•Villagers in England chased away a Google car, saying that Google Street View is, yes, an invasion of privacy—and will also facilitate crime in their area.
•Good news for chocolate lovers: Eating it can help your math skills [ed. note: We refute this claim based on personal experience—we couldn't eat more chocolate, and couldn't be worse at math].
•Gals, take pride: sisters bring more happiness (and balance) to a family than do brothers.
•But any mothers out there, you might want to get your baby formula examined: It could contain rocket fuel.
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Does simple arithmetic give you sweaty palms? Do you always show up late for appointments? Is it a nightmare to figure out the bill at restaurants? If so, you may have dyscalculia, sort of the mathematical version of dyslexia. People with dyscalculia often excel at languages or visual arts, but can barely pass middle school math. They have trouble with numerical concepts—specifically, with associating numerical quantities with their abstract representations.
Although it’s estimated that about five percent of people have dyscalculia, researchers disagree as to the cause of the disorder. The debate boils down to whether number sense is an innate or learned trait in humans. Some argue that we are born with the ability to understand exact numbers. Even babies, for example, will stare longer when they are shown two dolls moving behind a screen and then three dolls coming out, indicating they were expecting a different numerical outcome.
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Earlier this week, this blogger’s beloved Milwaukee Brewers fired their manager, Ned Yost, with less than a month remaining in a pennant race. It’s pretty common in pro sports to cut the coach loose when things go south; it’s easier than firing all the players. But a study out of Sweden says that frankly, it doesn’t do any good.
Leif Arnesson at Mid Sweden University led a team that studied the Swedish Elite Series of hockey all the way back to the 1975/76 season. Sweden’s league is another bastion of mid-season coach firing—five were fired last season. But after studying the data, Arnesson says that firing the coach in mid-season has basically no effect: A good team is still a good team, and a bad team is still a bad team.
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The talk about air pollution at the Beijing Olympics last month apparently didn’t bother Usain Bolt, the insanely fast Jamaican sprinter who broke his own world record in the hundred meters, 9.72 seconds, by running a cool 9.69. But scientists reviewing the tape now say that if Bolt hadn’t let up early when it was clear he had the race in the bag, his time could’ve been 9.55.
A research team led by Hans Eriksen at the University of Oslo studied footage of the race, concentrating on the positions of Bolt and the runner-up, Richard Thompson. Both runners slowed down at the end, and if Bolt had decelerated at the same rate that Thompson did, he would’ve finished at 9.61. However, Bolt slowed down even faster than Thompson as he pounded his chest in celebration. As a result, Eriksen says, Bolt’s hot-dogging cost him even more time; if he’d run all-out across the finish line, he could have finished in as fast as 9.55.
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Don’t worry, lean-lovers: They haven’t totally straightened out the leaning Tower of Pisa. It just isn’t leaning enough for some people anymore.
Last November, the Guinness Book of World Records took away Pisa’s status as the tower with the biggest lean, instead bestowing that title on the Schiefer Turm von Suurhusen in Northern Germany, a church whose steeple tilts a full degree further off center than Pisa’s. Now, a Dutch mathematician has tried to steal some leaning pride for his homeland.
Jacob van Dijk told Reuters that a tower in Bedum, Holland, is also more off-center than Pisa. Though the Dutch tower stands only 117 feet tall, van Dijk calculated that if it were the same height at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, 183 feet, it would lean 6 centimeters further than the Italian monument.
If Guinness acknowledges the German tower, this new claim seems like a silly battle for second place. But from the pictures of Schiefer Turm von Suurhusen, it looks like it could topple at any time. In any case, the Dutch tower became number one because the Italians straightened Pisa slightly between 1999 and 2001, back to its angle from 300 years ago, hoping to stabilize it for another few centuries. So thankfully, they seem to be more concerned with keeping the tower around for a while than winning a contest.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Alkarex
Yesterday we wrote about scientists who were trying to learn the secrets of efficient traffic flows by watching the masters—ants. Now, researchers are trying to figure out the traffic flows of a much less organized group—drunks.
Simon Moore from the University of Cardiff in the U.K. wanted to find the math behind the stumbling and weaving of a drunkard’s gait. So he and his team spent nights in the center of the Welsh capital, studying how people in varying states of inebriation stagger around. They then created a moving model from their data, which you can watch here.
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Earlier this month we wrote about a study of adaptable ants that changed their leaf-gathering strategies to bypass a roadblock thrown in their way. These clever insects solve traffic jams much more easily than big-brained humans do, and now scientists want to borrow their secrets to ease our highway woes.
Ants leave a trail of pheromones to show others the best way back to the nest; when others follow, they leave their own pheromones and the trail is reinforced. They all work together through what biologists call “distributed intelligence.” You can see this skill demonstrated in a Slate video here.
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The geometry geeks (or space aliens, if you prefer) who stamp out intricate designs on the fields of the U.K. may have topped themselves this time.
British astrophysicist Mike Reed said last week that the giant formation that appeared outside the village of Wroughton in early June, and had stumped scientists and amateur enthusiasts attempting to decode it, has a simple explanation: Pi. That’s right. The world’s most popular irrational number, 3.14159 and so on, holds the key, Reed says. Starting from the circle in the center, a line spirals out toward the edge. The length of each segment, before it juts out, corresponds to a digit in pi. The smaller circle near the middle is the decimal point, Reed says, while the three larger dots near the edge are an ellipsis, indicating that the number never ends. Check out Wired’s blog for a graph of the numerical progression.
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Like a lot of physics ideas based in quantum mechanics, the magnetic fields produced by superconductors are difficult to picture in your mind. But if you want an illustration, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy say, look in your coffee cup.
Superconductivity means that a metal offers no resistance to electricity, having expelled its magnetic field. Only some metals, like lead and aluminum, have this property, and only at extremely cold temperatures—lead must drop below a critical temperature of about 7 degrees Kelvin. But when scientists at the DOE’s Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University looked at the arrangement of superconducting lead’s magnetic domains—the groups of atoms with a preferred magnetic direction—they saw a pattern: The picture looked an awful lot like bubbles in the frothed milk on top of a cup of cappuccino.
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Anyone who’s frozen up during a job interview, a grade-school theater performance, or what would otherwise have been an irresistibly suave and witty pick-up line knows how paralyzing it is to truly be “at a loss for words.” Luckily, the experience is a temporary one, and before long the language that has inundated your life since you were little comes flooding back. But what if you grew up without any words at all? It’s pretty much impossible to imagine living in a world without words, but here at AAAS, “Thinking With and Without Language” took a peek at the thoughts of some people who happened to grow up without the privileges of language.
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