Weekend Tidbits

Four separate studies have found that taller people tend to earn more money, on average $789 per year for each additional inch of height.

Expensive hotels are frequented by business travelers who charge everything to their companies, and therefore don't care about the cost of incidentals.

As you have no doubt observed, brothers and sisters do not mate.

Altruism was first explained as kin selection: "I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins", as J.B.S. Haldane put it.

Wikipedia is an astonishing resource that provides an enormous amount of information to billions of users.

One of the roles our government has taken on is to provide us with information to be used in making decisions.

Males fight for dominance in order to gain access to the limited supply of female eggs. This is why male birds expend energy on brightly colored plumage, but female birds do not.

Imagine two stakes in your backyard. Now draw an east-west, north-south coordinate system on your lawn. Measure the east-west distance between the stakes and also the north-south distance. Take the square root of the sum of the squares of the two measurements and, voilà, you end up with the "distance" between the two stakes.

In evolutionary times, we were far more likely to die from starvation than from diseases related to obesity. In those times, when food was available, it was best to stuff oneself.

As discussed in a previous tidbit, people are over-confident in their abilities for many reasons. Here's an example...

There are two sets of baseball cards:

Remember Dan White's "Twinkie defense" in 1979? Well it turns out that the the ability to convert food into glucose is correlated with the ability to control oneself.

Sea otters are the largest members of the weasel family.

Numerous studies have shown that people are over-confident in their own abilities. Most people, for example, think that they are better drivers than average.

Evidently, when you are thinking about a problem, you use up glucose.This can be seen by monitoring blood glucose as people work on math problems and the like.