Hot Weekend Tidbits Posts
Today's Tidbit: People Generally Do the Right Thing, Unless They're Paying to Do Otherwise
In an attempt to get parents to pick up their kids on time, a number of Israeli day-care centers decided to impose fines on parents who show up late.
Today's Tidbit: To Find Inner Peace Free from Self-Nagging, Make a Plan
Obviously, it's evolutionarily advantageous for us to remind ourselves of tasks we have yet to finish, and experimentally it has long been observed that unmet goals keep popping into people's minds.
Today's Tidbit: Einstein Referred to Quantum Entanglement as "Spooky Action at a Distance"
Particles, such as electrons, have a property called spin which can be measured at any angle, but when measured always results in one of two answers—up or down.
Today's Tidbit: American Children Spend Less Time in School Than Kids in Other Countries
Comparing the average amount of school days per year by country, the United States contains the least amount of days, besides Belgium.
Today's Tidbit: Tall People Make More Money
Four separate studies have found that taller people tend to earn more money, on average $789 per year for each additional inch of height.
Today's Tidbit: Expensive Hotels Nickel and Dime Their Customers
Expensive hotels are frequented by business travelers who charge everything to their companies, and therefore don't care about the cost of incidentals.
Today's Tidbit: Most Twins' Happiness Is Genetically Determined
Studies with identical and non-identical twins show that between 50 and 80 percent of one's reported level of happiness is genetically determined.
Today's Tidbit: Laptops and Smartphones Make Falling Asleep Harder
Often someone who is bone-tired will lay down in bed and flip on the TV or his laptop thinking that it would be nice to relax for a few minutes before going to sleep.
Today's Tidbit: Siblings Raised Apart Are More Likely to Commit Incest
As you have no doubt observed, brothers and sisters do not mate. While they may find one another attractive, they find the notion of sex with one another repulsive. This is because a child produced by siblings has a high probability of sharing the same recessive genes, and recessive genes are often harmful unless coupled with dominant genes.
Today's Tidbit: Humans Are the Only Primates That Can't Eat and Breathe at the Same Time
Humans are able to produce a wide variety of sounds in part because they have descended voice boxes that makes room for longer vocal tracts.
Today's Tidbit: Money Can't Buy Everything
Legal Services A group of lawyers refused to provide legal services to needy AARP members for $30 per hour, but when asked to do it for free, they readily agreed.
Today's Tidbit: Tunisian Ants Don't Need a GPS to Return Home
There are ants in Tunisia that are roughly a few millimeters long. They leave their nests and find food sources by smelling them.
Today's Tidbit: Lower Social Status = Weaker Immune System
Scientists are able to control hierarchy in rhesus macaques. They do this by introducing monkeys into groups one at a time, and at least initially the monkeys that are introduced first have higher status.
Today's Tidbit: Altruism Doesn't Necessarily Mean Being Selfless
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.
Today's Tidbit: To Be a Tiger Mom or Not to Be...
Asian Americans comprise 4% of the American population, but account for 25% of the students at top universities.
Today's Tidbit: Why Women Live Longer Than Men
Life has many perils: parasites, predators, and pitfalls. Eventually, any organism will succumb, and if that organism has not first passed on its genes, those genes will face extinction.
Today's Tidbit: Americans Spent More Time Watching TV Ads Than It Took to Build Wikipedia
Wikipedia is an astonishing resource that provides an enormous amount of information to billions of users.
Today's Tidbit: Why the World Is Full of Dirty Old Men
In yesterday's tidbit, we learned that across the planet women seek material wealth in their mates. This stems from our hunter-gather past in which females depended on male hunters to provide them and their children the meat necessary to support their large brains.
Today's Tidbit: Why Women Choose Men for Material Wealth
A vast number of studies ranging across time, continents, cultures, political systems, and religions show that when evaluating potential mates, women place significantly greater emphasis than men on material wealth, and that men tend to both display and exaggerate their financial status and prospects when around women.
Today's Tidbit: Can You Really Trust EPA Ratings for Electric Vehicles?
