I grew up in Sri Lanka, a tropical country where the days were hot and one perspired a lot. And yet, there was little fear of dehydration. We drank water with meals and the occasional cup of tea but no one carried around bottles of water. Even when my friends and I played cricket all day, we drank when we were thirsty but that was about it. The idea that dehydration was a danger lurking that had to be staved off constantly was foreign to us.
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We are already being inundated with opinion polls on all the election races going on and this blizzard will likely intensfty as we get closer to November. In order to help us keep a grip on reality, Harry Enten provides a list of things to bear in mind confronted by poll numbers. I have given just the headers but Enten’s post explains the rationale for each.
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It is interesting how conventions quickly develop for situations where people are put in close proximity, such as in elevators. There is even a name for the study of how people relate to others in public spaces: proxemics. This post looks at what we know about elevator behavior, such as how people arrange themselves as they enter, that people look at the numbers, possibly as a way to avoid eye contact with others, and that “Men leave more space between themselves and other men than women do with other women”.
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We have come really close to eradicating the deadly disease of polio and so any setbacks have to be viewed with concern. NPR’s Jason Beaubien, who has been doing some excellent reporting on health issues in Africa, says that the recent discovery of two new cases in the northeast of Nigeria (near the border with Chad) has health experts worried because that country had gone for two years without any cases and was on track to be next country to be declared polio-free.
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While I am terrible at remembering names, I thought that I was pretty good at remembering faces. The main evidence that I had for that is that I often notice resemblances between unrelated people that others miss and when I watch films, I often recognize minor actors that I have seen before in other films.
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I accidentally stumbled upon this long article by Michelle Dean that tells the absorbing story of an extremely sickly child and her devoted mother that eventually became exposed as a fraud following a murder.
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I rarely watch commercial radio or TV because the frequent interruption by ads annoy me, but it is impossible to avoid advertisements these days since they are all over the internet, including this blog. I like to think that I am too sophisticated to be taken in by these pitches but it may be that advertisers are smarter than we are. For example, take a look at this ad.
There have been news reports about the possible discovery of a fifth force of nature. The source of the interest is a paper titled Protophobic Fifth-Force Interpretation of the Observed Anomaly in 8Be Nuclear Transitions that appears in the August 12, 2016 edition of Physical Review Letters.
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It is a cliché that older people seem to think that time goes by faster than younger people. Christian Yates reviews the various theories that purport to explain this.
This apparently accelerated time travel is not a result of filling our adult lives with grown-up responsibilities and worries. Research does in fact seem to show that perceived time moves more quickly for older people making our lives feel busy and rushed.