or brown eyes were rated for their […]
Brains of London taxi drivers, again
Scientists have uncovered evidence for an inbuilt “sat-nav” system in the brains of London taxi drivers. So writes the BBC in a recent report about the research of Hugo Spiers from University College London, who presented his results at this week’s BA Science Festival. Earlier studies had shown that taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus […]
Math Quiz: The Lt. Governor’s base
Today’s math quiz is based on this statement in a September 13, 2008 MSNBC news report: “Nevada Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki said on stage that 10,000 people were in the crowd, but parks officials said the pavilion held only 3,500 people.” Question: Lt. Governor Krolicki is not using the base ten number system. What base […]
An argument against rings
A British doctor who requests anonymity writes: Side effects take many forms. Here is a case report from Cases Journal (2008, 1:45) of a poor man: “Penile and scrotal strangulation caused by a steel ring: A Case Report,” by Ioannis Efthimiou, Savas Kazoulis and Ioannis Christoulakis. I guess one must expect some things if that […]
Lockhart’s Lament
Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the […]
Prez Candidates’ Page Costs (Updated)
Investigator by Paul E. Greenberg writes: In an earlier posting on this website (Cost Per Page of Books by U.S. Presidential Candidates, Jan. 28, 2008), I reported on the vast disparity in the cost per page of the memoirs written by 11 different U.S. Presidential candidates. Now that the field has narrowed and the Democrats’ […]
Being Carmen Miranda
More than 50 years after she last wore a pile of fruit on her head, Carmen Miranda inspired a psychological test. Emily Balcetis, of Ohio University, and David Dunning, of Cornell University, published a study, in the journal Psychological Science, called Cognitive Dissonance and the Perception of Natural Environments. Balcetis and Dunning describe an experiment […]