One of the roles our government has taken on is to provide us with information to be used in making decisions.
Today's Tidbit: Morality and Religion Are Byproducts of War
Humans clearly demonstrate altruistic tendencies towards other members of groups with which they identify.
Today's Tidbit: How to Use Science to Improve Your Pet's Self-Control
The connection between self-control and glucose is not unique to humans. A bunch of trained dogs were divided into two groups. One group was instructed to sit and stay for 10 minutes. Dogs in the other group could run around and do whatever they wanted.
Today's Tidbit: How to Tell at a Glance if a Man Is Willing to Fight for His Own Self Interest
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.
Today's Tidbit: Why Minting Small Change Is Bad for the Economy
Economists have long since known that people want to be rewarded for taking on risk. Investments are thus judged by their risk-adjusted returns (Sharpe ratios). A typical hedge fund has a Sharpe ratio of around 0.5. This means that its excess annual return over the risk-free rate is about half its annual standard deviation.
Today's Tidbit: How Removing Lead from Gasoline Reduces Violent Crime
Before lead was removed from gasoline, lead from car exhaust got into the air, was breathed in by kids, lowered their IQs, and increased crime rates (there is a very strong correlation between IQ and criminal behavior).
Today's Tidbit: Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity
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.
Today's Tidbit: The Reason Why Women Buy Anti-Aging Creams and Face Lifts
Roughly five million years ago, humans split off from chimpanzees, who had in turn split off from gorillas five million years earlier.
Today's Tidbit: Ethicists Have No Ethics
There are these people called "ethicists" or "moral philosophers". They make their livings by thinking about what is right and wrong and how to live a moral life. Does all this thinking get them anywhere?
Today's Tidbit: Dieters, Beware of the "What the Hell Effect"
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.
Today's Tidbit: Later Is Less Stressful Than Never
Nicole Mead and Vanessa Patrick had a bunch of dieters, one at a time, sit and watch a movie, each with a bowl of candy next to him. Some were told they shouldn't eat the candy, while others were told that they should hold off during the movie but could have the candy later.
Today's Tidbit: Know Your Limitations
Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister gave a bunch of college students a questionnaire in which the students answered questions about their work habits. In a class which she taught, Tice also assigned a paper with a deadline which she said could be extended and observed which students availed themselves of the option to extend.
Today's Tidbit: Statistics Beat Taste Buds
As discussed in a previous tidbit, people are over-confident in their abilities for many reasons. Here's an example...
Today's Tidbit: Thoughtful Christmas Gifts Are Cherished, Good Deals Get Regifted
As we approach the holiday (i.e. gift-giving) season, don't forget to make sure to include the usual notes in your gifts indicating that they can be returned. Otherwise, you'll just cause the recipients to save your gifts until they can be properly regifted onto some other ungrateful chump.
Today's Tidbit: Ingesting Cat Poop Might Make You Crazy
The cat virus Toxoplasma gondii produces psychotic symptoms in cats similar to those in humans suffering from schizophrenia.
Today's Tidbit: More Is Less
There are two sets of baseball cards: A = Contains 7 top players.
Today's Tidbit: People Like Pain More Than Pleasure
There is a ton of evidence that people find a loss from whatever their reference point is more painful than they find pleasure in a gain of the same magnitude.
Today's Tidbit: If You Want to Live Longer, Get a Rocketship
According to special relativity, if a twin leaves earth in a high-speed rocket, goes out into space, and then returns to earth, he will return younger than his twin who stays home.
Today's Tidbit: Stay Off the Twinkies and Become a Better Person
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.
Today's Tidbit: Politicians Never Forget a Face, Just Like Fuscatus Wasps
Constructive social interaction depends upon recognizing those one is interacting with. Not surprisingly, then, we have a section of our cortex devoted to facial recognition. But we're not the only ones.
Today's Tidbit: If You Like It Hot and Dry Outside, Eat Meat
It takes roughly 500 gallons of water to produce a quarter pound hamburger, and in the process, approximately six pounds of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere.
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