Month: September 2008
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Loud Music Increases Alcohol Consumption
When Gueguen et al. manipulated the music volume in a bar in the west of France, their suspicions were confirmed: louder volumes correlate with higher alcohol consumption. [T]urning the music up so loud that people are forced to shout at each other doesn’t have quite the same beneficial effect on social interactions. Because everyone is…
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Lost and Found (The Red Queen and Tri-X)
On the 14th August I travelled from Cardiff to London on the first leg of my journey to Dijon. Once in London I mislaid a book of mine: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley – one of the most enthralling pieces of non-fiction I’ve read in a long…
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Crow Intelligence
A couple of interesting ornithological studies: Like elephants, could it be that crows never forget a face, and learn to recognise threatening (and, conversely, rewarding) humans from both parents and others in their flock? Crows and their relatives — among them ravens, magpies and jays — are renowned for their intelligence and for their ability…
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Collective Creativity is Key to Pixar’s Success
Programmer and Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull leads by empowering others to achieve. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, he describes the architecture of Pixar’s Success: a community where people at all levels support one another. A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance…
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Believing in Impossible Things
Lewis Wolpert, the Emeritus Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology at UCL who gave the Is Science Dangerous? lecture (pdf) at the 120th Nobel Symposium, recently wrote the book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. In this book Wolpert explores the evolutionary origins of belief, and ABC News discusses this opinion in Why Do We Believe…
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The Last Supper in Detail
The highest definition photograph in existence is one of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. The 16 billion pixel photograph of The Last Supper can be viewed online in all its glory, and allows viewers to enlarge and observe any portion of the painting down to as little as one millimetre square. According to…
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Gresham College, London
Gresham College is an unusual institution of higher learning in Holborn, Central London. It enrols no students and grants no degrees. Instead, Gresham College provides lectures free and open to the public, and has done so since its foundation in 1597, long before there was any university in London. The success of the college led…
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A New Look at Health Insurance and Gym Use
From Tyler Cowen’s Markets in self-constraint: A Danish gym chain is now offering membership free of charge, with the only caveat that you have to show up, in order for the membership to be free. If you fail to show up once per week you will be billed the normal monthly membership fee for that…
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Science Cribsheets
Since late 2005, Seed Magazine has been producing a series of cribsheets (or cheatsheets, as they are more commonly known in the UK) for “living in the 21st century”. These one-page introductions to contemporary scientific issues are really useful as reference sheets on a number of disparate topics. So far, subjects covered include stem cells,…
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A Presidential Debate on Science
Science Debate 2008 is a small group of people who, in 2007, began working to “restore science and innovation to America’s political dialogue”. Enlisting the help of over 38,000 people they gathered a total of 3,400 pressing science questions from nearly every major American science organization, dozens of Nobel laureates, elected officials and business leaders,…