Cheap thrills save lives, some might infer from this new study: “Sildenafil and Suicide in Sweden,” Ralph Catalano, Sidra Goldman-Mellor, Tim A. Bruckner, and Terry Hartig, European Journal of Epidemiology, epub 2021. (Thanks to Staffan Yngve for bringing this to our attention.) Here’s a plot of data from the study, which comes with the explanation […]
Tag: suicide
Podcast #23: The effect of country music on suicide
“Volunteers performed three 1-minute sequences of continuous chest compressions on a manikin accompanied by No Music, repeated choruses of ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ and ‘Disco Science’.” This and other country music insights — and lots of other things — turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. Click on the “Venetian blinds” icon — at the lower right corner […]
Effects of Parliamentary Elections on Suicide Rates in Hungary
Professor David Lester, the world’s most prolific writer of short research studies about suicide, has a new study: “Effects of Parliamentary Elections on Suicide Rates in Hungary,” Tamás Zonda, Zoltán Kmetty, David Lester, Mónika Ditta Tóth, Crisis, epub 2015. The authors are at Hungarian Association for Suicide Prevention, Budapest, Hungary, Károli Gáspár University, Budapest, Hungary, […]
Explosive Lemming Outbreaks in Fennoscandia
An outbreak of lemmings is not something you’ll see every year. The last major one was 2006 to 2007 – the first time in two decades. The causes of, and mechanisms behind, such population surges are, to this day, intriguing naturalists (and physicists, and mathematicians). But some progress towards understanding the outbreaks is, however, being […]
The math controversy that, they say, led to a mental breakdown
In an essay called “The Root of Infinity: It’s Surreal!“, the ThatsMath blog writes about a dark side to the power of numbers. The Cantor mentioned here is George Cantor [pictured here], who pretty much created large subsets of certain branches of mathematics : … But the extended system was hugely controversial, and for good […]
Moon-Wednesday and Indian Crimes [studies]
There are a plethora of scientific research projects which have investigated the Moon’s effect on what might seem to be unrelated earthly occurrences. They tend to break down into two categories – those which find there’s no effect, and those which find there is. No effect, for example on the Spanish suicide rate. Though the […]
The Stephen King of suicidology is now president
Congratulations (a bit belatedly—we only recently heard the news) to Professor David Lester, the Stephen King of suicidology, on being named president. A March 1, 2011 press release from Richard Stockton College says: Dr. David Lester, distinguished professor of psychology at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, has been elected president of the American Association of […]