Professor Tobias Rosefeldt, of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, counts things that could exist – in particular, he specifically does so in a new paper for The Philosophical Quarterly. “Consider a tailor who works for a company that sells business suits as well as hipster suits. She has two business trousers and two business jackets […]
Tag: numbers
‘Friday the 13th: The Empirics of Bad Luck’ (study)
Bearing in mind that today is Friday the 13th, what better time to examine the question of whether the socio-economic outcomes of people born on the 13th day of the month, and of those born on Friday the 13th, differ from the outcomes of people born on more auspicious days? Investigators Dr. Jan Fidrmuc and […]
False ‘missing toe’ sensation(s) [digital agnosia]
Do you ever get an uncanny feeling that one of your toes is missing, despite the fact that they’re all there? You’re not alone. “To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first to document the [erroneous] experience of a ‘missing toe’ in healthy volunteers.” “Nineteen young adult participants underwent tactile stimulation […]
Beijing traffic jams and the number 4
Excessively polluting and timewasting heavy traffic congestion in central Beijing causes significant distress to drivers and residents alike. In a drive to identify root causes, researchers have put two and two together and come up with an improbable answer – the number ‘4‘. “In this work we estimate the effects of traffic congestion on subjective […]